Culture
2024 Was the Year the Climate Movie Grew Up
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
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Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
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An animation historian on Reddy Kilowatt, the cartoon charged with electrifying everything in the early 20th century.
With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.
Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I first came across Reddy Kilowatt last year when a climate tech peer emailed me an image of him, probably from the 1950s, powering everything from a hot water heater to a record player with the headline “Your all Electric Home.”
National Museum of American History Archives Center
For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about that headline because I kept hearing people in the decarbonization movement say similar things (does Electrify Everything ring a bell?). Itching to learn more of the history of Reddy, I reached out to an expert.
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson is a professor at Seattle University who teaches and writes about animation. Her paper, Live Electrically with Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electrical Servant, explores the history of this “phenomenally successful and ubiquitous spokescharacter.”
I chatted with Dr. Moana Thompson over a video call from her office where a framed illustration of Reddy Kilowatt hung behind her. I went into the call thinking about positioning this article, “Is America ready for another Reddy?,” but by the end I learned he may be best left in the 1900s. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Mike Munsell
Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you ended up researching Reddy Kilowatt?
Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson:
I'm a professor and chair of the film and media department at Seattle University, and Reddy Kilowatt was part of my research into animation that has been used in sponsored media — that is media used for non-traditional, non-entertainment purposes to do something else, like sell something, instruct you, persuade you. It forms a chapter in what will be a new book coming out in the next couple of years on animation and advertising. I think Reddy Kilowatt is a great example of how popular it was in the post-war period to use animated spokescharacters to sell products or ideas.
Munsell:
I’m curious: Are animated mascots less prevalent today than back in the post-war period?
Thompson:
My research doesn’t focus on the contemporary era, so I couldn't give you a precise example. But certainly, as late as the ‘70s, animation characters still were extensively used to promote products, not just cereal, and toys, but things like bubble bath and candy and, well into the ‘70s, alcohol as well.
There are lots of reasons for that, because certain types of animation were fairly cheap to produce, were appealing, often comedic, and attention grabbing. They were a great means to sell a product — also great to use for abstract or more complex processes, like, how do you make oil or petrol or gas? How do you convey a concept like capitalism? Animation, as opposed to live action, was often a more successful way to convey or target topics of that nature.
We have to anthropomorphize the things that are too abstract, too conceptual, or too inhuman to make them translatable into something that we can comprehend and relate to. Hence the Geico lizard or the Aflac duck.
Munsell
And that makes sense then for Reddy Kilowatt to advertise electricity back when it was new, right?
Thompson
Yes, it really emerged around the time electrification was in two thirds of American households — by 1930. And electrical utility companies needed to find an appealing way to sell their product and to encourage consumer consumption of things like appliances, which themselves were emerging — things like dishwashers and washing machines and hair dryers and so on. But also rural electrification, and electrification for business purposes and factories, and on farms.
[Reddy Kilowatt] emerged targeting a fairly affluent consumer, by, for example, turning electricity into a servant – an abstract servant that was personalized and anthropomorphized.
But it was also a way of rather cleverly justifying rate increases as well, which occurred a little later, by making Reddy Kilowatt literally a figure that earns wages and was regarded as an employee by many electrical utility companies. So it's a clever way to say to people, hey, everybody deserves a wage and Reddy Kilowatt deserves a wage and prices are going up, so we're going to put his wages up. And that's a fair thing.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
Munsell:
The Smithsonian has a huge collection of Reddy Kilowatt material. Did you get to go check that out?
Thompson:
Yes, I did. The archives are extensive. And so you can read all about how [Reddy Kilowatt creator] Ashton Collins promoted the product, and what the kinds of speeches that he gave to many other business companies and electrical utility companies in the 30s and 40s.
But he's part of a wider movement. There are other leading figures like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz, who were animation studio heads. Walter Lantz, of course, ran what he would pick the Walter Lantz studios that produced Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, and a number of other popular cartoons of the 40s. And Walt Disney, of course, we're all familiar with. But they all believed that the kinds of skills that animation studios were doing in the 1940s — by making cartoons to train troops to operate machinery or rifles, and by making propaganda to translate the values of the fight for democracy against fascism — they believed that those skills could be applied to the commercial market in the post-war period. And that animation was a key element of visual culture that could translate to a sometimes illiterate population or partially illiterate population.
