Essay by Eric Worrall
Greens equating their cause to the role of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the liberation of the slaves.
‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis?
David Smith in Washington
Sat 20 Jul 2024 20.06 AESTTwisters is the latest in a long line of movies that fail to address the environmental emergency – experts say it’s a missed opportunity.
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A study published by the nonprofit consultancy Good Energy and Colby College’s Buck Lab for Climate and Environment analysed whether the climate crisis was present in 250 of the top-grossing fictional films between 2013 and 2022. In only 32 of the films (12.8%) was it clear that climate change exists, and in only 24 of them (9.6%) was it clear that a character knows it.
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“We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate. We need stories in hundreds of different languages, reflecting a thousand times more cultures experiencing varying degrees of awareness and emotional processing.”
He adds: “But if a film-maker is reluctant to let climate be in some way a part of their movie, I always tell them that it’s a guarantee within the next five years their film will play as irrelevant as movies do today about how noble the war against the ‘American Indians’ was.”
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Asked whether film-makers have an ethical responsibility to tackle the subject, Lipsky identifies a parallel with slavery: “The model is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That issue had to be addressed and so Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that novel. When Lincoln had an audience with her at the White House, he said, so you’re the woman who caused this civil war of ours. Sometimes the expression of something can be so astonishing and so direct that it makes people take action.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/20/hollywood-climate-crisis
It is difficult to overstate the cultural and political influence of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin“. The book sold millions of copies. The portrayal of the main character, Uncle Tom, as a decent Christian man who helps his friends and steadfastly lives by his beliefs, in the face of unspeakable cruelty, brutality and betrayal, had a profound impact on people’s attitude towards slavery in the United States.
We’re used to green arrogance, but in my opinion this effort to equate their climate pseudoscience propaganda with such an important historical work is unconscionable.
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I guess Don’t Look Up, The Day After Tomorrow, An Inconvenient Truth, and Avatar, and a dozen other movies weren’t sufficiently preachy enough to get the message across. They need every single movie that has any kind of weather in it to prostrate itself before the leftist gods of climate doom. Or else. For klimate kooks, it’s all about the messaging, never about the apocalyptic fantasy that they’ve conjured up. They don’t understand why people aren’t rushing to the altar in an ecstatic fit, shouting “hallelujah, I’ve been saved!” and declaring their conversion to climate alarmism.
You forgot “Geostorm” where bad weather can be turn off by the literal flip of a switch.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981128/
“….8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate”
Oil companies might be responsible for more CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, but they should get it through their heads that it doesn’t make climate or weather worse.
Maybe they should look at the actual data for severe weather and see that Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Floods, Droughts, Wildfires, etc. are either even or getting better since the 1970s or before:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/25/wheres-the-emergency/
They should be made to watch “Climate The Movie” !
I sent a link to that film to about 100 people here in Wokeachusetts: state environmental officials, enviro groups, forestry groups, politicians, friends- I’m sure none watch it. This state is so brainwashed, nobody will even consider that we aren’t having a climate emergency- which of course is official state policy. Maybe they’re afraid somebody will find out they watched a film by DENIERS!
There are already lots of “Science Fiction”, and “Science Fantasy” films and TV series.
Some good, some really bad…. why make more really bad ones. ?
I loved Avatar. Didn’t even notice any climate stuff- too busy enjoying the 3D stuff. Oh, yuh, the bad guys were wrecking the planet and of course the indigenous folks, blah, blah, blah.
An aside, just read an article in a local paper that said we should listen to the indigenous folks here in Wokeachusetts- telling us how to wisely manage the forests. I almost puked.
Pilgrim leader William Bradford commented on how “parklike” the forests around Plymouth were in his records.
This was because the local tribes at the time did regular controlled burns of the underbrush.
Maybe they SHOULD listen to the indigenous peoples in this case. Their forestry policies couldn’t be any worse than what they do now.
You don’t have a clue about forestry policies.
