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America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?
Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
His new book, Terrible Beauty, argues that “fighting losing battles is a worthy cause.”
Climate shouldn’t be only a story for documentaries.
Paranormal: Caught on Camera is not the kind of television show you’d typically expect to read about in a research paper. Recent episodes include “Haunted Doll Bites Child” and “UFO Takes Off in Argentina”; a critic once described it as unsuitable for viewers who have developed “some powers of critical thought.” But credit where credit is due: Caught on Camera cites “climate change” as a possible cause of increased sightings of the Loch Ness monster.
This, alas, is the kind of meager victory the climate movement is often forced to celebrate.
According to research by USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, there were just 1,228 mentions of “climate change” in the nearly 200,000 hours of unscripted TV that aired in the U.S. in the six months between September 2022 and February 2023. (Fifty-eight of those mentions were on “paranormal/mystery” programs, including Caught on Camera.) The situation is even worse for scripted film and TV: Between 2016 and 2020, just 0.6% of 37,453 scripts used the words “climate change” during their runtime. While there are notable exceptions — An Inconvenient Truth won the 2007 documentary Oscar, and The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up were mainstream hits — climate mostly remains off-screen even as nearly half the population says it has affected their lives.
Starting a Climate Film Festival, then, might seem foolish — because what would you even program? But New Yorkers are about to find out: The inaugural CFF will open Friday with a sold-out screening of the documentary Searching for Amani at the Explorer’s Club in Manhattan, with the festival’s 58 other films to be screened primarily at the Firehouse Cinema over Saturday and Sunday in a de facto kick-off to Climate Week. “Once we started digging, we found that there were an incredible number of these stories being told, but no one was really bringing them together under this rubric,” Alec Turnbull, who co-founded CFF with his wife, J. English Cook, told me.
The supply, however, is noticeably lopsided. CFF received “well over 300 submissions” during its open call for movies this past spring, according to Turnbull — enough that he and the volunteer screeners were able to winnow their broad interpretation of a “climate movie” from anything with “an environmental lens that didn’t have explicit climate themes” to movies specifically about climate.
In the end, though, unscripted documentary-style films and shorts came to dominate roughly 63% of the CFF slate. Only two of the program’s full-length features — the found-footage film Earth II and DreamWorks’ animated movie The Wild Robot — are fictional climate narratives.
This disparity might lead to the impression that there are too many climate documentaries in the world. (Seriously, how many more movies and shows can be made about regenerative farming?) While that isn’t the case — at least compared to something like the oversaturated true crime genre — documentary filmmaker might have more access to the subject than their peers in Hollywood because the medium has a “long history of addressing social issues,” Erica Lynn Rosenthal, the director of research at USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, told me.
At least some mismatch is also likely due to “self-selection bias,” according to Turnbull. He told me that narrative filmmakers might not have submitted to something called the “Climate Film Festival” simply because they “don’t think about the work they’re doing as a climate story.” Another reason might just be endemic to film festivals. “Documentaries are really great for the festival circuit, for impact screenings, and for coupling with resources and workshops,” which boost their visibility even if they “don’t always make it to a broader audience” afterward, Tehya Jennett, whose short scripted horror film “Out of Plastic” is playing at CFF, told me.
According to the Norman Lear Center, however, nearly half of mainstream audiences said they want to see fictional stories that “include climate-related storylines” on screen. That’s far from trivial. “We know from decades of research that stories have the power to shift people’s hearts and minds and move them to action on a variety of topics, whether it’s health behavior or social issues,” Rosenthal said.
Sam Read, a CFF jury member and the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that works to reduce the entertainment industry’s environmental impact, confirmed that the demand for climate narratives “currently outstrips the supply.” But he stressed to me that what makes a climate moment in a script doesn’t have to be something preachy, moralistic, alarmist, or even terribly overt, pointing to examples like the most recent season of Hacks, which included a bottle episode about climate change, and True Detective: Night Country, with its environmental and Indigenous plotlines.
“If you’re writing a sitcom and the mom is an office worker, could you make the mom a solar panel technician?” he asked, adding: “There are ways to both help people see what a clean energy future can look like while also exploring how this is affecting communities and how people are responding to it.”