So Ashton Collins is not alone there. He's part of a broader movement in the film industry and in the animation industry, to understand the unique power of animation to communicate and to sell and persuade.
Munsell
Did you find anything in your research particularly surprising?
Thompson
In addition to extensive print materials in the Smithsonian, you see dozens and dozens of objects that featured Reddy Kilowatt. His image is on everything from stickers to comic books to toys, and other giveaways for kids to little marionettes, and robots, which were used in trade shows and trade fairs. [Author’s note: eBay has an extensive Reddy Kilowatt collection]
It was used in the 1939 World's Fair, for example, to communicate and to encourage the public to interact with Reddy Kilowatt as if it was a real figure. I was quite taken with this – it's really an early form of animatronics. They were using an avatar, a spokescharacter, who was fairly ubiquitous in the American home, on people's electricity bills, and combining it with a large three dimensional object with a record player attached and somebody who operated the speaking, to interact with kids at fairs and to communicate basic ideas. So that was really exciting in a way because it shows how ahead of its time Ashton Collins was at understanding interactivity.
Mike Munsell
I was thinking about copyright and trademark law and the public domain. Reddy Kilowatt was, in his original form, created in 1926. We're coming up on that 100 year mark. Is there a chance he enters the public domain?
Dr. Moana Thompson
I'm not sure about that. Because you can renew copyright. Which of course Disney did repeatedly before it finally had to succumb to the end of copyright. And Reddy is also a trademark as opposed to a copyrighted image. So he has not just appeared in what is public access now, some of his films and TV commercials, but he's also a trademark figure that has a continuing commercial currency. And Ashton Collins was absolutely rigorous at paying attention to trademark law. He sued other companies that had similar characters, like Willie Wired Head.
National Museum of American History Archives Center
I suspect that Xcel Energy [who now owns the rights to Reddy Kilowatt] is going to be very strict in policing its trademarks. Because if this product has value as a commodity of nostalgia for a certain generation, or multiple generations, or even if it has a new function in Xcel’s future corporate identity, he's going to have value.
Munsell
I guess your research sort of doesn't get quite into the present day, but for my understanding Reddy Kilowatt is not really used much today. It was used by a utility in Barbados and an Ecuadorian soccer club more recently, but from your understanding do you know why he stopped being used?
Thompson
Well, I'm not sure that he stopped being used. I have seen the return of Reddy Kilowatt as a consumer figure and as a licensed product that appears on T-shirts and stickers. Amazon has been selling quite a lot of Reddy Kilowatt products. So it's possible that Xcel Energy that owns the trademark sees the value of the product for a new market, which is the nostalgic market, where you can sell a cartoon character itself.
Munsell: I do think that with the emergence of heat pumps, and induction stoves, there is a push toward home electrification and moving away from fossil fuels in your home. I wonder if that’s an opportunity for a reemergence of Reddy?
Thompson
Yeah, it could be an opportunity for them to repurpose the trademark.
Munsell
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your research into Reddy?
Thompson
I thought it was interesting, the blend that Reddy Kilowatt had of both the impersonal and the personal. On the one hand, we've mostly been talking about it as this cute cartoony character of appeal and personality. But on the other hand, he represents an abstract concept, which is almost robotic. He was literally a robot as part of his marketing. This concept of the kilowatt as one and a half horsepower was part of this wider discursive emergence in the ‘20s that electricity was both a servant, as an anthropomorphized figure, and an abstraction that is there at the flick of a switch.
And in their marketing, they used imagery that of course would never be used today. The association of kilowatt as both a “coolie” – which was the specific language used – and a slave.