I am a little surprised the Guardian felt the need to big up the idea of films relating to climate change? Maybe they have not herd about ‘Climate the movie’ ? Maybe we should send them a copy to watch and then distribute….?
“We’re used to green arrogance, but in my opinion this effort to equate their climate pseudoscience propaganda with such an important historical work is unconscionable.”
I wasn’t even aware of the “climate crisis” until I went out of my way to research it.
The word “climate” was redefined by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization to be 30 years of weather, so it, like the weather, is always changing.
If Follywood really wanted to fight the climate crisis it would shut down; pronto.
The Guardian will shortly be on school holidays. Lashings of ginger beer.
No AC in theaters?
For all the money being spent on so-called “climate change” a bunch of deadly diseases that are killing people now could be cured.
Bloomberg estimates it will take $US200 trillion to stop warming by 2050. A lot of diseases could be cured with that much money extending human life span.
$200 trillion is more than all the money in the world. . . so that we can all move backwards into the Stone Age.
Besides, the whole world is not on board with this doomsday scenario, and devotion to make ourselves poor again. More of the world is trying to climb out of poverty than to dive back in. Climate catastrophe is only a fetish among a minority of affluent westerners who have nothing better to do that speculate about the wonderfulness of primitive pre-industrial lifestyles.
Predicting climate catastrophe unless everyone everywhere suddenly renounces industrial development is the ultimate luxury belief.
They are like Marie Antoinette cosplaying a milkmaid in a mock peasant village built inside the courtyard in Versailles.
(LARPing as heavily romanticized common folk was a popular leisure activity of French aristocracy at the time.)
Clean water and sanitation worldwide would cost a few billion and save the lives of 1 million people every year, but no, let’s waste trillions on “solving” the “climate crises” and save the lives of net zero people in the next 1000 years.
Did you forget there are already too many people. Destroying them is the real program.
Absolutely. Here’s a link to a spreadsheet produced by the optimum trust AKA Population Matters (Attenborough and Packham are Patron Saints)
Optimum Trust Spreadsheet
This shows where they want population reduction
“extending human life span”
I liked that idea better when I was young. Have you ever seen a 90 y/o human?
While a longer life is not necessarily a better one, that’s a valuation that must be left to the individual, not to monolithic busybody bureaucrats.
The industry has no interest in curing anything. The money is in treating symptoms for the rest of the victim’s life.
What they really want is a Green “Birth of a Nation”, pure agitprop that was trend setting art for its time. Or a Green Leni Reifenstahl, doing a CAGW “The Triumph of the Will”.
But don’t tell me, this David Smith uses FF every single day of his life, of course!
Flaming climate hypocrite.
Why are actors, politicians and ‘journalists’ so joined-at-the-hip when it comes to global warming / climate change alarmism?
Is it because they all just learn a scripted set of lines by rote, and then disgorge them on cue, as required, ad nauseum, without nuance?
The short answer to your opening question is that actors, politicians and journalists traffic in fantasies, wishful thinking, hokum, and hooey. Disgorging humbug on cue comes naturally to them. No weird, Siamese-twin type surgery required.
It gets them on the front page of the New York Times.
Notoriety and celebrity status upgrades.
none are profound thinkers
Sure…… slavery and the climate crisis are “almost the same thing”, except slavery was real, did significant harm to a lot of people, and is still happening in many parts of the world. The climate crisis has no presence in the real world but makes for an entertaining IQ test for eco-imbeciles. But fantasy fear mongering is stock and trade for the Guardian and many other media outlets that used to practice journalism a very long time back. We won’t miss them when they go out of business.I wonder how the enslaved would feel to hear crap publications diminish their suffering by likening their struggles for freedom to the hobby of wealthy elites throwing limitless resources at a non-existent harm associated with a mild pleasant warming of the weather.
The Guardian was founded on the proceeds of slavery.
Apparently, the Anglo-Ashanti wars never happened and there was no West Africa Squadron…
A leukophobic, self-loathing bunch.
Elites throwing our tax dollars at everything but where it will do some good.
