Mick Jagger slams Pres. Trump over environmental policy

NEW YORK -- Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger took on President Donald Trump's environmental policies and slammed him for leaving the Paris climate agreement at the Venice Film Festival this weekend.

"We are in a very difficult situation at the moment, especially in the US, where all the environmental controls that were put in place -- that were just about adequate -- have been rolled back by the current administration so much that they are being wiped out," Jagger said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

"The US should be the world leader in environmental control but now it has decided to go the other way," he added.

Jagger, the 76-year-old English rock star, was in Venice to promote the film "The Burnt Orange Heresy," in which he plays an art collector.

In a sharp departure from former President Barack Obama, the Trump administration has attempted to remove many of the prior guardrails that were installed to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to declaring its intention to leave the Paris agreement, the Trump administration has weakened fuel economy standards, replaced the Clean Power Plan and opened public lands and waters offshore to oil and gas drilling.

Earlier on Saturday, hundreds of activists staged a sit-in at the Venice Film Festival's red carpet to demand a ban on large cruise ships in Venice and call for action on climate change. They earned Jagger's support.

"I'm absolutely behind that," Jagger said, according to THR. "I'm glad they're doing that because they're the ones who are going to inherit the planet."

Actor Donald Sutherland, who plays an artist in the film, said he agreed with Jagger and offered his own criticisms of Pres. Trump, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

"Mick is right when he said the reforms that were instituted during the Obama administration were barely adequate, and now they're being torn about," Sutherland said.

"It's the same in Brazil and they will be torn apart in England," he said.

"When you're my age, when you're 85 years old and you have children and grandchildren, you will leave them nothing if we don't vote those people out of office in Brazil in London in Washington," Sutherland said. "They are ruining the world. We have contributed to the ruination of it, but they are ensuring it."

Also at the event, Jagger said it was a "very strange time," with more polarization and less civility.

"I'm not sure I was always against civility, but when you see it now, the incivility of political life, which we see in so many countries, including my own, especially this last week -- and in other countries, particularly the US -- when you see this, it's a bit of a sea change from what you were used to," Jagger said, according to THR.

"I don't mean that manners are everything. But the combination of all these things, where it's going to lead us," he added, is "polarization, rudeness and lying."

During the 2016 campaign, the Stones asked Pres. Trump to stop playing their music during his campaign events and rallies, saying the band never gave him permission to use them.