Maybe Hollywood Does Get It: A Year In Climate Change Cinema

In The Atlantic, Noah Gittell recently argued that Hollywood is dropping the ball on climate change. Pointing out the lack of explicit acknowledgement in Interstellar, Gittell went on to suggest that Hollywood keeps getting the environment wrong because addressing an environmental crisis is not dramatic or awe-inspiring. As a graduate student in environmental policy, I must disagree.

Among the picturesque views of distant worlds, Interstellar touched on deep philosophical issues in environmental politics. More than that, in the past year Hollywood has produced films that have tackled the environment head on. Finally Hollywood has stopped portraying climate change as a simple disaster movie and begun to explicitly explore serious themes in climate and environmental policy. Three films released this year stood out to me in how they interpreted potential solutions and what if it all fails.

This has been, admittedly, a bleak year for climate change policy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that time is running out to keep global warming under the lauded goal of 2 degrees Celsius. Yet Australia removed its price on carbon, and a newly elected Republican congress in the United States virtually guarantees that no new climate change treaty could be ratified in America. While the recent US-China agreement may provide some hope, all eyes are aimed at the coming Paris climate talks and what might happen if they fail.

“Snowpiercer”

A joint venture between artists in South Korea and the United States, Snowpiercer is the clearest example of a climate change related film in the past year, and was generally well-received. The film captures the story of a rebellion by the poor against elites on a train, which was built so that humans could survive a geoengineering attempt gone wrong. Geoengineering is the process of deliberately changing the climate. While its action sequences were fun, the overt commentary on geoengineering was hard to miss.

Geoengineering ideas include the restoration of whale populations and the release of particulate matter high in the atmosphere. These potential solutions are deservedly getting a lot of traction in some sections of the policy community, particularly in free market think tanks like Cato. Geoengineering could allow fossil fuel use to continue for much longer than cutting carbon through a policy mechanism like cap and trade. This action would allow the market to dictate when renewable energy replaces fossil fuels. Geoengineering has been met with skepticism in the scientific and policy communities because of uncertainty over the long-term impacts. Some solutions might only be band-aids and require consistent maintenance. Most ideas only deal with changes in temperature and fail to engage the problem of ocean acidification.

Where sustainability gets complex is over a dark question: how do you resolve the problem of overpopulation? In the film, population control was achieved through periodic planned rebellions of the poor against the rich, with casualties keeping the population in check. No rational human being would ever support such a policy in our world, but geoengineering made a desperate situation worse.  Snowpiercer takes a very clear stance on geoengineering: don’t do it.

“Godzilla”

Before everyone groans, claiming this is clearly a reach, you have to consider the cinematic history of Godzilla. Godzilla in its debut film (Gojira 1954) was symbolic for the threat that nuclear technology posed to the world. A creature created by the use of nuclear bombs, Godzilla was intended to be the very force of nature reacting like an immune system confronting a disease. The 2014 film’s director Gareth Evans was clear that Godzilla was meant to be a force of nature again; symbolically fighting against humans’ abuse of nature. In this film, Godzilla was not created by nuclear weapons, but is a reaction of nature itself to mistakes in the use of nuclear power.

Concerned with the fall-out of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Godzilla has seen different thematic interpretations. If we are to relate it to climate policy, this film concerns the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle is a conservative philosophy that works on the idea that something must first be proven not to be harmful before it is done. It is often applied by religious conservatives to cultural issues and by liberals to environmental issues.

The precautionary principle is about risk aversion and avoidance. Nuclear power has typically been met with skepticism on the political left in the United States. Incidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island inspired fierce resistance to the expansion of nuclear energy. To combat climate change however, nuclear energy is believed to be crucial in the transition to a green power grid.

The precautionary principle is a driving argument against allowing the climate to change. The character played by Bryan Cranston talks about how nature will ultimately balance itself out. In Godzilla, it takes the widespread destruction of major population centres for this to finally happen. We simply can’t predict all of the potential fall-out from a changed climate, but what has been predicted is dire. Nature may balance itself out, but do we really want to endure that process?

“Interstellar”

This brings us to Interstellar. Interstellar is about a last ditch effort to get humans off Earth. In the face of massive environmental degradation (severe weather and food shortages), the human species must escape from Earth or die. While Snowpiercer focused on geoengineering, and Godzilla concerned the precautionary principle, Interstellar takes us to a point where there is no hope left to save our own planet and confronts head on the environmental economics problem of social discounting. Handling climate change is explicitly ignored by Interstellar, because environmental degradation has been allowed to fester past the point of no return. Interstellar offers a cutting and pragmatic explanation why.

When we confront problems like deforestation and water scarcity, the classic argument is: “Don’t we want to leave a better world for our children?” Interstellar explicitly handles the consequences of us saying no, and more than that, why we can’t seem to be able to say yes. The main character himself continues to look forward, up into the sky, instead of backwards. Humans have trouble with confronting risks that go beyond their lives, or the lives of their children. The film explicitly acknowledges this in two of the more dread-inducing plot twists.

The screenwriters communicate many of the chief concerns of environmental policy analysts and environmentalists. The list of issues presented or implied read like the headings for an executive summary on global environmental issues. More than that, they serve as plot points. Destruction of rainforests reduces oxygen availability, soil erosion leads to scenes reminiscent of the dust bowl, and lack of genetic variability in crops leads to a food crisis.

Interstellar ultimately does not pass judgement on humanity for what it did to the planet in the reality it portrays. It is about what happens when we are pushed to extreme ends. Moving to space has been a policy solution kicked around by astrophysicists for some time, and with the latest dire reports coming out of the IPCC, I wonder how likely such a scenario might be.

Is it too late?

While blockbuster movies are meant to entertain, they have long had a role in alerting the national consciousness to serious issues and putting pressure on society to act. The films Black Like Me and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were crucial in the cultural awakening to societal inequalities in 1950s and 1960s America. Philadelphia helped to humanize the AIDS crisis. With the next and likely most important round of climate talks coming next fall, we will see if Hollywood’s latest attempt will hold any weight. I certainly hope so.