Abraham Lincoln never made any such statement to Harriet Beecher Stowe, easily found by googling … it was an apocryphal story told long after her meeting by members of her family.
Abraham Lincoln knew, as most other people at the time, that the cause of the civil war was the fact of slavery being legal in the southern states, and the determination in Congress that slavery would not be allowed in the unsettled western territories and states. Southern slave holders took that to mean that their days of relying upon chattel slavery to support their economy were numbered, especially after the election of Lincoln in November 1860. The legislatures of the slave states immediately began debating secession, and one by one the slave states seceded. The rest of the nation would not allow secession, and consequently the Civil War was the result.
The Civil War was a long time coming, as played out in Congressional lawmaking, Federal court cases, individual state debates, and internecine fighting in the west ( “Bleeding Kansas”) and the east (John Brown’s insurrection at Harpers Ferry) that preceded the Civil War. In fact the seeds of the conflict were planted long before at the time of our nation’s founding, where “All men are created equal” was debated by members of the Continental Congress before agreeing to the Declaration of Independence.
Keep in mind that slaveholders got an extra 3/5 vote for every slave per the Constitution.
That political power was also a big cause.
Consider the population demographics had shifted with the northern states getting more representation in the House and northern politicians had ended the south’s run on President and the best they could do was keep the Senate 50-50.
All those factors along with an un-Constitutional protective tariff benefitting the New England states and causing economic down turn in the south was the first “tipping point.”
A historical bit of trivia, in N.C., there was substantial ballot stuffing to ensure Lincoln would be elected with the fore knowledge that Lincoln’s election would trigger S.C. to secede, which it did triggering the domino rally..
any proof of that ballot stuffing? I’m not disagreeing- never heard about it
There was no ‘Civil War’. It was a war of separation.
It certainly wasn’t civil.
that’s what the Ukraine thing is all about
And we mustnt forget that it was the southern US democrats who maintained the Jim Crow laws/ segregation etc and it was Lincoln, the Republican who forced the issue during the Civil war, albeit after the need to secure the union by other means first..
When the Colonies rebelled against the UK to become an Independent Nation, there were many abolitionist who wanted to end slavery. But if they did not compromise with the Southern Colonies, there would never have been “The United States of America”.
Then the Civil War.
We, as a nation were closer than ever before to those abolitionist’s and MLK’s dream of people being judged on the quality of their character rather than the color of their skin … before Obama.
Now the real racist are calling any return MLK’s ideal “racist”.
History is history. It happened, good or bad.
Now, where do we go from here?
The “founding fathers” knew it was a huge problem and kicked the can down the road. Regarding Lincoln, my favorite book of all time is “Team of Rivals”.
Slavery had nothing to do with starting the war, it was the perception of the expansion of unwarranted federal control over states rights. That was being done by the north because they did not want to lose their very profitable control of world trade based on the southern plantations providing the trade products that they traded overseas (e.g. cotton and tobacco) . Southern companies were starting to do their own trading with Europe, in part because of technological advances in finished cotton production.
At the time it was still fairly widely known that the compact establishing the Union left open the option to withdraw from it. Many people, prior to the anti-slavery propaganda, were inclined to accept the southern states withdrawing from the union. Anti-slavery was played up heavily in the north in order to gain support for Lincoln’s war.
Tackle climate change in film? Like what, product placement? You know, like a PSA in exchange for carbon credits. Hollywood is already too preachy. Possibly no one would notice.
Everyone should be like California. Charge poor farm workers a dollar extra for every gallon of gas they buy so wealthy techies can buy subsidized electric vehicles for transportation. And poor renter can help rich home owners put solar panels of their roofs made with forced labor in Asia. If that’s not climate justice I don’t know what is.
“How dare you!” 🙂
Raise minimum wage on fast food chains resulting in layoffs, higher prices, and about 2/3 closing shop. So, the $12 / hr went to $0 / hr and people bought fewer burgers.
Every decision has consequences. Too bad too many do not think things through.
