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Illustration by Rafael Varona
Letter From the Editor
The dire situation regarding climate change can lead to inertia when it comes to taking action — that nothing we do can alter the cataclysmic fate that headlines constantly warn about. There’s the study that says we have less than a decade to prevent global warming from irreversibly damaging the Earth. Then there are other predictions of famine, water shortages and increased global conflict that will directly result from our failure to reduce our carbon footprint. Combined with the glacial movement of global leaders to formulate a unified plan to combat climate change, it seems as if we’re resigned to our destiny — and certainly no amount of refillable water bottles can help us. But a feeling isn’t reality, and in fact, there is still a key impact we as individuals can make to reduce climate change, and even more when we act as a community. And segments of the entertainment industry are taking meaningful steps to help rewrite the narrative on climate change to give us the positive plot twists we’ve all been yearning for. In The Hollywood Reporter’s inaugural Sustainability Issue, you’ll read about environmental initiatives launched by key studios, how celebrities are embracing (and profiting from) the push to go green, how sustainability efforts range from the personal to the professional, and more. Released digitally to reduce our own carbon footprint, this edition of THR is an extension of the reporting we've done on the environment for years and debuts during the Environmental Media Association’s annual Impact Summit on improving the conditions on our planet. We are thankful for the partnership with EMA, with whom THR will host the June 2 Pictures for the Planet program, and our continued relationship with Walmart, which is the presenting sponsor of this event and the digital issue. It’s not too late to write our own story and have a true impact on the environment — but we need to take action now. THR’s Sustainability Issue and the EMA summit provide a roadmap to make it happen.
Nekesa Mumbi Moody
Editorial Director
Photographed by Diana King
Walmart proudly supports The Hollywood Reporter's Pictures for the planet virtual screening series and salutes the work of the Environmental Media Association
Last Look
Netflix’s ‘Our Great National Parks’: TV Review
Hollywood Flashback: Waterworld Has Finally Earned Respect
Critic’s Notebook: The Deep Hollywood Roots of the Cli-Fi Wave
Voices
EMA’s Debbie Levin: Making a Difference
Yes, I Did Say That
Style
Green Building: A Sustainable Backyard Retreat
About Town
Scott Z. Burns: Green Screens and Sets
Features
Studio Execs Unite to Tackle Climate Change
Hollywood’s Notable Achievements
Survey: Most Impactful Storytelling
Five Celebrity-Backed Eco-Conscious Companies
Albert’s Stamp of Approval
The Climate Change Playbook for Writers
A Climate Change Playbook for Writers
Albert's Stamp of Approval
Hollywood's Notable Achievements
Yes, I Did Say That!
EMA's Debbie Levin: Making a Difference
Critic's Notebook: The Deep Hollywood Roots of the Cli-Fi Wave
Hollywood’s Biggest Environmental
From Disney to Sony, the entertainment industry giants are united in the push for clean energy sources and fighting to prove going green can also be cost-effective.
By Kirsten Chuba
They
“This is an area where we really need to be cooperative and not competitive.”
Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Netflix and Amazon, along with Fox Corp., Amblin Partners, Hasbro and Participant, are all members of the Sustainable Production Alliance (SPA), a consortium focused on moving the industry toward sustainable habits faster than any one company could alone.
“Someone that might be working on Mission: Impossible 7 for us this year, when they go to work on Wonder Woman for Warners next year, they bring with them that sustainable expectation and behavior,” explains Jennifer Lynch, senior vp corporate social responsibility and internal communications at Paramount Pictures. “Then it doesn't just become a studio-by-studio initiative — but an industry-wide one.”
As the SPA found in a report published in March 2021, the industry has a significant environmental footprint that needs addressing. Looking at carbon emission averages for SPA’s member company productions in the years between 2016 and 2019, the report found tentpole productions had an average carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons (about 33 metric tons per shooting day), with large films at an average of 1,081 metric tons and small films at 391 metric tons — all with fuel from production vehicles and generators as the biggest culprit. On the TV side, one-hour scripted dramas had an average carbon footprint of 77 metric tons per episode and half-hour scripted single-camera shows had 26 metric tons per episode. For reference, the University of Michigan reported in 2021 that a typical U.S. household has a carbon footprint of 48 metric tons per year.
And just how do they plan to get there? Across the board, the companies have pledged to focus on water conservation (via artificial landscaping and water refill stations), energy efficiency (via renewable energy sources and conservation), waste minimization (via reusing, recycling and composting), low emission transportation (via electric vehicles) and sustainable building design (via LEED certifications). In recent years, there’s been an industry-wide embracing of battery generators, LED lighting, food donations, reduction of single-use plastics and reliance on cleaner fuels like renewable diesel, all of which have been celebrated as major game-changers.
Though the companies are collaborating on best practices and ideas for moving the sustainability mission forward, each has set its own goals: Disney has a 2030 goal for achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions for direct operations; Sony aims for 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and zero environmental footprint by 2040; Paramount is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Climate challenge, committing to a 50 percent greenhouse gas reduction in 10 years; NBCUniversal aims at being carbon neutral by 2035; Netflix projects it will achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2022; and Amazon has a 2040 net zero carbon goal and says it’s on track to powering its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. Warner Bros. Discovery, following its recent merger, is still setting its sustainability goals, reps say.
Sony has installed solar panels on its lot, which it reported in 2021 (based off of 2019 data) offset 100 percent of the electricity consumed by stage operations. “It's something that you do once and you have to maintain it, but it's there, right? It's infrastructure that's there for 25 years,” says the company’s sustainability vp, John Rego.
Paramount has constructed an alternative energy plant on its lot, lowering its energy consumption to below 1990 levels and saving 400 million imperial tons of greenhouse gases over the past decade in the process, says Lynch. For comparison, the EPA reported that in 2020, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 5,222 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. The Paramount plant features micro turbines that help the studio self-generate energy. And Disney, which in 2020 hit its goal to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 2012 levels, is piloting a digester, which turns all of its food and green waste into compost without needing to be taken to another facility. Day says many of the studio’s crews take home the compost at the end of the day for their gardens, engaging and educating employees in the process. For now, the digester is used on the lot soundstages but could later expand more widely to sets. Disney has also made major sustainability waves with its virtual production technology called "the Volume," which it put into use on The Mandalorian. Massive LED screens were used to create digital, rather than physical, sets, cutting out building materials and international travel for its cast and crew. The studio reported that the technology reduced the show’s carbon emissions by an average of 30 metric tons for each shooting location eliminated, and its LED set lights used 70 percent less energy than traditional lights.
“It's still in its infancy, obviously, and we're doing a lot of work to try to figure out where the line is,” says Day about the technology’s future. “For a show like Grown-ish, from an environmental perspective it probably would still make sense for them to go out on their smaller locations, do traditional location work. But where is the line? Where do we reach the point where it actually, from an environmental and sustainability perspective, makes more sense to use something like the Volume or virtual production, instead of doing that traditional work on location?” Speaking of virtual production, the pandemic ushered in a wave of changes to Hollywood’s way of working as well as its sustainability practices, upping waste — via PPE and individually packaged meals — but saving on commuting emissions as many moved to remote operations. Two years later, with some industry employees still working at least partially from home even as productions have boomed back, the execs report some environmental good has come out of the COVID-19 era, spurring a shift to paper-free sets and realizing some things, like meetings and location scouting, don’t need to always be done in person. They are mixed, though, on how positively remote work really affected the industry’s footprint, with employees likely using less clean energy at their homes than they would onsite, and although fewer employees commuted, those who traveled on set were less likely to use a shared vehicle.
“For a lot of us, looking back and seeing how quickly and how effectively the industry mobilized to address the challenge of the pandemic and come up with solutions that we could all agree upon and implement quickly on that scale, is a great lesson for sustainability,” says Warner Bros. Discovery’s director of sustainability, Mike Slavich. “I think that you can apply those learnings and say, ‘OK, let's apply those same resources, that collective effort to solving some of these other problems,’ and that's not only the studios but also our suppliers and, really, the industry at large.”
While studios have seen success in many areas of sustainability, they still face a number of challenges, including in pure logistics needed for such massive companies. “Fuel still remains the biggest impact area of our production, and that's because of the heavy-duty vehicles that we're using and the generators that are required to power our sets,” explains Slavich. “On the vehicle side, there just isn't inventory yet [of] the alternatives in place to be able to purchase those vehicles. With generators, as well, there isn't an inventory of mobile batteries that can replace the power needs that we have.” Rego echoes the same, pointing to diesel as still the only real option to power such large operations.
