This Sunday, the Academy Awards will celebrate Hollywood — the greatest storytelling engine in human history.
Stories help people find meaning and courage in times of crisis — and there is no greater crisis facing humanity than our changing climate. But less than 3 percent of scripted films or television shows currently make any reference to climate at all.
That’s why last week in the run up to the Oscars, Good Energy — the nonprofit I founded to help Hollywood tell honest and entertaining stories about the climate crisis — launched the climate equivalent of the Bechdel Test, which measures female representation in television and film.
Our Climate Reality Check can be used to check any story set on Earth now or in the future. This year, 13 of the 31 nominated films met that criterion. Of those, just three passed the test: Barbie, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Nyad.
Each represented climate in artful, authentic, and relatable ways.
In Barbie, teenage Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) admonishes Barbie (Margot Robbie): “... you’re killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.”
In Mission Impossible, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) warns Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) that the next world war will be fought over “a rapidly shrinking ecosystem. It’s going to be a war for the last of our dwindling energy, drinkable water, breathable air.”
And in Nyad, when swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) gets stung by a box jellyfish and almost dies, her friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster) tells her it’s because of global warming. We learn that those jellyfish were never supposed to be in that part of the ocean.
By inserting the climate crisis into popular culture, beloved and critically acclaimed movies like these have the power to influence public perceptions and ultimately policy decisions. But to make a real difference, more climate narratives need to appear on the world’s screens — and more donors need to recognize the value of working with Hollywood to change hearts and minds on a range of issues.
Changing Narratives
Copious research shows that the stories we watch on screens change people’s behaviors and worldviews, helping for example, to reduce prejudice toward LGBTQ+ people and creating new social norms such as designated drivers. Yes, you read that right: Hollywood played a pivotal role in reducing alcohol-related driving fatalities by 30 percent in just six years.
Our goal is to see 50 percent of eligible TV and film stories acknowledge the climate crisis by 2027 — an effort that is currently supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, among others.
Taking on Big Energy
Meeting that goal means countering more than a century of well-funded narrative-change efforts in Hollywood by the fossil fuel industry, which grasped the importance of story long ago. Taking on these corporate giants and telling a different story will require a dedicated response from philanthropy.
Of the 2 percent of global charitable funding that goes to climate, a tiny fraction is directed toward strategic climate communications, and an even smaller portion toward narrative change efforts. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies spend $750 million a year on climate communications.
Car companies, such as Ford, and oil companies, such as Shell and BP, have targeted Hollywood for decades, working with Oscar-winning talent and garnering nods from the Academy Awards and prestigious film festivals. Back in the 1930s, Shell even launched its own film production unit to make and invest in films that glorify a lifestyle made possible by oil, featuring luxurious vacations enabled by airplanes and cars.
The fossil fuel industry also has a long history of inserting itself into the works of trusted television personalities. The four-burner stove and gas rotisserie on Julia Child’s late 1970s show Julia Child & Company was funded by the American Gas Association.
As recently as 2012, the television documentary Earth 2050: The Future of Energy, co-directed by three Oscar nominees and created in partnership with Shell and Wired magazine, argued that the real problem is future energy demand and that Shell has the solutions.
These popular depictions have helped fuel a global reliance on fossil fuels and the widespread cultural belief that we cannot live without them.
Huge Funding Gap
The philanthropic world now has a massive opportunity to help rewrite that script and quickly fill a huge funding gap in support for narratives about climate change. Recent and historic social change efforts show how shifting narratives contributes significantly, and sometimes directly, to policy change.
Hollywood depictions of LGBTQ+ people on TV shows such as Will & Grace helped pave the way for the legalization of gay marriage in the United States. The Academy Award-winning film Roma drew attention to the plight of the disenfranchised in Mexico and led to the passage of legislation to protect domestic workers in that country. And the establishment of international security measures on nuclear weapons during the Cold War was fueled by movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In fact, the Department of Defense has had a Hollywood program for nearly a century. President Roosevelt called the film industry a “necessary and beneficial part of the war effort” thanks to the more than 300 movies made during World War II alone.
None of this was happenstance. Behind each of these cultural shifts there were organizations making significant investments in outreach to screenwriters and industry decision-makers, developing sophisticated cultural and narrative strategies, and building trust and relationships with key players in Hollywood.
Imagine the potential if climate change also became a mainstay of Hollywood scripts and the varied ways it touches our lives. What if our on-screen worlds gave us empathetic and hopeful narratives showing the power of society to adapt to the climate crisis and do better?
I founded Good Energy because we can’t win on climate without more and better stories. But I also did it for a more selfish reason: I need these stories. I live on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which my family has called home for five generations. Every year, the storms and heat waves get worse. I struggle with climate anxiety, fear, and grief — as do millions of others. The truth is, I need to see my world on-screen. I need help making meaning of all this — and finding joy, resilience, and beauty amid the pain and destruction.
So, I chose to devote my life to nurturing stories that help us find courage in the face of climate change and envision a better future.
There are no silver bullets when it comes to the climate crisis. But stories have always been our most powerful tool for surviving existential challenges. Let’s do all we can to make sure that narratives about climate become part of every film and television awards ceremony.