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Time to remove all the exposition.
Twenty-ish minutes into the latest Tom Cruise outing, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, a roomful of intelligence so-and-sos explain to each other and the audience why they should care about the movie’s big bad, a rogue AI called the Entity. Eventually, we get to the director of the CIA, who wants to bend the AI to his will.
“The next world war isn’t going to be a cold one,” he tells Ethan Hunt (Cruise). “It’s going to be a ballistic war over a rapidly shrinking ecosystem. It’s going to be a war for the last of our dwindling energy, drinkable water, breathable air.”
If that sounds like the setup for a climate movie, you would be wrong; Hunt’s fight is focused solely on the AI. But the Entity is, on the whole, a fairly good stand-in for not just climate change — “An enemy that is anywhere..and nowhere,” one of the intelligence officials says — but also the problems of climate storytelling.
There’s a classic adage that anyone with even a passing interest in narrative has heard at least once in their life: Show, don’t tell. In past Mission: Impossible movies, this was fairly easy. You show the audience a nuclear bomb or a biological weapon, and you don’t have to tell them what the problem is. The other details — who has the bomb, why they want to set it off, how the virus works — are ancillary, like the cars that will inevitably be destroyed during a high-speed chase.
An artificial intelligence that lives in the cloud … well, that’s different. An AI requires explanation, and this movie is full of it. The script is as loaded with exposition as Hunt’s guns are with bullets: Each new character gets their own explanation of the horrors the Entity can unleash, and some lines are repeated just to make sure the audience understands them (at one point Ving Rhames, playing series stalwart Luther Stickell, sagely nods and simply echos the phrase “source code”).
A bodiless AI is such a difficult thing to turn into a villain that Hunt spends much of the movie fighting not it but a human stand-in, the smirking, knife-wielding Gabriel (Esai Morales), who comes into the movie saddled with newfound backstory for Hunt that had never existed in any of the six movies that came before. The Entity is so amorphous, so difficult to explain, that the writers felt the need to give Hunt an entirely different reason to care about the person he was fighting.
Frankly, I get it. So much of what anyone writing about climate change must do is exposition; we clear our throats, explain the stakes, the science, the urgency with which we need solutions. Don’t Look Up, perhaps the most popular recent climate-oriented movie, is still an allegory — and on top of that an allegory about the difficulties of telling climate stories. Climate change has no punchable villains (fossil fuel executives don’t count) or disarmable bombs. What’s a Tom Cruise to do, massacre a few hundred spotted lanternflies?
There are disaster movies, of course, and movies where ecoterrorists are the villains. There are TV shows like Extrapolations, which leaned so far into climate change as a buzzword that it tipped over into the realm of cringe. But overall, as Kendra Pierre-Louis recently wrote in Mother Jones, Hollywood has a climate problem.
Maybe we need to find ways to remove the exposition. In its playbook for screenwriters looking to incorporate climate change into their stories, Good Energy, a nonprofit consultancy, recommends weaving climate change into the backgrounds of shows and movies of all genres. Climate change is a lived reality, the thinking goes, so it doesn’t need explanation when it appears in mundane ways.
The ubiquity of climate change provides a sort of freedom: It doesn’t need to hit us over the head. Take After Yang, a film that The Verge’s Andrew Webster called the “coziest science fiction movie” of 2022. That sense of coziness exists despite clear signs of an unnamed apocalypse that has come and gone. It could have been climate change, or it could not, but either way the world of the film is one in which humans and nature have, seemingly, come to a sort of symbiotic agreement.
In a recent essay for The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal argues that our tendency towards narrative, to believe that stories are the answers to our problems, both saddles the form with expectations it can never live up to and blinds us to other approaches we could look to instead. “What forms of attention does story crowd out?” Sehgal asks.