Lynch, on the other hand, acknowledges the stigma still associated with sustainability, and the fight to prove that going green doesn’t come with a massive price tag.
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Hollywood’s Biggest Environmental Wins, Challenges and Goals for a Clean Carbon Footprint
From Disney to Sony, the entertainment industry giants are united in the push for clean energy sources and fighting to prove going green can also be cost effective.
Wins, Challenges and Goals
for a Clean Carbon Footprint
are some of the biggest names and fiercest competitors in Hollywood, battling for projects, talent, execs and financial success. But these studios and streamers have put aside the competition for one common goal: accelerating the transformation of the entertainment business into a more sustainable industry. “From the early, early days of starting this work, we came together and we said, ‘You know what, we can be as competitive as we want to at the box office, on our linear channels and our streaming services, but this is an area where we really need to be cooperative and not competitive,’” Lisa Day, manager of environmental sustainability at The Walt Disney Co., says of the industry’s collaborative network tackling climate change with a united front.
Lisa Day
Manager of Environmental Sustainability at The Walt Disney Co.
Jennifer Lynch
Senior VP Corporate Social Responsibility and Internal Communications at Paramount Pictures
John Rego
Sustainability VP at Sony
Mike Slavich
Director of Sustainability at Warner Bros. Discovery
“It's something that you do once and you have to maintain it, but it's there, right? It's infrastructure that's there for 25 years.”
“How effectively the industry mobilized to address the challenge of the pandemic ... is a great lesson for sustainability.”
“We call that carrot cake: It's your vegetables, but they taste good.”
After years of environmental storylines being relegated to panic-inducing documentaries, says Day, writers are learning how to approach environmentalism in a way that's not doom-and-gloom, but more integrated into everyday life. Looking ahead, the sustainability execs emphasize increased collaboration and education surrounding environmental measures, moving beyond the simple no-nos and teaching their employees about things like gardening, digital waste, lighting efficiency and fuel use. “For those of us who are at the major studios and the streamers, we're lucky enough that we have sustainability people full time who are working on this, often multiple people who are working on this, whereas some of the indies and other smaller companies just don't have that scale,” Day says. “It's really important for us to keep doing this work that we're doing and building the tools and the resources and making them available to other people in the industry, both here and internationally, so that they're not having to figure it out on their own or trying to replicate the work that we've already done. They can take existing learning and tools and resources and start at a much higher level in terms of getting sustainability in place.”
3,370
metric tons of carbon dioxide per tentpole film
By the Numbers
“There's that fallacy of, ‘Oh, these single-use plastic water bottles are cheaper so you're going to save money,’ but they're really not,” the Paramount exec says. “On Top Gun: Maverick, we moved more than 30,000 single-use plastic water bottles out of the waste stream in order to make sure that we were using water filtration systems and people were using refillable canteens. That saved us thousands of dollars according to the sustainability report. So I think that the fallacy that having a sustainable set is going to be a more expensive set, that mindset in and of itself is problematic.” One other area where sustainability is slowly making progress is onscreen, with environmental storylines woven into major projects. Rego says Spider-Man: No Way Home featured electric vehicles in the film, as did Paramount’s Scream, in what Lynch sees as a two-pronged approach. “It's that almost product-placement piece of, what are the anecdotal things that you see? You don't see that Starbucks single-use cup, but instead you see somebody with their cup from home that they've used to fill up their coffee,” she says. “So there's got to be more of that; but then there's also the storytelling. We call that carrot cake: It's your vegetables, but they taste good.”
1,081
metric tons per large film
391
metric tons per small film
77
metric tons per episode of one-hour scripted drama
26
metric tons per episode of half-hour scripted single-cam
Source: SPA's member company productions, 2016=-2019
Warner Bros. Discovery's beach cleanup efforts Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery/WarnerMedia Co.
Disney's virtual production stage used to shoot The Mandalorian Courtesy of Melinda Sue Gordon/Lucasfilm Ltd.
WarnerBros. Discovery's green buildings in Culver City Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery/WarnerMedia Co.
Spider-Man: No Way Home featured electric vehicles Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Environmental Media Association Founded
The nonprofit organization is established by Alan and Cindy Horn and Norman and Lyn Lear to promote environmental progress in the entertainment industry. The group goes on to establish the EMA Awards, honoring Hollywood studios and productions that address environmental topics, and the Environmental Production Guide, which provides key information on sustainable product alternatives. It also hands out the Green and Gold Seals recognizing excellence in sustainable practices on set. More than 1,200 productions have received the EMA Green Seal so far.
How Hollywood Is Going Green: A Timeline of Notable Achievements
Over the years, the industry has made strides in reducing its global footprint, a trend that has accelerated recently. Here are just some of the efforts by studios, productions and groups to implement sustainability solutions.
1989
2008
PGA Green Established
The committee is set up as part of the PGA's commitment to encourage and support sustainability in the entertainment industry. In October 2021, the group called on Hollywood to clean up its energy footprint. Noting that film productions emit an average of 391 to 3,370 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which adds up to millions of metric tons of CO2 per year, the PGA set a goal of reducing entertainment industry emissions by 50 percent by 2030.
2010
Sony Launches "Road to Zero" Initiative
Sony strives to achieve a zero environmental footprint by 2050 by curbing climate change, conserving resources, controlling chemical substances and promoting biodiversity through its products and business activities.
Sustainable Production Alliance Launched
The group is founded to accelerate the entertainment business' transition to more environmentally friendly practices and technologies. Members include Disney, Netflix and other major film, TV and streaming companies.
Scroll to explore
2012
Think Like a Man Shoots With LED Lighting
The Screen Gems rom-com incorporates green practices into its production, including LED lighting, reportedly making it the first major studio film to be shot entirely using the highly efficient light source.
Compiled by Trilby Beresford and Lexy Perez
2014
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Goes Green
The Sony film donates nearly 50 tons of materials for reuse on future productions and nearly 6,000 meals to community shelters, earning a carbon neutral certification.
Courtesy of EMA
BARCELONA, SPAIN - MARCH 03
Think Like a Man Alan Markfield/Screen Gems/Courtesy Everett Collection
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
2018
The X-Files' Green Production
The Fox sci-fi classic's limited series return donates leftover food, uses innovative green technology onscreen and recycles 100 percent of the aluminum and steel used in set construction. The production diverts more than 81 percent of its total waste from landfills and generates nearly $41,000 in cost savings.
X-Files Ed Araquel/20th Century Fox Film Corp/Courtesy Everett Collection
2019
Sacred Lies Sustainability Challenge
The second season of Blumhouse's Facebook Watch series challenges its 150-person cast and crew to switch all vehicles to eco-fuel and electric, replace traditional lighting with LEDs, enact a reusable water bottle mandate and recycle standing sets into multiple different forms. The set also goes paperless with digital-only script and call sheets, saving 176,000 pieces of paper, and composts 10 tons of garbage.
2020
Jurassic World: Dominion Goes Paper-Free
The Universal feature, which was among the first major films to resume shooting after the spring 2020 shutdown due to the pandemic, went paper-free for call and time sheets, while the catering department eliminated beef dishes.
Raised by Wolves Avoids Plastic Bottles
The HBO Max series utilizes a mobile drinking-water trailer created by Bluewater Group to avoid the use of more than 100,000 plastic water bottles on set. The trailers can be attached to any water source — potable or non — and the filtration system will generate up to 1,850 gallons of cold, pure water every day.
JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
100,000 plastic water bottles on set. The trailers can be attached to any water source — potable or non — and the filtration system will generate up to 1,850 gallons of cold, pure water every day.
How Hollywood
Some of Hollywood’s leading voices on the climate crisis — as well as members of the Environmental Media Association’s board — share their picks for the most eye-opening movies, TV shows, documentaries (and podcasts) that have tackled environmental themes through storytelling.
Climate Change
is exploring
onscreen
"The hosts offer in-depth interviews with experts in a very conversational, no-BS way. And the name says it all: We need optimism; we also need to be outraged."
Drew Scott
Property Brothers
At Home podcast
Linda Scott
Outrage and Optimism
1/2
2/2
"If there’s anything that will break your heart open and then fill it with a fire to fight, it’s the journeys these kids take as they go up against the U.S. government to protect their future."
