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Sadly, the new Apple TV+ show is terrible.
In the future, we can speak to whales, and they sound like Meryl Streep.
This is the vision of Scott Z. Burns, a filmmaker frequently renowned for his prescience: He produced An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and wrote the screenplay for Contagion, the 2011 Stephen Soderberg film that anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic down to “social distancing” and Dr. Sanjay Gupta discussing preventative measures on TV. Burns’ latest project, Extrapolations, aims to do the same narratively as Contagion, but for climate change, following our trajectory to its most terrifying conclusions.
This is a worthy pursuit! There’s no denying that the climate crisis is also a crisis of storytelling, both on a political level — see: the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long attempt to question the science — and on a cultural one. We need better climate stories — ones that go beyond preaching to already-convinced audiences, imagine complex and hopeful futures, dispense with cliches about humanity as a blight, center on characters outside the Global North, and forgo unhelpful platitudes about the future being “up to us!”
But Extrapolations is not that.
What Extrapolations is: An eight-episode anthology that spans from 2037 to 2070 (the first three episodes, “2037,” “2046,” and “2047,” premiere on Friday on Apple TV+ and are the focus of this review). The show stars what feels like every working A-lister, and it clearly cost roughly a gazillion dollars to make. It is also ridiculous (see: Meryl Streep voicing a whale) and terrible (see: Meryl Streep voicing a whale).
After a scene-setting pilot that begins with a “climate change is bad” montage featuring footage of smokestacks, landfills, and hurricanes — visual cliches even in the Obama era — the subsequent episodes of Extrapolations each focus on a different measurement of our destruction: animal extinctions, sea level rise, heat deaths, the financial cost of climate change, and population growth. Tying the stories together is the ubiquitous presence of billionaire tech founder Nick Bilton (no, not that one), the show’s stand-in for techno-optimists like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He’s played by Kit Harington, and he reads stock exchange numbers projected onto his lap pool because that’s what rich people do.
Other recurring characters include a rabbi named Marshall (Daveed Diggs), who works in the third episode to save his Miami synagogue from flooding and has an inexplicable dream sequence that seems to exist just so he can dance and sing, and Rebecca (Sienna Miller), who specializes in conversing with last-of-their-kind animals, like the philosophizing humpback whale that speaks in the voice of her dead mother (Streep). Alas, a ghoulishly evil Matthew Rhys doesn’t make it past the first episode because he gets mauled to death by a walrus. Nature strikes back!
If that all seems, well, cringe, it’s not even the worst of it. This is a show where every dinner conversation revolves around climate change, where bad guys predictively cackle “we’ll be dead!” when discussing how their short-term gains will doom the future of the planet, and where random strangers pop up out of the woodwork to inform you that the blockchain is making the sea levels rise. Rarely do characters seem like anything other than mouthpieces for ideas. In the first episode, set in July 2037, someone mentions the 2018 self-immolation of climate activist David Buckel, only to offer the superficial analysis that “it showed that the world is in pain and needs change.” In another scene, Rhys’ character shouts, with bizarre specificity, about a 2019 speech by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, evidently just to prove the show’s reference to U.S.-Chinese tensions in the Arctic has real-world antecedents.
This kind of overreliance on exposition is a tic of Burns’ that actually worked fine in Contagion — back in 2011, the vocabulary and experience of a pandemic were foreign to most viewers, and things like R0 and herd immunity were fascinating to hear explained. That isn’t the case for the basics of climate change anymore. A majority of Americans have believed in human-caused global warming since at least 2001, and that number has only grown in the 20-plus years since — not to mention, anyone who still need convincing is probably not watching Extrapolations in the first place.
Instead, the show feels at times like a vehicle for celebrity activism, a way to phone in an “important” and “urgent” performance for accolades. That sense is only compounded by the fact that most of Extrapolations’ episodes focus on the global well-off and are set in major cities like London, Miami, and Tel Aviv. Charitably, these locations were picked so the show can be relatable to its likeliest audiences; in actuality, it is out-of-touch, centering more on inconveniences to the world’s wealthy than those who will actually bear the worst of the brunt. The whale episode, set in Colombia, features almost no actual Colombian characters; an Indigenous character in the pilot episode who exists just to comfort Rebecca, played by actress Cara Gee, doesn't even get a name.
There is certainly little enjoyable entertainment value here; the messaging is the entire point. But as the show’s title suggests, Extrapolations lacks the ability to imagine anything other than a circa-2016 fatalist projection of a coming calamity. This results in the narrative propulsion being hand-wringing doom and gloom, even if the truth is that there is actually much promise ahead of us. That doesn’t mean the hard work is done or that there aren’t more minds to change, but it does mean catastrophizing is losing its usefulness as the central force of climate narratives; in the worst cases, it’s actively detrimental. Extrapolations isn’t entirely devoid of optimism (trials for corporate ecocide are also a plot point), but as climate scientist Michael Mann has previously written, while there is always a danger of understating climate change, “there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability, and hopelessness.”
Alarmism is an easy, familiar story. But there are better ones out there. They’re just still waiting to be told.
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.