The New Green Deal has a new hope: Star Wars actor Mark Hamill.
On Tuesday, the beloved performer—who portrayed Luke Skywalker in several Star Wars films, most recently 2017’s The Last Jedi—used the force of Twitter to criticize Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah. Lee recently took to the Senate floor to mock the Green New Deal, a proposed resolution that would address climate change.
According to USA Today, Lee claimed the Green New Deal aimed to eliminate air travel—a falsehood, as PolitiFact notes—and employed a photo of Luke Skywalker astride a tauntaun, the snow-skipping creatures first seen in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. In that film, tauntauns are used not only for transportation, but also for shelter: At one point, an injured Skywalker is stuffed into the creature’s belly for warmth by his friend Han Solo. “I thought they smelled bad on the outside,” Solo famously remarks.
In his speech, Lee jokingly asked, “In a future without air travel, how are we supposed to get around the vast expanses of, say, Alaska?”, he asked, according to The Daily Caller account. “I’ll tell you how: Tauntauns!” He added: “Not only are tauntauns carbon-neutral, but according to a report a long time ago and issued far far away, they may even be fully recyclable.”
The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution, but the serious business of human flourishing – the solution to so many of our problems, at all times and in all places: fall in love, get married, and have some kids.https://t.co/N2gYdJFldt pic.twitter.com/ekoFlaECSd
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) March 26, 2019
After a tweet featuring Lee’s speech began circulating online, the 67-year-old Hamill began taun-taunting the senator. “I’m using an oversized photo of @SenMikeLee as a prop to push my #MAGA (#MoronsAlwaysGaslightAmericans),” the actor wrote. In another tweet, he used the hashtag #CongressSmellsBadOnTheInside.
Despite Lee’s claims, tauntauns would likely have a hard time surviving in Alaska, which in recent years has experienced record temperature lows. The creatures have a penchant for freezing to death in such chilly weather, and could likely be easy prey for aggressive local predators.