Ray Halbritter
CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises & Owner, Standing Arrow Productions
James Cameron’s AVATAR
"In the scope of contemporary history, few have done more than filmmaker James Cameron to connect the public emotionally to the intertwining relationship between environmental stewardship and Indigenous peoples’ rights. Both through his groundbreaking and record-setting film Avatar (and now the upcoming sequels) and his ongoing international activism, he has become an important chronicler of the fight for environmental human rights and for the ecological future of this planet. Upon first viewing Avatar over a decade ago, I was struck by our story — the story of Native and Indigenous people worldwide — being told so powerfully. … Native people were the first 'environmentalists' in the United States, embracing our role as stewards of Mother Earth as our most important life’s mission. Seeing that core belief serve as the central metaphor for a cinematic achievement as momentous as Avatar and watching the global response to the film and its message made clear to me the true power of film."
YOUTH v GOV
Maya Penn
Environmental Activist, Animator
Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai – PBS
"Wangari Maathai was a trailblazing powerhouse, Kenyan environmental and social activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her story, work, and fight for the protection of nature and women’s rights is showcased in this powerful documentary."
Carla Shamberg
Producer (Erin Brockovich, Extraordinary Measures)
Meltdown: Three Mile Island
"Meltdown: Three Mile Island might be pertinent because Joe Biden just gave the nuclear power industry $4 billion. Now, because there are all these oil supply problems with Russia, people are looking at nuclear again. But the problem with nuclear energy is nuclear power plants are run by people and people make mistakes. People can be corrupt. So it actually is sort of pertinent when it comes to sustainability because they’re looking at it as a form of sustainable energy. But it’s a very dangerous form of sustainable energy."
Frances Fisher
actor/activist
"Don’t Look Up hits the nail on the head in a cleverly disguised tale about the Climate Emergency, spelling out the fact that even when faced with scientific evidence, some members of the human species live in such denial that they take everyone else down with them."
Don’t Look Up
Jennifer Nickerson
SVP Corporate Citizenship, City National Bank
"In the face of catastrophic mismanagement of the planet, everyone has a part to play and everyone can make a difference."
Wall-E
Abbie Richards
Co-Founder, EcoTok
Okja
"This film is beautiful and the story is wonderful to watch unfold. However, it also delightfully satirizes the belief that technology alone can remedy environmental problems that are intrinsically tied to our systems of exploitation. It takes the idea behind feeding industrial agricultural cows a special diet to reduce their methane emissions to an extreme that allows us to examine that framework. Even if our current model of animal agribusiness had no environmental impact, wouldn't the model still be immoral? The film encourages us to ask, 'Should we kill?' rather than, 'How should we kill with minimum environmental impact?' As we focus on transitioning to a greener world, we should be examining all of our systems this critically."
Philippe and Ashlan Cousteau
Philippe, Ocean Explorer, Filmmaker, Founder of EarthEcho International; Ashlan, Ocean Explorer and Co-Founder of SeaWeed Naturals
2/3
The Day After Tomorrow
"Because it opened the world's eyes in an entertaining way to the threat of climate change."
1/3
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
"We are biased, but it was the first show to expose theorld to the wonders of the ocean so it belongs on any list like this."
David Attenborough's Life on Our Planet
"From the legend himself, all his work is great but this was really conservation focused."
3/3
As the world turns its gaze to sustainable brands and reusable materials, celebrities are hopping on board. Whether it be the item or the packaging, options for making products more environmentally conscious are on the rise. Here are five innovative celebrity-backed and eco-friendly companies.
Stars from Jay-Z and Leonardo DiCaprio to Gwyneth Paltrow are betting on these innovative businesses looking to reduce plastic use, keep oceans clean and save forests.
Click a product to learn more
Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher back Cruz Foam, which aims to make the packaging industry more eco-friendly. It's a simple concept, aiming to exchange harmful Styrofoam for a more sustainable option. But formulating a workable substitute meant searching the planet for a suitable material. Cruz Foam ended up working with chitin, a naturally occurring compound largely found in crustacean shells and produced in abundance by the seafood industry, as shrimp and crab shells are often discarded. And because it's a naturally occurring material, it decomposes quickly and safely. The end product is a compostable packaging material that degrades in dirt in 60 days or less, at an average rate of 98 percent of material. So far, Cruz Foam has launched a pilot program with Whirlpool on its packaging and is in talk with producers of everything from food and drinks to TVs.
Cruz Foam
Find out more
Pela
Every year, millions of plastic phone cases get discarded, some of which end up in oceans and waterways. Canada-based Pela is working to diminish that impact with its compostable phone covers, which are made from flax straw and fit iPhone and Android models (most styles $59.95-$69.95). When it has outlived its usefulness, the case should be discarded in a compost bin rather than sending it away to a landfill. In 2019, Pela closed a $5 million investment round led by Marcy Venture Partners, co-founded by Jay-Z.
Rare Beauty
Selena Gomez's makeup brand takes on some of the many imperfections in the skincare industry, starting with the 100 percent-recyclable packaging that includes eco-friendly, corn-based foam material that composts naturally. Launched in 2020, Rare Beauty separates itself, though, with cruelty-free vegan products. The PETA-certified brand doesn't use any animal testing, and none of its compounds are derived from animal products.
Bionic Yarn
You might have seen some of Pharrell Williams' eco-friendly collabs around, notably the organic Adidas Humanrace sportswear collection (which supports sustainable cotton farming). The singer-producer is also an investor in Bionic Yarn, a company that uses discarded fabrics and ocean plastic to make fabrics for use in footwear, apparel, upholstery and luggage. From classic denim to fall-essential plaid, the company takes very basic materials and turns them into high-quality polymers, ready for the clothing supply chain. To date, Bionic Yarn has been used in products from Moncler, Timberland and Cole Haan, among others.
Cloud Paper
Investors in Cloud Paper — a company that makes toilet paper and paper towels from fast-growing bamboo, a sustainable alternative to trees —include Robert Downey Jr. (through his FootPrint Coalition Ventures fund), Kutcher, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ciara and her NFL star husband Russell Wilson, and manager Guy Oseary. The subscription-based company (from $30.99 for 24 rolls of TP every two months) uses zero plastic in its packaging and partners with CarbonFund to pay for twice the amount of carbon offsets needed to cover distribution and shipping. Cloud Paper asserts that "if everybody in the U.S.A. switched to bamboo toilet paper and paper towels, we would save 526 million trees a year."
By Thomas Hindle
The Albert Stamp of Approval
The mononym seeks to inspire sustainability in storytelling and reduce the carbon output of British productions by certifying qualifying film and TV projects, as well as awards ceremonies, with their logo.
By Alex Ritman
Over the last decade, a singular name has been showing up with increasing regularity in the credits of British TV productions and even a few films. Across shows such as Bridgerton, Sex Education, His Dark Materials and The Serpent, and features including Sam Mendes’ 1917, the name “Albert” has been appearing at the tail end of the closing credits, usually next to the image of a footprint. Albert, it turns out, is actually a sustainable production certifier and the name of BAFTA’s environmentally focused organization, one that has been trying to reduce the excessive waste and carbon output of the film and TV industries while promoting discussions onscreen.
First launched in 2011 as a project at the BBC, Albert began as a “very basic carbon calculator” for TV shows, according to Albert director Carys Taylor, that the network — as part of its public service remit — then shared with the industry. It was soon adopted by BAFTA, which took Albert under its wings and expanded its offerings. The carbon calculator — the first iteration of which Taylor likens to “an Excel spreadsheet” — has been updated several times, now covering all aspects of production and not just the high-impact areas of travel and energy consumption. “You have to measure to understand what you can reduce,” she notes. All U.K. productions from Netflix, Sky, the BBC and ITV now register their carbon footprints via this calculator, having individually mandated the requirement themselves over the last few years.
“You have to measure to understand what you can reduce.”
Carys Taylor
Roughly nine years ago, Albert added its certification process, which offers three different star ratings based on how a production meets certain sustainability criteria, including use of renewables and efforts to cut back on domestic flights. “And if you’ve done all the things that you said you were going to do, at the end of production, we’ll provide you with the end-credit logo to certify your show,” says Taylor, who notes Albert asks for evidence from production managers and has future plans for third-party auditors to visit sets to get proof first-hand. In 2020, the BAFTA Film Awards became the first BAFTA ceremony to be carbon neutral and Albert-certified, something it achieved by having a 100 percent recyclable red carpet, sustainably sourced produce in the dinner and providing guests tools to offset their own travel. Other initiatives include a green rider, an actor’s contract — akin to the diversity rider — that can push for requests such as plant-based catering, low-energy lighting or the production agreeing to a “zero to landfill” policy, plus a Creative Offset scheme for productions to offset emissions that can’t be reduced. There’s also a new studio sustainability standard — launched together with engineering giant Arup — to help facilities measure and reduce their environmental impact. And all of these tools are offered globally.
