Green billionaires are pouring money into discreet campaigns to persuade Hollywood writers to catastrophise the climate in future film and television scripts. One of their main vehicles is Good Energy, which tells writers that showing anger, depression, grief or other emotion in relation to the climate crisis, “can only make characters more relatable”. Los Angeles-based Good Energy is funded by numerous billionaire foundations including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Sierra Club and the Climate Emergency Fund; the latter operation is part-funded by Aileen Getty and is one of the paymasters of the Just Stop Oil pests.
Good Energy aims to weave climate alarm into all types of film-making, “especially” if it is not about climate. With the support of Bloomberg, it recently published ‘Good Energy – A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change’. It claims the Playbook is “now the industry’s go-to guide to incorporating climate into any storyline or genre”. As with almost all green campaigning groups, Good Energy would not exist without the support of billionaire funding. These operations seek a supra-national collectivist Net Zero solution to a claimed climate emergency. Good Energy acknowledges it would not exist without this funding, adding, “as collaborators and champions, each has provided a unique contribution for which we are endlessly grateful”.
Announcing the launch of the ‘Playbook’, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the tax-efficient ‘charity’ channel for distributing the wealth of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, noted that “accurate and relatable storytelling about climate impacts and solutions can grow public support and motivate decision makers”. As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will recall, billionaire foundations are grooming populations around the world by funding a variety of press, political and academic operations. Most significant non-profit bodies seeking to stop the use of hydrocarbons are funded from these sources. Few green campaigns arise from ‘grass roots’ these days. Put to the vote, for instance, the Green Party in the U.K. loses most of its election seat deposits.
Since this is La La Land, Good Energy has some relevant advice for writers to normalise climate friendly actions. “Let’s reimagine what it looks like for a character to eat a plant-rich diet (Michelin Green Star restaurant, yes!), attend a protest or upcycle vintage clothes. And if your story requires a yacht, why not make it solar powered.” That last idea might appeal to super-yacht lover Leonardo DiCaprio, but private planes, the preferred method of transportation for many high-end Hollywood stars, might be a problem. Hypocrisy a problem with all this? Not according to the Playbook, which quotes climate activist Bill McKibben that “hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle”. For plebs, gammons, fly-overs and deplorables, this of course translates as “you do what you are told and radically change your lives – we don’t give a flying flamingo”.
Needles so say, a mere climate crisis is not enough for über-woke luvvies. It is not separate from other critical social issues like racism, sexism, economic injustice and war. The Playbook notes that “indigenous people are the first climate scientists, and indigenous people are leading us through this climate crisis”. Climate can be a “generative lens with which to view any subject or character”, the Playbook helpfully notes. For scripted entertainment, observes Good Energy, “the emotional truth is as important as the literal truth”.
Good Energy was started in 2019 and its influence and services seem to be growing within the U.S. west coast film industry. Rolling Stone recently profiled the operation in an article titled ‘How Hollywood is Crafting A New Climate Change Narrative’. One of Good Energy’s “standout” projects last year was a collaboration with Scott Z Burns on the series Extrapolations for Apple TV+. This was said to be the first mainstream show centred entirely around climate. It starred Meryl Streep in eight interconnected stories over 33 years and was said to explore how the planet’s changing climate will affect family, work, faith and survival. Rolling Stone reports that the operation is “dedicated” to ensuring that within three years, 50% of contemporary TV and film acknowledges climate change.
It is unsurprising that the power of film and TV to influence large audiences is being captured to promote a political message. During the 2021 COP 26 meeting in Glasgow, seven soap opera programmes in the U.K. including Coronation Street and Eastenders joined forces to highlight climate change. Most of the plot lines were clumsily inserted into existing storylines and in an era of declining audiences, the experiment does not appear to have been repeated.
Nevertheless, elite billionaires are pulling out all the stops to insert climate Armageddon messaging into all forms of media. As I write, the BBC climate disinformation reporter Marco Silva is possibly learning how to improvise on the theme of a mango during his six-month sabbatical at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network. Past funders of the course include the European Climate Fund, which is supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Previous course attendees were told to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to the impact of climate change.
