Zeus: Climate change goes Hollywood

By David Callaway, Callaway Climate Insights

SAN FRANCISCO (Callaway Climate Insights) — I wasn’t a big fan of the Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up.

It was funny in its cynicism about how different groups of people treat global warming, but I always felt that climate change — like the meteor in the movie — was largely just a prop for the writers to make a point about how divided we are as a society in the U.S.

That’s why a story this week about a group that measured the use of climate change in screenplays caught my attention. The group, a non-profit consultancy called Good Energy, released a playbook for writing about climate change to address their findings that less than 3% of movie fiction between 2016 and 2020 used words that referred to climate change or global warming.

The story said that apparently one of major obstacles to writing about climate change has been that writers viewed any stories about it as having to be apocalyptic. A meteor destroying the earth (Don’t Look Up), or a world after some devastating environmental event (The Day After Tomorrow or Waterworld). . . .

To read this column and more about what David Callaway says about climate in Hollywood, subscribe: How about Housewives of Silicon Valley, where all the wives are either billionaires who run clean tech companies or give away money to sustainable efforts or divorce their billionaire husbands and give some of that money to sustainable strategies?

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