Beyond Doom and Gloom: How Can Hollywood Tell More Climate Stories?

From 2016 to 2020, 37,453 films and TV episodes aired in US markets but only a tiny fraction – 0.56% – mention climate change, according to data from the University of Southern California’s Media Impact lab. Just 2.8% mentioned climate-adjacent words like global warming, solar panels, fracking, sea level rise, or renewable energy.

"That’s got to stop," said Anna Jane Joyner, a climate advocate, to a group of interested writers at the Hollywood Climate Summit in Los Angeles last month. "It’s the biggest story of our lives, but we’re not seeing it on screen."

For comparison, she added that the word "dog" showed up 13 more times than all the climate words combined. "Our goal is to change that, quickly."

Joyner and other climate activists in Hollywood are behind new efforts to get climate stories on screen – in movies and television – in compelling ways that make the current climate crisis more visible.

She says she spoke with more than 100 TV and film writers; many felt that that climate change is too political to write about. They told her, traditionally, there were two issues you didn’t pitch in a writers’ room: climate change and abortion.

Yet Americans are concerned about what is happening outside their screens. According to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72% of American adults think climate change is happening and 65% of them are worried about it.

According to Joyner, a major barrier to climate storytelling was that writers felt they had to tell the entire climate story, and they had no place to get into it. "Climate stories had to be lectures or apocalypse stories," she says. "We believe that is one of the reasons why on the rare occasions where you do see [climate stories], they are apocalypse stories." Research has shown that doomsday stories depicting the inevitable end of the world due to climate change make people less likely to act.

There are so many small ways to tell climate stories outside of an apocalypse. That’s one reason Joyner created the Good Energy Playbook, an interactive resource to help creators "explore the ways the climate emergency complicates characters’ lives."

"We think about the climate lens," says Joyner. "Climate change is already happening to the world of your story and to your characters if they are in the past 20 years or the next 100. What we do is to support writers to uncover where climate would be authentically and naturally showing up in your characters’ lives."

Telling realistic, nuanced climate stories isn’t just about helping people understand what is happening in the world, Joyner says. It's also an incredible creative tool: stories that are deeper, richer and more authentic connect with the audience, because they touch on something everyone is feeling and seeing.

Climate storylines can take a number of different forms, and the group doesn’t think about climate storytelling as a separate genre, says Carmiel Banasky, a television writer who helped create the Good Energy Playbook. One example of a strategy from the book is climate placement, where characters enact climate friendly behaviors as normal background to the story that’s unfolding. There’s an episode of Black Mirror where a character charges an electric vehicle using portable solar panels outside a museum where people’s consciousnesses have been uploaded into objects.

Solar panels can be a subtle yet organic part of the story, Banasky says, as in the movie "The Quiet Place", where panels are a silent energy source that keep the characters safe from mysterious creatures that use sound to hunt their victims.

Another way to integrate climate into screen stories is to mention it in passing, which normalizes talking about climate change in daily life. Banasky cites an episode of the HBO show "Insecure" where a character jokingly mentions an event "is going to be fire" and then walks her comments back, due to actual wildfires.

There are also shows that focus on the impacts of the climate crisis throughout the entire story, as the dystopian near-future miniseries "Years and Years" did.

Hollywood climate stories are moving far beyond the doom and gloom phase, says Allison Begalman, a writer and climate activist who created the Hollywood Climate Summit and helped with the Good Energy Playbook. The playbook is about hope and creativity, she says, and getting people at the upper levels of Hollywood to see how climate can be a lens for exploring the world. She adds that many people don’t realize the boundaries they’ve placed around the subject, because of political worries. "The political aspect of this topic has created a lot of walls, even for people who would consider themselves sustainability advocates," she says.

Begalman says her favorite recent climate story is "Undone," an animated series on Amazon that takes place on an oil rig and involves pollution and a character’s lungs (Banasky helped write the story). "It wasn’t [explicitly] a climate story at all," says Begalman, "but it added so much depth to his character and his story."

She also points out that Grey’s Anatomy has done a lot of work talking about heat waves and how they will impact healthcare – especially for low-income people and people of color who will bear the biggest burden of climate change.

Back at the Hollywood Climate Summit, participants were starting to dream up storylines for "Orange is the New Black". One person wondered out loud about the impacts of heavy rainfall on upstate New York – where the show takes place, inside a prison. Another mentioned increased human disease from a surge of deer ticks or mosquitoes in the region. Some speculated on how climate change could disrupt supply chains to the prison, already a hard place to acquire goods.

"Every character who is alive in this world today is reacting to, running from or otherwise encountering the climate emergency," says Joyner. "It is a universal backdrop to all of our stories, and that is a lot of stories."