So this kind of racist imagery is interesting because it gets to the roots of this idea of the dehumanized, depersonalized aspects of Reddy Kilowatt – that electricity represented by using this imagery, and they had little pictures of kilowatt, which were described as a slave or a “coolie” to explain that, basically, this was free labor and unlimited labor. So obviously addressed to an implicitly white consumer. [The idea that] racial imagery of course affected all kinds of aspects of American advertising is well known to scholars in this field and often played on imagery of blackness or whiteness, in the case of soap advertising, for example, but Reddy Kilowatt in particular is this machinic identity.
And who knows, maybe that'll come back again in the future, because machines are so much more part of our lives now, as compared to 1926 or the mid century with computers and artificial intelligence.
Stanford’s Rob Jackson discusses methane, the “my-ocene,” and his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky.
Mornings are my time for thinking about Rob Jackson — specifically, when I am making coffee. Every time I reach for the knob on my gas stove to heat my water kettle, I remember something he told me during our discussion of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere: “We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants.”
Mornings, incidentally, are also my time for practicing holding my breath.
Jackson is the chair of the Global Carbon Project, a professor of Earth science and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy, as well as one of the most highly-cited climate and environmental scientists in the world — all a long way of saying, he spends a lot of time thinking about kitchens and neighborhoods just like mine. But emissions aren’t the only thing that occupies Jackson’s time these days; while he stresses that reducing emissions is still the “cheapest, safest, and only sure path to a safe climate,” his book also reluctantly examines technologies that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere after they’ve been emitted. “In truth, I’m frustrated … because we shouldn’t need them,” he explains.
Ahead of the release of Into the Clear Blue Sky on July 30, I spoke with Jackson about why it’s so difficult to make people care about atmospheric restoration in the same way they care about habitat loss or extreme weather, and the stories, people, and emerging technologies that do make him hopeful. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
In the introduction to Into the Clear Blue Sky, you write that restoring the atmosphere “must invoke the same spirit and philosophy used to restore endangered species and habitats to health.” But unlike with polar bears or glaciers, we usually can’t see the damage to the atmosphere. Do you think that is part of why we’ve been so slow and halting in addressing greenhouse gas pollution?
A little bit, I do. I think the real reason we’ve been slow to address greenhouse gas pollution is because we are better at just continuing with the status quo. We aren’t making changes in our lifestyles and our industries. I’ve grown skeptical that people will respond to climate thresholds like 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming] or 2 C. People don’t really understand why those numbers are important — they don’t understand what they mean in paleo-time, in terms of sea level rise and ice melt. I’m seeking a different motivator, a different narrative for change. And I think restoration is a more powerful narrative than some arbitrary temperature number.
There are several moments in the book where you suggest that decarbonization has benefits beyond just addressing climate change — like how feeding cows red seaweed accelerates their weight gain, or how electric motorcycles don’t have the fumes, vibrations, or noise of gas-powered motorcycles. Do you think we need to market green technologies in ways that go beyond just cleaning up the atmosphere?
Yes. Approximately half the population in the United States isn’t motivated by concerns about climate change, and we have to reach them a different way. I strongly believe that climate solutions won’t just help our grandchildren; they’ll help make us healthier today, and ultimately help us save money.
Air pollution is the best example: Our air is cleaner today than when I was a boy. So is our water. But there are 100,000 Americans who still die from coal and car pollution every year in the United States, and one in five people worldwide — that’s 10 billion people a year who die from fossil fuel pollution. Those deaths are unnecessary and senseless. We have cleaner technologies available now. So if we can help people see that clean energy and climate solutions will restore our water and air, they might be more likely to say, “Okay, let’s give it a try.”
CO2 and methane are the big villains of the book, but I noticed that you don’t tangle with nitrous oxide too much. Was there any thinking behind that decision?
The problem with nitrous oxide is there are fewer things that we can do to reduce emissions. The number one source of nitrous oxide pollution — which causes about 10% of global warming, it’s not a trivial amount — is nitrogen fertilization for our crops. It’s a very complicated discussion when you get into growing food for people around the world, especially in poor countries, and climate change caused by resource consumption in richer countries. The issues are more complicated, and the solution set is smaller.
In your chapter about hydrogen — which you express some doubts about — you say it’s not your job as a scientist to “pick winners and losers.” I’m curious about these moments of tension between your personal opinions and your position as a scientist. When do you speak up, and when do you choose to stand back?