Albert has grown from just two staffers over the first half of its lifetime to now around 15, including consultants, Taylor estimates. And there’s good reason for the surge. In September 2020, together with the British Film Institute, Albert published the Screen New Deal report, which examined everything from the use of plastic bottles on set to fuel consumption. It found that the average hour of TV generated 9.2 tons of carbon emission, while the average tentpole film generated 2,840 tons (a figure Albert equates to 11 one-way trips to the moon). Transport — particularly air travel — accounted for almost 50 percent of the total emissions.
“This pledge is not about more news on climate change, and it's not about more documentaries.”
While the current record-high boom in film and TV production in the U.K. could be seen as having an environmental impact, Taylor sees it as an opportunity, asserting that there’s now a “vast chunk of the economy” being spent on entertainment that could “shift supply chains from dirty goods and services to clean ones.” She also says the industry now has a “huge amount of signaling power to markets” and could, for example, push for an electric car to pick up talent where there wasn’t one before. And although Taylor acknowledges that inflating costs — particularly in the U.K. — may cause producers to squeeze out the use of green alternatives they see as more expensive, she claims that, in many cases, sustainability methods actually “save money.” Among the examples are a production that saved more than $22,000 merely by doing a read-through online rather than transporting people to one location.
Why “Albert”?
Some in the industry believe that the name (which is officially spelled with a lowercase “a”) comes from Albert Square, which is the central location in the long-running BBC soap and Albert-certified Eastenders. But the truth is ever-so-slightly more mundane. When it was first being created at the BBC, claims communications manager Genevieve Margrett, there was another similar project being developed called Victoria, “and I guess they needed pet names, as ‘carbon calc project’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it!”
t
Carbon emission
0
1.2
2.4
3.6
4.5
6.0
7.2
9.2
average hour of TV
355
710
1,065
1,420
1,775
2,130
average tentpole film
But while its production certification program is what Albert is best known for, a growing element of its work now concerns effecting change in front of the camera. At the Cop23 United Nations climate change conference in 2021, it introduced the Climate Content Pledge, in which the signatories — including all major U.K. networks — committed themselves to using their content to inform audiences about the consequences of climate change and to inspire sustainability. "This pledge is not about more news on climate change, and it's not about more documentaries,” says Taylor. “It's about making sure that any content has that climate lens on it, and that we're weaving narratives in that enable audiences to engage with this.” Taylor notes that Albert’s research has shown that onscreen conversations about the subject have been more heavily focused on recycling compared to energy or transport, the latter of which have a far higher impact. (In its latest Subtitles Report, which surveyed a year’s worth of subtitling data across all the main U.K. networks, it found 43,175 words relating to disposal when discussing “climate-related actions,” as opposed to 10,991 relating to transport).
New Screenwriting Playbook Aims to Increase Portrayals of Climate Change in Hollywood
Good Energy founder Anna Jane Joyner hopes the digital writers' guide — which includes Hollywood voices like Rosario Dawson, Adam McKay and Mark Ruffalo — gets the industry talking more about environmental issues in TV and film.
By Evan Nicole Brown
Three years ago, Anna Jane Joyner, founder and director of nonprofit story consultancy Good Energy, felt a call to take action. A longtime climate communications expert and self-described lover of television and film, Joyner was keeping an eye on how the crisis was being discussed in pop culture when she realized that, although scientists agree we are firmly in the age of climate change, the topic was largely absent in narrative television and film scripts. "There's very little climate change appearing in scripted television and film," Joyner tells The Hollywood Reporter. This observation evolved into a full-on personal campaign to interview over 100 film and TV writers and producers about the gulf between the reality of climate change and its presence in scripts set in present-day. "What are the hurdles? What are the ways that we can better support writers to do this? What kind of resources would be most useful? That evolved into Good Energy and what the playbook is now.”
'Good Energy: A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change' is an open source digital resource, available for any screenwriter or member of the public to access. At the helm of the project was a core team of co-writers — Joyner, TV scribe Carmiel Banasky and journalist Scott Shigeoka. "If we are going to continue to tell authentic, inspiring, 'I can relate to that' stories, we need to incorporate the reality of the climate crisis through every stage of development, production, post, marketing and distribution," said Rosario Dawson, who is among the notable celebrity voices featured in the playbook, in a press release announcing the initiative. The Good Energy team collaborated with USC’s Media Impact Lab at the Norman Lear Center to get relevant data; together, they conducted a study that concluded that only 2.8 percent (1,046) of 37,453 analyzed scripts from 2016-20 included keywords like "climate crisis," "climate emergency," "global warming," "sea level rise," "solar panels," and various terminology that speaks to the link between fossil fuels and the climate.
“Climate change is terrifying and sad and absurd.”
“Our goal is that by 2025, scripts written in this universe and this time period, or in the next 100 years, have some indication that climate change exists in the real world," Joyner says. "So it doesn't have to be a full-on story, but basically that the world of art — the shows that we love — is reflective of the actual world we're living in.” Beyond offering information on climate psychology, science and suggestions on how to bring real-life climate situations onscreen, the playbook also features a chorus of Hollywood voices in support of greater climate representation in scripted storylines across all genres, including Dawson, Zazie Beetz, Scott Z. Burns, Lyn and Norman Lear, Adam McKay, Mark Ruffalo, David Rysdahl and Sarah Treem.
“Climate change is the biggest story in 66 million years. After reading the 2018 IPCC Report, I couldn’t sleep for two nights. I had the sickening realization that we have to take care of this, that it is happening right now, not in 80 years,” director Adam McKay said in a statement. “Climate change is terrifying and sad and absurd. And it's okay to have all these complicated feelings. That’s where my drive came from to make Don’t Look Up. We’ve seen how the film has created more conversation and protests to demand that governments look up. Nonetheless, that is just one movie and we have so much more to do."
Added Mark Ruffalo, "I hope all creators will see themselves in shaping this future and want to be a part of this new wave of storytelling; I hope all producers will want to support such an array of storytellers for the future we want.” Though there's still work to do, Joyner says concern about, and awareness of, climate change has accelerated due to popular media like Don’t Look Up, First Reformed, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Succession, The Affair and Madam Secretary, on which Joyner consulted for a three-episode arc. "It's important when you are already attached to a show and to characters that it comes up naturally and authentically in conversation — and even in passing — because it normalizes it for the audience,” she says. "I think when you can see a character is thinking about it, it's very affirming to the audience — 'This character that I love and I'm connected to is also worried about this.' "
Good Energy worked with a range of partners to bring the digital playbook to life: Bloomberg Philanthropies, CAA Foundation, Sierra Club, Walton Family Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, The Center for Cultural Power and 1 Earth Fund. “I think the reason that humans started telling stories was to process different, difficult problems with being human," Joyner muses. "And we have this huge existential crisis that we're not processing in our stories. I think that there's a really big desire from storytellers and from audiences to turn toward story to help navigate what it means to be human in this new era where climate change is very real and happening.”
All images Courtesy of Good Energy
-director Adam McKay
Scott Z. Burns on Creating Compelling Environmental Storytelling and Pushing Hollywood to Do More
The writer-director spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about his upcoming climate change series ‘Extrapolations’ and his efforts to lead the way in reducing the impact of on-set production.
By Sharon Swart
“Since 'An Inconvenient Truth' there’s been more awareness around waste on sets.”
Scott Z. Burns
Scott Z. Burns has been answering a lot of questions about his recently prescient Contagion, the screenplay he wrote about a decade before the COVID-19 outbreak. The writer-producer-director now has more cautionary tales on tap for the world with the Apple series Extrapolations, about the near-future impacts of climate change, due to hit the streamer this fall. Burns has been involved and interested in environmental causes throughout his life. After a career in advertising (working on campaigns including Got Milk?), he moved to California in the mid-1990s to work in film and continued to lean green. Burns joined the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Leadership Council, where he met activist/producer Laurie David. She invited him to one of Al Gore’s climate change presentations, which led to Burns producing the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim.
Burns is committed to applying sustainable practices, whether he serves as a producer, writer or director on a project. He notes that frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh is similarly minded when it comes to reducing waste on set. Burns wrote the scripts for Soderbergh's Contagion, The Informant!, Side Effects and The Laundromat. His other writing credits include 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, 2006’s Pu-239 and 2019’s The Report (the latter two he also directed), and he produced 2017's An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. His upcoming project, Fake!, about the OneCoin crypto scam, starring Kate Winslet, will be a green set. “Fake! is really about our collective ‘love for stuff,’ and that also has an environmental impact,” he says. In between mixing sessions for Extrapolations in New York, Burns shared more with The Hollywood Reporter about creating compelling climate change stories and how far Hollywood still has to go in reducing its carbon footprint.
I had a relationship with Laurie David through NRDC, and [producer] Lawrence Bender through my work in advertising and his company A Band Apart. The three of us coalesced around this project. Laurie, Lawrence and I approached Vice President Al Gore about making [his lecture] into film. We said to him, "A slide show could reach a couple hundred people a night. But, if we did a film, it could reach millions of people." Al was initially reluctant to turn it into a film — it had only been a few years since the election debacle. We went to Participant and presented our ideas to [founder] Jeff Skoll and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at that time. Davis and I had a discussion about merging Al’s growing awareness about the drivers of climate change and his journey through American politics. The challenge was, how to make a science lecture more emotional. Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz was an inspiration — that storytelling structure informed where Davis took An Inconvenient Truth. We were able to get some traction from Jeff and Participant, and the late, amazing Diane Weyermann. I remain grateful to Al and Jeff and everyone else for including me.
Take us back to how you became involved in An Inconvenient Truth?
I guess there’s two parts to this: How Hollywood operates as well as what stories Hollywood chooses to tell. Since An Inconvenient Truth, I find there to be more awareness on film sets, more people thinking about reducing waste. And the studios seem to have increased awareness around what a carbon footprint is. That being said, we are still profligate when it comes to transportation and other aspects of filmmaking. We are largely unaware of what can be done to improve our process. And the desire to get things done cheaply often results in making choices that are bad for the planet. As for stories themselves, there were many docs that followed An Inconvenient Truth that told important stories — Chasing Ice, Before the Flood, Years of Living Dangerously and many others. But once a studio or a streamer has made one of these, then the box is ticked and they move on. So, it is natural that it feels like interest is fading, but these are stories we need to keep telling. Storytelling remains our best tool for creating change in society. More and more scripted TV series seem to be willing to mention climate in an episode, but it’s going to take more than a casual mention once a season.
An Inconvenient Truth put a spotlight on the climate crisis, and it seemed to move many, including those in Hollywood, to take action. Now it’s about 16 years later, and it feels like we’re still just ramping up.
The series involves stories exploring climate change in the next 50 years. I don’t think the audience gives you a pass because you are telling a climate story. We set out to tell intriguing stories that would make people feel as much as think — comedies, thrillers, love stories, those are all going to exist in the future, but how will they be affected by a changing climate? People might want to call us sci-fi, but as my collaborator [executive producer] Dorothy Fortenberry is fond of saying, it’s the shows that ignore the reality of the climate crisis that are the real fantasies. We wanted to look at the next 50 years because we didn’t want people to be able to distance themselves from our stories. One question I’m interested in is: What is an individual’s event horizon? If a film tells you something bad might happen in 100 years, that might not be very compelling to you. If a film tells you something bad might happen by this Friday, that’s different. For someone who’s focused on putting food on the table, your event horizon might be dinner time. How does climate change intersect with their life? It isn’t a science lecture anymore — it’s a race against time. It’s our empathy against our greed.
What’s your approach with Extrapolations?
It is incredibly gratifying that people like Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Harington, Forest Whitaker, Marion Cotillard and Daveed Diggs show up to help tell these stories. Yara Shahidi, Gemma Chan, Sienna Miller, Tahar Rahim, David Schwimmer, Diane Lane — people would come and do amazing work for a few weeks and then go back to their other projects. People who usually don’t do TV. Meryl was the first person I reached out to. She had her own passion for the topic, and her participation really helped get other people to engage. That’s true on both sides of the camera — Greg Jacobs, whom I met through Steven Soderbergh, was an amazing producing partner for me. Nicole Holofcener directed an episode for us and so did Ellen Kuras.
“One question I’m interested in is: What is someone’s event horizon?”
It’s eight episodes, but it’s not really a true anthology show. A few characters have ongoing storylines, and some are just there for one episode. But they are meant to be seen in chronological order. We cover 50 years of our current century, because I think the next 50 years will determine the outcome of this crisis. So many of these climate issues are threshold issues. If we don’t get to net zero [greenhouse gas emissions] soon, the knock-on effects of that are catastrophic. We are involved in a real battle with ourselves and our appetites. Rajiv Joseph wrote an episode and so did another playwright, Bess Wohl. The novelist Dave Eggers worked with me on one episode and Ron Currie Jr. worked with me on another. And Dorothy Fortenberry worked with me in laying out the entire arc of the season.
What’s the structure, and how are you telling these stories?
What was a fascinating takeaway from consulting scientists and experts for Extrapolations?
Our advisors included Bill McKibben, Dr. Ayana Johnson, Denis Hayes and Elizabeth Kolbert, among others. We call the show Extrapolations because we looked at the science and tried to extrapolate from it what it suggests about our lives on this planet going forward. Contagion was about learning the history of pandemics — all the scientists told me there would be more novel viruses and made it clear that there would be another pandemic. The question was always when, not if. This was a different creative exercise. It involved looking at what we know so far about humanity’s impact on the climate and thinking through the possibilities — the knock-on effects of sea level rise or extreme heat or fires. We tried to connect the dots for people. Climate change is going to affect every area of our life: social services, investment, food, fashion, health — even the World Cup this year has been adjusted to deal with the heat. The times that we are living in are called the "Anthropocene" because humans are causing the changes. As we like to say: Everybody on Earth is in our show.
We worked with Zena Harris at the Green Spark Group. We learned a lot from them. Zena met with all the department heads. We did really well at some things. We made a huge dent in the normal amount of waste on set. For meals, we had compostable plates, knives and forks. We gave people reusable water bottles and tried to eliminate plastic bottles on set. Every day we would send out a climate story to try to educate people on the show. Getting good info to people was massive. Some things were easy to implement, but the big thing is fuel — that’s really hard. People need to take airplanes to work. Marion [Cotillard] comes from France to participate in the show. And due to COVID protocols, we had to keep people separated — so you need seven vans versus one. We all want to do what’s best for the show and the storytelling, but what’s best for the planet? Even with the best intentions, we scored a little better than the average TV show. We decreased our carbon footprint a little bit, from what Zena told us. Transportation is the main driver of climate change all around the world. We have to start to look at that. This idea of kicking the can down the road isn’t OK anymore. We’ve run out of road. Some responsibility is on the production, but it’s something the studios and streamers also need to address. We are going to need to spend a bit more money. For example, we need a battery-driven generator, not one that runs on fuel. Those decisions aren’t just performative, they’re what we need to do.
Extrapolations was also a green set. How did that go?
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Courtesy of Georgina Cates
Tell us about your cast and collaborators on the show.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES
COURTESY OF GEORGINA CATES
Green Building: A Sustainable Backyard Retreat for a TV Writer
This scribe's office and music studio, designed by CarbonShack, uses reclaimed redwood and heat-exchange technology for a reduced carbon footprint: "We love the way it blends with the landscape."
By Abigail Stone
“Sustainable design can be beautiful and affordable,” says Steve Pallrand, founder and principal designer of the sustainable design-build firm Carbonshack, citing two of the biggest misconceptions around green building. “It should function for your lifestyle while reflecting your values.” Just witness the one-bedroom additional dwelling unit he created in late 2020 for a television writer and a musician in Highland Park who were hoping to turn the dilapidated old barn at the rear of their property into a place they could use as a work-from-home office, a music studio and to host friends, family and their parents. Pallrand fabricated a rustic space that fits seamlessly into the low-key vibe of the neighborhood. Its redwood siding, raised footprint and spare lines evoke the serenity of a log cabin in the woods, while its subtle Japanese influence nods to the Craftsman-style main home. “We love the way it blends with the landscape,” says one of the owners, who prefers to remain anonymous to maintain privacy.
“It should function for your lifestyle while reflecting your values.”
Beneath its lean and deceptively straightforward design lies a mean, green, carbon-fighting machine. “The trick is to bring the conversation of sustainability and lowering the carbon footprint into the design process from the very beginning,” says Pallrand. “It’s a ground-up approach that impacts the systems you choose and the design choices you make.” At this property, form follows function, starting with the exterior, constructed by repurposing old-growth redwood that comprised the original structure “The only place you can find that quality wood is in national parks, so reusing it is one of the greenest things you can do,” Pallrand points out. Some choices, such as LED lights — as well as the solar panels that cover the flat roof (tilted south to maximize the sun) — are typical eco-conscious elements. Others have yet to make their way into the mainstream. A Rheem heat-pump hot water heater, for instance, uses heat-exchange technology instead of gas via pumps which “work like reverse air conditioners,” explains Pallrand, to keep the interior temperate year-round. “While the initial outlay can be expensive, in the long run they’re cost-effective,” continues Pallrand. “You’re weighing the embodied carbon cost of constructing a home against its long-term operational footprint,” though admittedly, building green does not automatically mean saving green.
“You’re weighing the embodied carbon cost of constructing a home against its long-term operational footprint.”
“The most surprising thing I learned is that reusing old things can be more expensive than using new materials,” the homeowner shares, “but to us, it was worth it to reduce the environmental impact of building. The upside is that, between the solar panels and the insulation provided by the dual pane windows, we’re saving a ton of money.” And helping create a model for a better way in the construction industry, which accounts for 40 percent of worldwide carbon emissions.
The bathroom’s fittings include a one-gallon flush toilet and a low-flow rain shower head. “Low-water appliances have come a long way since they were first introduced,” says Pallrand. He also suggests faucets that turn on and off via motion sensors (so that they automatically turn off when not in active use). “Although it would drive you crazy in the kitchen, in the bathroom you quickly learn where the sweet spot is."
“For the most part, tile has to be new,” says Pallrand who kept it local by sourcing it from Mission Tile West, meaning less impact on the environment due to transport. “Their tile is fired in California — in South Pasadena, actually — in electric kilns,” Pallrand notes. “So, you’ve bought local, you’re employing local people, and you’re producing things under California’s strict air-quality control laws.”
The natural-edge tables in the kitchen and dining area were milled from the trunk of a tree that needed to come down on the owners' property. And the cabinetry and some of the furniture was milled from Douglas fir repurposed from the old barn’s board-and-batten cladding.
An induction cooktop, which uses electric currents to directly heat pots and pans through magnetic induction, offers the same control and responsiveness as gas. Cast iron, enameled cast iron and most types of stainless-steel cookware are induction-compatible. “The energy goes to heat the food, not the room, so you probably sweat less,” says Pallrand. “The mistake people make is worrying they’re going back to the old electric stove their grandmother had.” To complete the cooking station, he added a combination microwave and induction oven with a top Energy Star rating.
The ADU’s large windows face south, taking advantage of the sun’s warmth, while the overhang provides shade and prevents the interior from getting too hot.
Roof sheathing enjoys a second life as the new home’s flooring. “When we take a building down, we try to use as much of it as possible,” Pallrand points out. Clerestory windows channel northern light during the day, their height addresses privacy concerns and deftly avoids having to look out at the neighbor’s garage.
Steve Pallrand, founder of sustainable design-build firm Carbonshack
All images courtesy of Cris Nolasco
The Challenge of Change
I’m a mother and a grandmother, and keeping my family safe has always been a priority of my climate work. Health and safety are great entry points into environmentalism —when I took over this organization 22 years ago, I didn’t know anything about the environment. I was just struck by the experience of being a parent and thinking, "There’s so much information out there that needs to be conveyed, and it needs to be conveyed in a way that’s relatable." I still very much believe in that. You can start with the food that you’re bringing into your home — read the labels, make sure there aren’t words that you don’t understand, because chances are they’re going to be chemicals or additives — and the same goes for cleaning products. Next, support local and organic farms. The creation of artificial fertilizers consumes 3-5 percent of all global natural gas, whereas organic farming can actually store more carbon than traditional farming. We’ve all been through a pandemic and health became paramount, so these are ways to offset emissions and keep your family healthy.
Five Ways to Make a Difference in the Climate Crisis — At Home or in Hollywood
After 22 years leading the Environmental Media Organization, which advocates for the planet’s needs through storytelling and entertainment, CEO Debbie Levin is on the forefront of the latest sustainability best practices. Here, she offers five actions anyone can take today (at home or at work) that will help in the crucial fight against climate change.
By Debbie Levin
Stock Up on Organic
It seems like electric cars are everywhere — we’re constantly bombarded with commercials — but they only make up 4 percent of cars sold. That’s crazy. We helped Toyota launch the Prius in 2001, and I remember going around making everyone on our board get one. Honestly, I used a little Jewish guilt, telling people they shouldn’t buy these huge gas guzzlers. All the agencies in L.A. started doing it too, and we sent actors to awards shows in Priuses and made sure the press photographed them getting out of the cars. I personally don’t understand buying a gas car at this point, because you could buy an electric or a hybrid or a fuel cell car for similar price points, and you don’t have to buy gas as often or ever. The industry has also democratized, and electric and hybrid vehicles are much more affordable now. You don’t have to buy a Tesla to go electric. It’s a statement that so many people could make — you get to drive around feeling proud of what you’re doing.
Get an Electric Car
“You don’t have to buy a Tesla to go electric.”
According to Earth.org, we throw out 92 million tons of clothes-related waste a year. That’s staggering. At EMA, we’re trying to support the idea that you don’t have to buy something new for everything. We’re starting to see celebrities going to awards shows in vintage or re-worn items. Jane Fonda said a few years ago that she didn’t need to buy anything new ever again. Now, not everybody has Jane Fonda’s closet, but the idea is to be more thoughtful and not purchase something you’re only going to wear for a few months. We have to think about longevity. There’s also a lot of fashion being made sustainably, at brands like Stella McCartney or ReDone, for those who can afford a higher price point, and so many resale companies for those who need affordability. Billie Eilish wore a sustainably made gown to the Met Gala this year, and we’re counting on her generation for that influence. Gen Z is so important to this movement because they’re asking all the right questions and they authentically care about companies’ values and ethics.
Skip Fast Fashion
We launched our EMA Green Seal in 2003 because we wanted to be able to work behind the scenes with productions to teach people how to be more sustainable. Studios have realized that it doesn’t actually raise production costs; they can save energy consumption and money. The technology has advanced in a way that you don’t have to sacrifice quality to be green. One really good place to start is the trailers — we’ve been working with Star Waggons for years, and they’ve built solar-powered trailers with sustainable materials — and making sure there are few to no private flights on a production. Actors understand that commercial first class is really nice; they want to be part of the solution.
Green Your Set
We also need to evaluate craft services. People not only want to eat more whole foods, they want things that are organically made. There should be fewer meat products, there should be real forks and knives available, or at least compostable versions. We need to keep plastic water bottles off sets. I remember when Scandal was filming, I went to set and we decided to build a hydration station off the side of one of the trailers so that everyone could bring their own bottles and get fresh, filtered water. We’ve worked to make sure that Sundance, for example, is a zero water bottle festival. These are all ways to make a statement to the world about who you are as a production or a company. For example, Sony’s ensemble comedy Think Like a Man used 100 percent energy-efficient LED lighting on set, and 20th Century Studios' adventure feature Call of the Wild used only organic food products and biodegradable cutlery at craft services — and was able to compost 30,753 pounds of utensils.
In a weird way, the pandemic introduced some logic into our lives that was missing. Before COVID, people would fly across the country for a single meeting. I think we all realized that there is value in doing things virtually, and you can still meet and talk in an intimate way and feel like you’re communicating. I know a lot of agencies and companies are pushing to be back in the office a few days per week, but I personally closed our offices and moved our stuff into storage (call me if you know someone who needs office furniture). We all work independently and see each other for events and get-togethers. Personally, I never want to return to an office. We’re saving unbelievable amounts of emissions, you’re saving energy and resources. You’re not purchasing stuff just to keep an office running. Remote work is virtually paper-free, you’re not throwing stuff out constantly. (According to the EPA, the U.S. produced 292 million tons of trash in 2018, the latest year for which there's data.) We can be really thoughtful about when we need to be in person and for what. At the beginning I was worried people would be lonely, but we build our community in different ways now.
Work Remotely
YES, I DID SAY THAT
92 million tons
of clothes-related waste is thrown out each year
Since taking over in 2000 as CEO of the Environmental Media Association, Debbie Levin has harnessed the power of the media and entertainment communities to pioneer a high-impact model of social activism, utilizing storytelling and message development to drive action and solutions. She has also expanded the organization to serve as a leading tool to connect industries, brands, influencers and entrepreneurs dedicated to promoting environmental progress and innovations.
