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Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
Keep ‘em coming.
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On Musk vs. Trump, tech emissions, and V2G charging
Current conditions: Polar air could deliver Australia’s most widespread snowfall in years this weekend • Toronto and Montreal have some of the worst air quality in the world going into Friday due to smoke from the Manitoba fires • Global average concentrations of CO2 exceeded 430 parts per million in May, the highest level in millions or possibly tens of millions of years.
Elon Musk’s criticisms of the Republican reconciliation bill triggered a very public falling out with President Trump on Thursday. Earlier this week, just days after his Oval Office send-off from the government, Musk took to Twitter to slam Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” bill, which he claimed would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” By Thursday, Musk was calling for Congress to kill the bill, and his criticisms had escalated: “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” he tweeted. Trump responded by telling reporters on Thursday afternoon that “Elon and I had a great relationship — I don’t know if we will anymore,” touching off a back-and-forth on social media that culminated in Musk claiming Trump is “in the Epstein files,” a reference to Jeffrey Epstein.
The conflict also sent “the value of Tesla shares into a freefall,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in his accounting of the breakup. The company’s stock was down 14% by the time the dust settled, erasing $153 billion from Tesla’s market value in the company’s biggest one-day drop on record. “The whole thing is idiotic,” Wayne Kaufman, the chief market analyst at Phoenix Financial Services, said, per Bloomberg. “People in these kinds of positions should know better than to act like kids in junior high.”
Indirect emissions from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta rose 150% in the three years between 2020 and 2023 due to the energy demands of artificial intelligence, a new report by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union found. Amazon saw the most significant jump in emissions, up 182% in 2023 compared to 2020, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145%, and Alphabet at 138% over the same periods. In total, 166 digital companies reviewed by the report contributed just under 1% of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.
Indirect emissions, also called scope 2 emissions, account for those from “purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling consumed by the company.” However, the report also found that nearly half of the companies it examined have committed to achieving net-zero emissions goals, with 51 companies setting ambitious deadlines of 2050 or earlier. Twenty-three of the companies in the report already operated on 100% renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022. You can read the full report here.
Renault Group
Renault Group announced Thursday that the Dutch city of Utrecht is officially the first in Europe to debut a vehicle-to-grid car-sharing service. The program, called Utrecht Energized, was announced last fall, with Renault supplying an initial 500 electric models featuring V2G bidirectional charging technology, allowing the cars to charge using clean energy and also feed power back into the grid during times of high demand.
Utrecht was already one of Europe’s “most progressive renewable-energy cities,” per the announcement, with 35% of its roofs equipped with solar panels. “To manage the grid with a high proportion of renewables requires a system that quickly adapts to the changes in energy generation and consumption,” Renault wrote in its announcement, adding that the bidirectional cars in the program can deliver 10% of the flexibility to balance Utrecht’s wind-and-solar-generated electricity during peak times. Although the program is the first of its kind in Europe, similar programs are also underway in China, Japan, and Australia, Autoevolution writes.
Battery cell maker Envision Automotive Energy Supply Co. announced a work stoppage on Thursday of the construction of its manufacturing plant near Florence, South Carolina. “AESC has informed the state of South Carolina and our local partners that due to policy and market uncertainty, we are pausing construction at our South Carolina facility at this time,” spokesman Brad Grantham said in a statement, per the South Carolina Daily Gazette. The pause jeopardizes 1,600 new jobs and a planned $1.6 billion investment in the facility by the Japan-based company. The state’s Republican Governor Henry McMaster, a Trump ally, acknowledged that “the tariffs are going up and down” and some projects are “being paused,” but added, “Let things play out, because all of these changes are taking place. So, I’d say, relax if you can.”
Record-fast snowmelt in the western United States could be cueing up a particularly severe fire season, The Guardian reports. Despite some states, including California, seeing above-average snowfall this winter, all western states already have below-normal snowpacks, indicative of a rapid melt rate that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described in a recent special notice as “not normal.” Additionally, a third of the states in the West are in “severe” drought or worse, the highest proportion in more than two years. Combined with a forecast for above-average summer temperatures, the “quickly depleting mountain snows will limit summertime water availability in streams and rivers throughout the West, and may kick off a potential feedback loop that could intensify and expand the current drought,” The Guardian writes, singling out the Pacific Northwest as especially vulnerable to wildfires as a result.
A Ginko tree at the Miaoying Temple in Beijing. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
A study of 50,000 trees in China found that thousands of endangered varieties have been preserved for centuries within the walls of religious sites and temples. “The researchers found that the density of ancient trees inside the temples was more than 7,000 times higher than those outside temples and in the wild,”Nature writes. Eight of the tree species identified by the researchers can only be found on temple grounds.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”