Scripted examples, though, remain relatively rare. In the Norman Lear Center’s research, just 10% of the thousands of mentions of extreme weather in film and TV shows actually made any sort of link to global warming, perhaps because producers or executives worry that referencing climate change is political and might estrange half their audience. “The idea that [climate change] is going to alienate or turn off audiences is really an outdated perception,” Rosenthal said. Still, it’s even harder to push for experimentation and risk-taking when the film industry at large is struggling. And despite how it might look at CFF, it’s the documentarians who have been hit extra hard by the post-COVID turbulence in the movie world.
Of course, none of this is to say that documentaries are any less creative, ambitious, or worthy of being in a festival slate than their scripted counterparts. In fact, the Climate Film Festival’s centerpiece, The Here Now Project, is a documentary entirely composed of found footage of real people filming weather disasters during 2021. “Two people in the film actually say, ‘This is a horror movie,’” Greg Jacobs, who co-directed the documentary with Jon Siskel, told me.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter, then, in what exact form these stories are getting told: in a world with a changing climate, truth and fiction are equally strange.
On climate-friendly toys, the Sunrise Movement, and solar-powered schools
Current conditions: Torrential rain caused a dam to burst in eastern Sudan, killing at least 30 people • Brazil’s environment minister said the country is “at war” with wildfires • The scorching heat that has blanketed the Midwest this week is shifting east.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Energy and Employment report is out today. It’s a compendium of information on employment and job growth across the many energy-related sectors of the economy, and contains hundreds of data points on which job areas grew, which shrank, and by how much in 2023. The report “is perhaps one of the current administration’s last opportunities to prove that President Biden’s — and, by extension, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ — policies to stimulate the U.S. economy with investments in clean energy are working,” wrote Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. Here are her three takeaways:
The Sunrise Movement, a climate change group led by young people, this week launched an effort to reach out to 1.5 million Americans about voting for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The campaign will rely on 3,000 volunteers to contact voters in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to remind them of the differences between Harris and her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, on the issue of climate change. But the Sunrise Movement won’t go so far as to offer its endorsement to Harris just yet – if it ever does. It’s waiting for her to flesh out her climate policies before making a decision. For what it’s worth, the group never officially endorsed President Biden.
“Young climate voters could decide this election,” Sunrise communications director Stevie O’Hanlon said in a statement. “The Harris-Walz ticket means millions more young voters are tuning in and considering voting. We’re going all-out to reach those voters and mobilize our generation to defeat Trump this November. And it’s why we will continue to urge the Harris campaign to put forward a bold vision that will energize young voters.”
Lego, the world’s largest toymaker, announced today that it will remove fossil fuels from its plastic bricks by 2032. The plan is to make toys using a new kind of renewable and recycled plastic made from biowaste, like oil or fat discarded from the food industry. This is more expensive than using cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, and the company will pay up to 70% more for the certified renewable resin in hopes that this will spur on production of recycled and renewable plastics. Lego will dig into operating profit to pay for the added expense rather than hiking prices, CEO Niels Christiansen told the Financial Times. Thanks in part to the company’s partnership with the makers of the Fortnite video game, profits in the first half of 2024 were up a record 26%, even as the broader toy market declined by 1%. Most virgin plastics are made from fossil fuels, and plastic production is projected to be a new growth market for oil in the years to come.
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Last year marked the first time that zero-carbon energy sources comprised more than 40% of the world’s electricity generation, according to new data from BloombergNEF. Here’s the actual breakdown: 57% fossil fuels, 24% nuclear and hydroelectric, 17% renewables like wind and solar. More than 90% of new energy capacity added last year came from wind and solar, up from 83% in 2022. Fossil fuels were just 6% of new capacity. “We have seen a step-change in renewable energy compared to a few years before,” said Sofia Maia, energy transition analyst at BloombergNEF. “There's now no question this is the largest source of new power generation, wherever you go.”
The amount of solar power installed at K-12 schools in America has quadrupled since 2014, Electrekreported, citing a new report from clean energy nonprofit Generation180. Last year alone, more than 800 schools added solar panels. The amount of solar energy generated by K-12 schools in the country is enough to power 330,000 households. These schools save money on energy bills, and many redirect that funding into student and community programs. The top states in terms of school solar capacity are California, New Jersey, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
China’s efforts to reduce air pollution over the last decade or so have resulted in the average citizen’s lifespan increasing by two years.