I wish I had a perfect answer to that. I speak more often now than I did earlier in my career. I feel that we’ve run out of time. There’s more urgency today. I feel like I no longer have the luxury of just letting the data speak. I want to try to help people understand the available solutions and the things that we can do individually and systematically.
To succeed in the fight against climate change, we will, I think, need to accept solutions that are not our favorites. And that’s a difficult message. People tend to fight everything they’re not 100% happy with, but the climate is not going to be fixed by any single solution.
The part of your book that made me the most anxious was the chapter about methane leaks, where you’re driving around Boston taking air samples and having the methane sensors go off all over the place. It also reminds me of the chapter on indoor air pollution and how many of these forms of pollution are so passive — like methane quietly leaking into our homes or up from under our streets.
The city home work has been really interesting, and it’s consumed a lot of recent years of my life — much more than I expected it to. And yet the biggest surprise of our methane work in the homes was how slow but consistent leaks from appliances like stoves and the pipes in people’s walls produced more pollution than the methane that leaked when the appliances were on. And that’s because the appliance might be on for an hour a day, but for 23 hours a day, the slow bleed of methane continues to the atmosphere.
It isn’t passive, though. The pollutants we document include NOx gases that trigger asthma. Benzene, formed in flames, is a carcinogen. We would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, yet we willingly stand over a stove, breathing the exact same pollutants, day after day, meal after meal, year after year.
Your book takes readers to many places worldwide. Is there any one project or organization that stands out to you as particularly exciting or crucial?
I very much enjoyed learning about green steel manufacturing. The chapter that I enjoyed the most, though, was the trip to Finland [to see the work of the Snowchange Cooperative, a landscape restoration group]. What I liked about that project, first of all, was seeing people taking matters into their own hands and working for solutions. But what was so interesting for me was the idea of “rewilding,” in the European sense — they’re not interested in trying to recreate an exact replica of something that was present in 1900. They’re trying to restore a functioning ecosystem that will still be there in 100 years. It’s a beautiful sight and the message was very moving for me.
The book vacillates between optimism and a kind of wary realism. I think that’s kind of the conundrum of climate activists on the whole, but is it something you have thoughts about? Do you want readers to come away hopeful, or are you hoping this galvanizes action, too?
That duality, that tension, is deeply rooted in me, and perhaps many people who care about climate and environment. I study the Earth for a living; I see the changes happening not just year to year but decade to decade from now. And you can’t help but be discouraged about the lack of progress.
But on the other hand, I talk to students about how optimism and hope are muscles we can exercise. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to find things that are better today than they were 50 or 100 years ago. That list is long: life expectancy and childhood mortality; water and air quality; the decline of global poverty despite all the injustices that remain. Then there are many specific examples, like the phase-out of leaded gasoline, the Montreal Protocol, and my favorite example, the U.S. Clean Air Act, which saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year at a 30-fold return on investment, so workers are healthier and more productive. We all breathe easier and pay lower medical expenses from air pollution. So I talk to students about how it’s important to acknowledge past successes; by doing so, we make future successes, such as climate, more likely.
Are there any last thoughts about your book that you want to leave readers with?
In the book, I tend to emphasize technologies — maybe to a fault. We don’t talk enough about reducing consumption and demand. The world is deeply unequal in terms of resource use and pollution.
I’m obviously a nerdy guy, and I talk about how we’re in the “myocene” — the my-ocene — the era when the top 1% of the world’s population contributes more fossil carbon emissions than half the people on Earth. The world cannot support the global population at the levels of resource use that we have in the United States right now. Either we need to reduce our energy use and consumption somewhat, or those other people in those other countries will aspire to be like us and they’ll produce and use more.
One example is cars: if everyone in the world owned cars at the rate we do, there would be 7 billion cars instead of about 1.5 billion. And I don’t care whether those cars are EVs or hydrogen vehicles or whatever; the world would not be a more sustainable and richer place with 5 billion more cars on it. We need to talk about using less in this country, not just building new things.