Americans waste more than
$218 billion
of food every year
One pair of jeans requires
7,500 gallons
of water to produce
A one-way flight between NYC and L.A. produces about
1,416 pounds
of emissions per passenger, which equates to 3.9 months of one person's average carbon footprint
The average emissions that result from producing a single episode of a one-hour drama are the equivalent of driving a car around the world
7 times
2001 Toyota Prius/Courtesy of Toyota
Debbie Levin with Malin Akerman and Lance Bass, members of the EMA board/Courtesy of EMA
“Our mission is to be storytellers for environmental issues," says EMA CEO Debbie Levin
A look at who’s saying what about the climate crisis.
Compiled by Sydney Odman
“I think we all need to try and do more. Even small efforts in our everyday lives can make an impact on the betterment of the planet.”
Selena Gomez
The actress, in a video on Instagram, encouraging people to make changes to help protect the Earth.
Click to see what everyone's saying
“When it comes to climate change, time really is running out.”
Barack Obama
The former president, on Twitter, urging people to follow through on their commitments to make a difference.
“Long before we kill Earth, Earth will kill us. It’s already underway.”
Michael Moore
The documentarian, in a post on his website, warning that global crises such as climate change and the coronavirus pandemic are signs of the planet's response to human neglect.
“Living more sustainably doesn't have to be difficult.”
Leonardo DiCaprio
The actor and longtime climate change activist, on Twitter, encouraging followers to join the United Nations Act Now campaign to raise awareness about sustainability.
“Climate disasters, which are growing in frequency and intensity, do not impact all communities equally, with communities of color and island nations facing the brunt of climate change.”
Rihanna
The musician, in a statement to Complex, after her Clara Lionel Foundation pledged to donate $15 million to organizations that are fighting for climate justice in the United States and the Caribbean.
“I don’t know the last time I was in a store to buy clothes.”
Billie Eilish
The "Happier Than Ever" singer, to Vogue, on her preference for thrifting as a more sustainable shopping option. The Oscar winner’s recent Met Gala look, by Gucci, was entirely made from upcycled materials.
The climate crisis is playing out across big and small screens with increasing frequency, the latest example in a long tradition of Hollywood turning global calamity into often lucrative entertainment.
By Robyn Bahr
It’s more commonplace than ever to witness the climate crisis — either explicitly or metaphorically — play out on our screens. On HBO’s Game of Thrones, the icy White Walkers threaten to unleash wintry hell on Westeros while nobles play at war and ignore the oncoming calamity. In the Avengers films, the alien supervillain Thanos annihilates billions of people across the universe to restore ecological balance after his own home world is wiped out due to overpopulation. Even the climax of the The Batman steeps us in a dark vision of a future in which governmental corruption and sociopolitical division literally lead to drowned cities.
After all, if we weren’t intrinsically thrilled by the thought of our collective end of days, then it wouldn’t be routine, thanks to the dominance of CGI, to see whole cities felled and emptied, freak storms and massive tsunamis blasting away civilizations, and untold horrors escaping from melting tundras. And, of course, if our fictionalized homeland weren’t always crumbling away thanks to some gargantuan tragedy, then why would we bother watching heroic astronauts explore nearby galaxies for possible replacement worlds?
Images of Earth’s demise are
terrifying,
admittedly, exciting.
galvanizing and,
Younger generations that grew up with global warming-inspired narratives can sense a cultural shift has taken place with regards to this type of storytelling: What once felt like oogey-boogey fodder for silly flicks like Waterworld and FernGully: The Last Rainforest now feels more concrete and crucial than ever as extreme weather, mass migration and rising sea levels have already started to change people's lives around the world. The film industry is finally catching up to the abject horror of it all — and for better or worse, climate urgency has suddenly become Hollywood’s latest Big Bad Wolf.
Stories of eco-cataclysm aren’t exactly new, but their prevalence in big-budget films has skyrocketed in the last 15 years as real-life scientists and world leaders continue to forecast an oncoming point-of-no-return for manmade climate change. Recent cli-fi (and adjacent) flicks such as Don't Look Up, Tenet, Snowpiercer, Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max: Fury Road, Geostorm, Interstellar and even the Marvel franchise use allegory and fantasy to show us what Earth's future could look like if we ignore the warning signs of impending doom. (Compare these films with older ones, such as Children of Men, Wall-E and Avatar, which seem to use biological disaster more as a plot MacGuffin than a true moral call-to-arms.) Heck, these storylines aren’t always even Plot A anymore — just look at 2021’s Reminiscence, a Hugh Jackman-starring neo-noir thriller that just happens to be set in a near future where extreme daytime temperatures have caused the population to become nocturnal.
But the more we rely on inflated budgets to give us a peek at what’s to come, the more I instinctively bristle at self-important disaster artists who seem to wag their finger and scold, all the while hoping to profit from my alarm. (And who probably leave an enormous carbon footprint just trying to shoot their darn movie to begin with.) Still, this is hardly the first time the entertainment industry has made a facile bogeyman from real-life global calamity. While the need to act on these issues may feel even more imperative these days because of how directors like Adam McKay and Denis Villeneuve depict planetary obliteration (and humankind’s tepid responses to these perils), I’d also caution moviegoers to remember climate change is just one of many apocalypses the entertainment industry has adopted over the last hundred years like a fashionable new accessory. Every generation believes it’s facing the end-times, and art has consistently mirrored these anxieties, ironically delivering us the very types of bread and circuses we ultimately use to avoid dealing with the tangible problems at hand.
Hollywood has a history of getting wrapped up in the eschatology du jour. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, it produced endless films on the horrors of World War II and the strange new civilization that emerged from the post-war geopolitical order. If World War I forever changed how conflict would be waged, introducing humanity to a new phase in industrialized warfare, then World War II widened this new type of systemized destruction to a massive new scale: The Great War resulted in roughly 17 million deaths and weaponized mustard gas; the Second World War resulted in about 80 million deaths and the invention of the atomic bomb.
World War II supplied filmmakers with limitless stories of dread, trauma and numbness as the population processed what had felt like the end of the world and what was, truly, the end of the world as they knew it. All-time great dramas like Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai and From Here to Eternity are among hundreds and hundreds of films produced in these two decades intended to rev up patriotism or shake people into grasping the reality of what they had experienced. Even 1954’s Japanese kaiju classic Godzilla was a direct response to the terror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, fears of Soviet Russia, American hegemony and the ever-looming threat of nuclear war led to a number of antic films imagining a bombed-out Armageddon or worse: a communist takeover of the U.S. 1962’s psychological thriller The Manchurian Candidate envisions communist sleeper agents brainwashed into infiltrating centers of power in America; Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove skewers unhinged Cold War bureaucracy; Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 Soviet sci-fi masterpiece Stalker alludes to frightful radiation zones that seemingly foretell the Chernobyl tragedy; 1980’s popular television film The Day After realistically projects the fallout of a fictional war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; 1984’s actioner Red Dawn depicts the guerilla resistance that ensues when Soviets invade the continental United States. This era was rife with apocalyptic terror and filmmakers capitalized on these fears, rousing entire generations that thought they would be the last on Earth.
While Hollywood has taken an interest in environmental catastrophe stories since Soylent Green came out in 1973, it feels like climate change (and, secondarily, the tech dystopia that seems to always accompany a cinematized split from nature) is just the next trending monster to capture our imaginations … and our wallets.
Perhaps paying for it to entertain us.
What's bleaker than the end of humanity?
Later, the 1990s and earlier 2000s channeled fears about AIDS and other pandemics into thrillers envisaging viral outbreaks, films such as Outbreak, 12 Monkeys, The Faculty, 28 Days Later and Contagion.
Dune/Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
Snowpiercer/Weinstein Co./Courtesy Everett Collection
Don't Look Up Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
Don't Look Up/Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
SNOWPIERCER/WEINSTEIN CO./COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
DON'T LOOK UP NETFLIX/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
DON'T LOOK UP/NETFLIX/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
Hollywood Flashback: Once a PunchLine, 'Waterworld' Has Earned Respect as a Prescient Warning
The 1995 Kevin Costner epic was a high-profile flop, but supporters now praise it for putting an early spotlight on climate change: “It was very ahead of its time.”
By Ryan Gajewski
Waterworld clearly didn’t make a splash in the way that Universal Pictures was hoping when it released the film in July 1995. Back in the early 1990s, following a string of successes — including Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989) and Dances With Wolves (1990), for which he won two Oscars — Kevin Costner put his movie-star capital behind Waterworld, initially conceived in the 1980s by writer Peter Rader during a meeting with legendary schlock-film producer Roger Corman. Costner and director Kevin Reynolds, who previously worked together on multiple projects including 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, signed on for the post-apocalyptic epic about a drifter (Costner) searching for dry land following the melting of the polar ice cap.
