Hollywood meets climate
Climate storytelling success, tragedy in Mecca, and small voices make big waves
GOOD NEWS
Compelling climate narratives in television shows and movies can help shift attitudes on climate change, a new study finds! Over a thousand participants were recruited, and researchers divided them into two groups. Half watched a climate-focused episode of Madam Secretary about a super typhoon menacing the Pacific Island nation of Nauru. The other half watched another episode of the same show about U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
People who watched the climate episode experienced “a substantial increase” in their level of concern about climate change and their support for government action. Researchers found this change persisted even two weeks after people watched the episode.
Good Energy (started by my friend Anna Jane Joyner) has a simple test for movies and TV shows to see if they’re talking about climate change. First, does climate change exist in the story world? And second, is a character aware of it?
For a long time, the answer was usually “no” – but that’s changing now. The fifth-annual Hollywood Climate Summit wrapped up this week, where creators of all stripes came together to talk about how to best include climate in their plot lines. Just like climate change touches everything in our world, I’m convinced every story can have a climate element to it – and it’s good news to see that this is becoming more common and that it can make a difference.
NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS
Extreme heat continues to threaten people around the world. Last week, more than 1,300 pilgrims died during this year’s Hajj as temperatures soared to 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the holy city of Mecca.
Climate change affects us all, but it doesn’t affect us all equally. 83 percent of the deaths during the five-day pilgrimage occurred among unregistered pilgrims, who do not have the same access to water, food, and air-conditioned cooling centers as registered pilgrims. Many walked for miles in temperatures above 100 degrees. An official Hajj permit and package can cost more than $10,000, a price tag out of reach for many.
Many of the dead were buried in Saudi Arabia. For example, Saida Wurie has not been able to find out where her parents, Isatu Wurie, 65, and Alieu Wurie, 71, of Bowie, Maryland, were buried, beyond the name of the cemetery.
All this led Human Rights Watch’s Michael Page to call on Saudi Arabia to do more to mitigate the heat risk for next year’s Hajj, which will also take place in the summer. Actions to keep people safe are essential. I have a list of them in this newsletter from a few weeks ago. But we must cut fossil fuel emissions too. Otherwise, the risks will continue to grow, faster than we can keep up with them.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
We can’t fix climate change alone, but I’m convinced we can do it together; and a group of middle-schoolers from Oakland, California proved how powerful people working together can be.
Students from the climate justice group Youth vs Apocalypse at Melrose Leadership Academy successfully advocated for installing a heat pump at their school, using around $5 million in school bonds to cover the cost of the project.
As the students explain here, they found the gas boiler that heated the school produced about 32 metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly. It was expensive to maintain, and it wouldn’t cool the school during heatwaves.
“I went about researching and then made a presentation about heat pumps. We started off with talking about the Oakland Unified school district’s action resolution they made in 2020 that says we need to achieve 100% clean electricity and phase out the use of fossil fuels. We thought that the district should honor the action resolutions they had made,” said Augie Balquist, 13.
The students presented their ideas to every class at the school, gathering 250 signatures, and also held community meetings and attended school board meetings. Ultimately their campaign prevailed, and the school has a heat pump now!
You don’t have to be a student to use your voice to make your school a better place: parents can get involved in calling for similar changes too, whether through a parent-teacher association or by attending local school board meetings.
Thanks for this post. I wrote about the balance of hope, apathy and scaremongering in climate change and biodiversity communication recently, here: https://predirections.substack.com/p/on-hope-apathy-and-scaremongering
Hope you don't mind me sharing.
Increasing concern about climate change is good, but I think that is not the basic problem. Rather it is how "concern" gets translated into domestic policy and into our stance at COP meetings.
What about a movie about a gorgeous economist and her yummy environmentalist boyfriend who have to fight off naive environmentalists who oppose taxing net CO2 (because they are secretly being paid by EVIL FOSSIL FUELS CORPORATIONS) culminating in a dramatic 50-50 vote in the Seante with the VP casting the deciding vote to pass the tax. :)