Truly, La La Land meeting the make-believe world of BBC Verify.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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“Green billionaires are pouring money into discreet campaigns to persuade Hollywood writers to catastrophise the climate in future film and television scripts”
Our job is to make these campaigns less discreet. In other words plaster this fact all over every information channel out there. Shine the spotlight on these green billionaire busybodies.
I doubt that the TV and Hollywood elites need to be pressed to make such stuff.
They just need cash since the “box office” for such woke stuff isn’t doing so well.
As I’ve noted earlier, Hollywood is running out of ideas for horror movies, so it’s hoping to rejuvenate climate catastrophe types. But just as audiences have been losing interest in the former, it won’t take long before the latter experience the same reaction. As well, these types of movies are about as likely to persuade viewers to scale back their lifestyles to combat a non-existent problem as their affluent producers will abandon theirs.
Nothing new under the sun
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
So even Shakespeare was got at by the Elizabethan climatocracy. So who put up the ducats for that expensive Globe Theatre. Probably these nasty Spanish dagoes with their dastardly climate friendly Armadas. Mind you it was in the Little Ice age which as all you right thinking climatistas did not happen. And which sod chopped down the trees of Birnam wood.
Ummmm . . . the Bard was referring to weather, NOT climate.
There is a big difference.
A Rose by any other name Old Chap. but did he not also believe that Tempests were becoming more intense and more frequent. and he also had an insight on see level rise
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Insight on sea-level rise? . . . or just the use of metaphors, for which the Bard is renowned as exemplified in your posted quote from his Julius Caesar.
Now in my 80s, I tend to mention events that young people have not experienced.
For all of those thinking years, I have wondered when the Hollywood rot will end. All people who watch movies/TV are affected in some way, be it good or bad. In the last couple of decades, we have seen growth in homicides, violent crime and drug-induced crime. Here in Australia we are in a wave of youngsters from about 12 years up, stealing and trashing cars, often over home invasions, impulsive bashing of innocent passers-by, almost as if their education has lost some prior categories like truth, honesty, compassion, etc.
For those 80 or so years of thinking, I have wondered why Hollywood chose major themes of murder, guns, violence – and persisted with more of it. No apparent examination by them of whether their movies were causing harm to the morals of the young.
You do not require a Nobel mind to deduce that Hollywood has harmed us all. It is sad that the harm is self-fertilising, because each new generation of Hollywood writers and producers has already had their minds harmed so it is easy to make the guns bigger, the murders more graphic and less consequential, the depiction of violence more obscene onscreen.
Hollywood (and audiences) choose themes of murder, guns and violence because they embrace fantasy (hatred, retribution, strength, power, etc). It’s just a different kind of porn. Wanna-be ‘heros’ want to know things that actual heros would like to forget.
There was a time when people could walk out of a disturbing movie and ease their mind by realizing, “It was just a movie.” As films became more “realistic”, it became more difficult to say, “It was just a movie.” Films (and video games) can influence behavior greatly. They are now a blatant assault on our thinking and consequently our choices/behaviors.
If there were well-produced legitimate debates about climate and energy on prime time television would they move the opinion needle as much as one-liners delivered by funny, attractive or talented celebrities on stage or screen? I think not.
Well, despite all efforts to the contrary, we still live in a great democracy where consumers vote with their wallets! Every time I see some entertainment or information program that touts climate gibberish I stop watching and generally don’t go back. If enough people vote like this, the woke idiots will have their green projects go bankrupt.
Precipitation in California will continue. This is the forecast for March 11.
I’m absolutely fine with this. As long as each script has only the billionaires, Just Stop Oil, eco-loon types dying in the catastrophe, and everyone else surviving.
If Hollywood were maintaining its hold on the youth of today compared to yesteryear, I’d worry about kids thinking a climate alarm centric life is “normal” and there must be something wrong with them if they don’t also feel that way.
But I believe Holly wood is self destructing and ironically being ultra woke is one of the main reasons and thus their influence is diminishing.