“If the tides started changing, it would flip everything around and start turning all the vessels.”
George Parra
Waterworld, which would become the most expensive movie ever made to that point, not adjusting for inflation, was filmed entirely on the ocean off the coast of Kona, Hawaii, and Mother Nature was a big reason why the shoot’s length and cost kept snowballing. “If the tides started changing, it would flip everything around and start turning all the vessels,” George Parra, first assistant director of the second unit, recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. “If there was a delay, it was a disaster, and we'd have to start all over again. There were a number of days where we didn't shoot a lot.” Although it was nominated for the best sound Oscar, the film became infamous as a critical and commercial flop. However, as the conversation surrounding climate change has increased in volume over recent years, the film has found new fans, which includes the Sierra Club heralding it for having “sounded an important, prescient alarm” about global warming.
Dr. Ellen E. Moore, professor of environmental communication at the University of Washington, Tacoma, commends the film for including a scene showing Costner setting fire to the oil reserves, offering hope for a future without reliance on fossil fuels. “The whole idea is, oil is the originator of the problems, and so we need to get rid of our dependence on oil,” she tells THR. “For its symbolism, I do think that Waterworld should be held up as a really great example of a film that is anti-overconsumption.”
“Twenty-plus years ago, very few people knew much about climate change. It was very ahead of its time.”
In 2015, Reynolds told Newsweek that ecological issues have long been a personal focus and that the devastation of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill was on his mind during production. Adds Parra, “Twenty-plus years ago, very few people knew much about climate change. It was very ahead of its time.”
Ben Glass/Universal Pictures/ Courtesy Everett Collection
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK: THE DEEP HOLLYWOOD ROOTS OF THE CLI-FI WAVE
Netfilx's ‘Our Great National Parks’: TV Review
Generally, the presidency of the United States has been a professional pinnacle achieved by venerable men with no expectation that a post-presidential career would ever be necessary. There are occasional exceptions. William Howard Taft, too often reduced to an apocryphal story of getting stuck in the White House bathtub, served as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Jimmy Carter, still continuing his 41-year "retirement," has written dozens of books, won a Nobel Peace Prize and contributed to the building of countless homes for Habitat for Humanity. More frequently, though, former presidents set up their libraries, perform general "statesman" duties and paint, usually poorly.
“Obama reading zoological bedtime stories will be more than enough for some people.'”
For those wondering if Obama's presence in Our Great National Parks is just token episodic book-ending, the answer is "No." The former president is a fully committed and present figure here, making on-camera appearances at the top of each episode, providing full-throated narration throughout and even seemingly trolling the Fox News crowd with the selection of episodic locations, which include Hawaii, Kenya and Indonesia, each tied in some way to Obama's biography. Note that the first episode is almost annoyingly formless, a bunch of barely linked animal encounters from around the world. It feels like a padded preface or an endless teaser trailer. Subsequent episodes take a cleaner and far superior one-country-per-hour approach. From there, it's fairly geographically representative, covering vast arid plains, humid rainforests, clear coastal waters and snowy highlands.
Unsurprisingly, Obama turns out to be a very fine narrator, and not just when Our Great National Parks has dogmatic points to make: He explains the synergistic ways in which governmentally reserved natural spaces can have non-antagonistic relationships with nearby human populations. He contributes wry humor to the scripts, with their slightly superficial, overly anthropomorphic explanations for animal behavior. And, more than that, his trademark deliberate cadences and oft-emulated calculated pauses are a perfect delivery mechanism for letting lovely nature photography breathe. I can't say that I learned a tremendous amount from Our Great National Parks — though I didn't know that slow lorises were poisonous — but there's a very relaxed dissemination of information here that's genially informative if not rigorously intellectual. Given Obama's lack of academic background in the subject matter, that's probably completely appropriate.
Fun fact I learned today: When Barack Obama left the White House in 2017, he was 55 years and 169 days old, exactly one day younger than Taft when he wrapped his lone term. I know this, so now you do as well, and while Obama has done the usual post-presidency things — kitesurfing, memoir-writing — he has also begun to build out a prolific television résumé thanks to a lucrative Netflix deal for Higher Ground, his production banner with Michelle Obama. Not content, though, with being the Greg Berlanti of nonfiction programming, Obama tries his hand at being America's Sir David Attenborough with Netflix's new five-part series Our Great National Parks.
image caption - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
This five-episode look at natural preserves from Hawaii to Chile to Kenya to Indonesia features President Barack Obama as an on-camera presenter and ubiquitous narrator.
By Daniel Fienberg
If Our Great National Parks has a thesis — and sometimes the series forgets that it has a thesis — it's that plants, animals and humans are interconnected, and that the more space, land and sea we set aside for protection, the more we benefit. That really ought to be a completely noncontroversial idea, and yet it will be treated as controversial by people exclusively on one side of the political spectrum. Of course, those same viewers will start freaking out as soon as Obama makes his first appearance in the introductory episode and won't stop freaking out until Obama concludes the last episode with the observation, "Vote like the planet depends on it." Except the chances of that hypothetical viewer watching five hours of this fairly innocuous documentary are close to zero.
Our Great National Parks doesn't push too hard to be educational, and I think that reflects director Sarah Peat's awareness that the series is entering a crowded marketplace. Peat has wide-ranging nature documentary experience, and however beautiful the photography is in Our Great National Parks, only at its very best is it able to compete with the sort of thing that PBS, BBC, Discovery and various other cable entities do regularly. It's a genre with conventions and the innovations here feel limited — so much so that the narration doesn't fail to mention any time a technological advancement is being made, like the nighttime photography of Chile's adorable marsupial monito del monte or the sensitive night-vision cameras rendering colorful nocturnal imagery of Kenya's black rhinos.
Just because Our Great National Parks isn't always revelatory definitely doesn't mean, though, that it isn't generally attractive and occasionally breathtaking. Highlights include lemurs leaping through the jagged stone forest of Madagascar's Tsingy de Bemaraha Reserve, a colorful Indonesian hammerhead worm devouring a glistening snail and the daunting flocks of thousands, possibly millions, of tiny red-billed quelea, swarms capable of nearly blocking the Kenya sun. The series has a tendency to over-rely on the cuteness of baby animals, using adorability as a narrative crutch at least a half-dozen times in each episode. But while there may be some jaded critics immune to the cuteness of a juvenile orangutan, I'm surely not.
Our Great National Parks ends with the aforementioned incitement to vote, which feels important but limited. There are so many different directions viewers enraptured by this glimpse at the world could be steered, and apart from that one explicit reminder, the series is light on calls to action or clearly presented audience resources. It's a small thing, but it's a thing future seasons could use for further differentiation. Though Barack Obama reading zoological bedtime stories will be more than enough for some people.
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THE ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA ASSOCIATION
Is proud to announce the official launch of the EMA green Talent rider During the 2022 EMA impact Summit
WE, THE PERFORMING ARTISTS OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY, RECOGNIZE THAT NATURE PROVIDES THE BASIS FOR SUSTAINING LIFE AND THAT WE CURRENTLY FACE A CLIMATE AND BIODIVERSITY CRISIS THAT THREATENS OUR EXISTENCE. WE ALSO RECOGNIZE THAT OUR INDUSTRY PLAYS AN INFLUENTIAL ROLE PROMOTING SOLUTIONS THAT ADDRESS THIS CRISIS. WE ASK FOR UNITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY OF ACTORS COMMITTED TO SUPPORTING CLIMATE ACTION AND THE HEALTH AND RESTORATION OF OUR PLANET TO SIGN ONTO THIS PLEDGE TO ADOPT THE PRODUCTION GUIDELINES EXPRESSED IN THE EMA GREEN RIDER TO MODEL BEST PRACTICES IN SERVICE TO RESPECTING OUR NATURAL RESOURCES. WITH OUR SIGNATURE, WE PLEDGE TO USE THE EMA GREEN RIDER IN ALL OUR NEGOTIATIONS FOR WORK WITHIN THE INDUSTRY ENCOURAGING THE STUDIOS, PRODUCERS, DIRECTORS AND ALL PERFORMING TALENT TO SUPPORT AND ALIGN WITH THESE PRACTICES
To sign the pledge PLEASE VISIT WWW.GREEN4EMA.ORG/GREENRIDER