For a while, filming on Dead Reckoning Part One had to shut down for the pandemic — there’s a famous audio clip of Tom Cruise reaming out crew members who broke COVID-19 guidelines, insinuating that the future of the entire film industry rested on that production — but the world of the film itself is entirely pandemic-free, Hunt and company neatly sidestepping that world-altering force in favor of a fictional one. But climate change will make itself known without trying; all we have to do is give it our attention without trying to narrativize our way around it.
Future productions will, inevitably, feel its impacts one way or another. A disaster could delay filming, or extreme heat might stop Cruise in his tracks as he tries to execute one of his famous runs. If it does, perhaps they should just keep the cameras rolling.
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Current conditions: Thousands are without power and drinking water in the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion after Tropical Cyclone Garance made landfall with the strength of a Category 2 hurricane • A severe weather outbreak could bring tornadoes to southern states early next week • It’s 44 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Washington, D.C., where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with President Trump today to sign a minerals deal.
The 16th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP16, ended this week with countries agreeing on a crucial roadmap for directing $200 billion a year by 2030 toward protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss. Developed nations are urged to double down on their goal to mobilize $20 billion annually for conservation in developing countries this year, rising to $30 billion by 2030. The plan also calls for further study on the relationships between nature conservation and debt sustainability. “The compromise proved countries could still bridge their differences and work together for the sake of preserving the planet, despite a fracturing world order and the dramatic retreat of the United States from international green diplomacy and foreign aid under President Donald Trump,” wrote Louise Guillot at Politico. The decision was met with applause and tears from delegates. One EU delegate said they were relieved “about the positive signal that this sends to other ongoing negotiations on climate change and plastics that we have.”
The Trump administration yesterday fired hundreds of workers across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, key agencies responsible for monitoring the changing climate and communicating extreme weather threats. The National Hurricane Center and the Tsunami Warning Center both operate under NOAA, and the layoffs come ahead of the upcoming hurricane season. “People nationwide depend on NOAA for free, accurate forecasts, severe weather alerts, and emergency information,” said Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Purging the government of scientists, experts, and career civil servants and slashing fundamental programs will cost lives.” A federal judge yesterday temporarily blocked the administration’s mass firings of federal workers, so the status of those affected in this latest round is unclear. Somewhat relatedly, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports that the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by NOAA it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding.
The FBI reportedly has been questioning Environmental Protection Agency employees about $20 billion in climate and clean energy grants approved under the Biden administration, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has insisted were issued hastily and without oversight. According toThe Washington Post, the Justice Department has asked several U.S. attorneys to submit warrant requests or launch grand jury investigations, but those efforts have been rejected due to lack of evidence or “reasonable belief that a crime occurred.” “It’s certainly unusual for any case to involve two different U.S. attorney offices declining a case for lack of probable cause and to have the Department of Justice continue to shop it,” Stefan D. Cassella, a former federal prosecutor, told the Post. Several nonprofits said their Citibank accounts holding the funding have been frozen without explanation.
Some Democratic states are apparently freezing out Tesla in response to Elon Musk’s political maneuvers within the Trump administration. Tesla operates on a direct-to-consumer sales model, so it doesn’t have to go through dealerships. More than 25 states ban or restrict direct EV sales in some way. The company has been lobbying to get permission to sell directly in these states, but some Democratic lawmakers are “disgusted” by Musk’s moves in Washington and are rebuffing lobbyists or dropping their support for proposed legislation allowing direct sales.
Apple is in trouble for claiming some of its Apple Watches are “carbon neutral.” A group of customers are suing the company after learning its claims relied on carbon offsetting projects in protected national parks or heavily forested areas, instead of “genuine” carbon reductions. “The carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading.” The lawsuit seeks damages, as well as an injunction that prevents Apple from using the carbon neutral claim to market its watches. Apple has a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Researchers in Amsterdam have examined the nests of birds known as common coots and discovered plastic items dating back to the 1990s, including a McDonald’s McChicken wrapper from 1996, and a Mars wrapper promoting the 1994 USA FIFA World Cup. “History is not only written by humans,” said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, who led the research. “Nature, too, is keeping score.”
Auke-Florian Hiemstra
Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.