I know, the key word is “think.”
The Guardian wants us all to surrender ourselves to *climate* slavery. There is no appreciation at all of the shackles and chains of energy scarcity and tyrannical control that must result if we don’t free ourselves from the Net Zero illusions.
You left off you nearly complete list, socialism. One World Order. Genuflecting to the UN and giving up national sovereignty.
Funny that, im listening to Hayek’s ‘the road to serfdom’ on Youtube. ..https://youtu.be/tiHtRp57-gI?si=HvD0mfcCDAHVaobv. I read the book some 30 years ago. Not quite tabletalk amongst my leftish friends back then who clearly hadnt a clue.
I was raised by socialist parents. Granddad was a commie. Steeped in red. To them education meant reading Marx.
Anyway, Hayek was on the ball even then, in the late 1940s. We were already aware after the Gulag archipeligo/1984 etc..
In 2010, a short move was released by a group called 10-10. The title was No Pressure; there is a Wikipedia page. The film was withdrawn from public circulation on the same day it was released, because it was gross and got immediate negative publicity.
Another short “polar bears falling from the sky” (also gross) can be seen here:
polar bears falling from the sky (youtube.com)
Might only be a part – these were usually about 4 minutes.
Can’t find on WUWT now, but sure they were discussed.
“Anyway”, with these spectacular bits of video artistry, why do we need more?
https://youtu.be/tu3gd2FulwY
10-10
Maybe label such films ahead of time for us so we can save our money and not be subjected to surprise lectures.
Very nice Eric. Once again a perfect example of indoctrinated, uneducated cultists doing the devil’s work.
“The model is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That issue had to be addressed and so Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that novel.“
If its a “have you seen it and can you name a character” competition amongst the 8 billion people the author notes, I’m guessing George Lucas and his sword fighting mutants beats the *%^$^& out of Harriet Stowe and her literary classic.
Having read most of the Pulitzers, most of the US classics and most of the verbose Russians I can wonder “why have I never held a copy of UTC”? I can only guess it is not a good read. Probably I’ll never watch Twisters the movie either – apparently about weather-inspired thrill seekers who get themselves into thrilling trouble and scream a lot in front of green screens.
And most who do recognize the name probably have no idea what the original was like – they only have the modern distorted perception.
Stowe’s book was an indictment of slavery in the American South pre-Civil War. Her hero, Uncle Tom, was a Ghandi-type character and a strong practicing Christian. He believed in doing what was right, in his view, in all cases — and died for that belief.
For that cause, he is an anathema to today’s BLM and other black-racist movements.
The totalitarians have basically killed this genre with the constant flood of over-hyped lies and nothing-burgers. This why they play so well as science fiction. Don’t Look Up, was fun and it depicts something to actually worry about! Climate Change? Not so much. Climate Armageddon has been advertised for 40 years to be coming but so far the the climate, plants, animals keep getting better and better.
How about about a film about ganggreen manic depressives sitting around a healing circle, catatonic over Trump riding in and cancelling the meme!
“Oil companies destroying the entire livable climate”
What a whopper of a lie.
The oil companies make a raw product that has trivial effect on the climate.
The people who combust the product, like car drivers, are responsible for the alleged and questioned effects on the livable climate.
Put your blame where it resides.
Geoff S
So what has changed?
I took this image in the Carolinas cotton territory.
The ladies were proud of their work, appeared to love it. What is there for others to complain about?
Geoff S
Probably more fun when you get paid and choose who you work for.
““We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate.”
that’s libel!
Time for a film that shows why it’s wiser to not believe we’re having a climate emergency. Get some big name actors (they’ll do it for enough $$$). Show how certain groups are enriching themselves because of all the $$$ thrown at “the problem”- bureaucracies, enviro groups, wind/solar companies, the media, etc. Show them looking moronic. Show the “deniers” looking smart! Add some sex scenes- gotta have those to attract attention to the film. 🙂
Perhaps film-makers have been spooked by the “get woke go broke” they’ve witnessed. 😉