Jane Fonda’s Greenpeace-financed documentary Gaslit tracks liquefied natural gas from Permian Basin fracking to Gulf Coast terminals, as US exports hit 15 billion cubic feet a day and the carbon math grows more confusing.
In a scene from Gaslit, her new documentary, Jane Fonda stands in a field in West Texas beside a woman named Sharon Wilson, looking at a row of storage tanks. The sky is clear. The tanks are unremarkable. Then Wilson hands her an optical gas imaging camera, and the landscape changes. “You look at the tanks and it’s like, what’s the problem? No problem: Sunny day, beautiful blue sky,” Fonda told The Hollywood Reporter in February, the month the film premiered. “And then you look through the camera [and there are] hundreds of feet high billowing clouds of methane.”
Gaslit was financed and produced by Greenpeace USA, premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and follows Fonda across Texas and Louisiana to examine the liquefied natural gas boom. She rides with the self-described ‘methane hunters’. She meets a cattle rancher who sold land his family had held for generations after he says nearby oil extraction fouled its water. She sits with organizers who argue cancer rates in their parishes have climbed. Connie Britton and Maggie Rogers appear at stops along the way, and Fonda is candid about why. “Connie, for years, she was in that huge hit Friday Night Lights. She was embedded in that world, and so I really wanted her to come back and to see it through the eyes of the people whose lives are being destroyed,” she said. “Maggie is Gen Z, and I wanted to encourage young people who might be followers of hers to want to watch.”
Fonda’s own account of the methane needs one small correction. She told THR that methane is “80 percent more damaging to the climate over a 20-year period.” The actual figure, per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, is that fossil methane has roughly 82.5 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over 20 years, and 29.8 times over 100 years. Fonda understated her case by roughly two orders of magnitude. The scale of what she is describing, though, is not in dispute. According to the Energy Information Administration, US liquefied natural gas exports surged from 0.5 billion cubic feet per day in 2016 to 15.0 billion in 2025, making the United States the world’s largest LNG exporter, ahead of both Australia and Qatar. The agency forecasts exports will exceed 18.1 billion cubic feet per day by 2027. Eight export terminals are operational, and the EIA expects capacity to nearly double by 2031 compared with December 2025. Europe took 68 percent of American LNG between January and November of last year. In 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the figure was 34 percent.
Fonda traces her involvement to 2019, when she launched the Fire Drill Fridays protests in Washington with Greenpeace’s help and was arrested repeatedly. “I became aware of the fact that the most climate damaging work was happening on the Gulf of Texas,” she said. “It was potentially the greatest concentration of substances that would damage the atmosphere — what they called [a] ‘carbon bomb.'”
The scientific question underneath the film is, though, contested. Cornell professor Robert Howarth published research in Energy Science & Engineering in 2024 concluding that LNG carries a greenhouse gas footprint 33 percent worse than coal over a 20-year horizon once processing and shipping are counted, and that it equals or exceeds coal even on a 100-year scale. “Natural gas and shale gas are all bad for the climate. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is worse,” Howarth said. “So liquefied natural gas will always have a bigger climate footprint than the natural gas, no matter what the assumptions of being a bridge fuel are… It still ends up substantially worse than coal.”
The Breakthrough Institute, an ecomodernist think tank that advocates for nuclear power and has long sparred with Howarth, published a detailed rebuttal in July 2024 accusing him of “incontrovertibly flawed methodology.” Its author, Jonah Messinger, argues Howarth attributed all reported methane emissions to natural gas production when the underlying dataset, from Sherwin and colleagues in Nature, covers both oil and gas. Messinger called it a “failure to apply such an emission allocation method across both produced natural gas and oil can result in considerable double counting.” His estimate is that Howarth overstated the greenhouse gas intensity of delivered US LNG by 32 to 84 percent on a 20-year basis. Readers should weigh the source. Breakthrough is not a neutral referee, and its critique arrived as a Republican-led House committee was using it to question the science behind federal policy.
Policy briefly moved in Fonda’s direction and then moved back. In January 2024, the Department of Energy announced a pause on pending approvals of LNG exports to non-free-trade-agreement countries. “We managed to pressure Biden into calling for a pause in the export [approvals] of this LNG, liquified natural gas,” Fonda said.
It lasted about six months. That July, Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, granted a preliminary injunction lifting it, citing among the states’ injuries “the loss of revenues, market share, and deprivation of a procedural right.” Grist called it the quick, quiet death of the policy, noting the pause had only slowed a handful of projects already cleared by federal regulators. “It’s no surprise that a Trump judge would bend the law to hand the oil industry a win,” said Craig Segall, vice president of Evergreen Action. Steven Miles, a research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, was cooler. “If this is really over… this will have been a blip.” In January 2025, the returning Trump administration formally scrapped what remained.
Roishetta Ozane lives with the result. The founder and chief executive of the Vessel Project, a mutual-aid organization in Lake Charles, Louisiana, she wrote in The Lens in February: “As a Black woman and mother of six, I stand in the wreckage of grief and fear. I lost my son to a seizure which could have been exacerbated by pollution; every day I watch my other children struggle with asthma and eczema, their bodies reacting to the toxic clouds that loom over us.” Human Rights Watch, drawing on 2016 and 2020 Environmental Protection Agency modeling, has reported that residents of the corridor known as Cancer Alley face more than ten times the cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants borne by other Louisiana residents. Fonda’s assessment of what those communities have left is blunt. “They felt that they had the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, that they could possibly get help from. I will have to say it wasn’t super good the help they were getting, but now it’s zero.”
Which is why she has stopped believing in the thing she is most famous for. After decades of protests, marches, books, and articles, Fonda says the strategy never paid, because officials of both parties take fossil fuel money and defend the industry that provides it. Her political action committee now targets down-ballot races almost exclusively. “We’re electing climate champions,” she said. “And when you’re a climate champion, what we find is you also believe in fairness, in economic equality, you care about all the issues that are important to human welfare.” Most of the candidates are women, she notes, and 70 percent are women of color.
She still defends the marching, though, and she does it on grounds that have nothing to do with policy outcomes. “Courage is courageous and we can help it metastasize. We can model courage. We should be as brave as the characters we play,” she said. “History records, that kind of thing.” Somewhere in West Texas the tanks are still standing under a clear blue sky, and the only way to see what is pouring out of them is to look through the right lens.
Related on Ethos:
