A ‘Climate Reality Check’ for movies won’t get audiences to share climate activists’ agenda.
A ‘Climate Reality Check’ for movies won’t get audiences to share climate activists’ agenda.
D espite endless media campaigns, few Americans — including Hollywood screenwriters — care much about global warming, according to new research.
A study conducted by environmentalist group Good Energy and Colby College launched a “test” for movies, with just two criteria to “pass”: Global warming must exist in a film, and a character must know it. Yet the group’s analysis of the 250 top-grossing movies between 2013 and 2022 with these metrics found that a mere 24 films, just 9.6 percent, passed. Not a single film released in 2016 passed.
The researchers lowered the bar on what counts as a mention of global warming so low that the film Triangle of Sadness, which briefly showed a billboard in the background that read, “THERE IS A NEW CLIMATE ENTERING THE WORLD . . . OF FASHION,” was counted. Only six of the films had three or more scenes mentioning global warming. The “winner,” or film that mentioned global warming the most, was the 2017 black comedy slasher film Happy Death Day. But that’s because of a Groundhog Day–type scenario in which a character must relive the same day repeatedly, including being pestered by an environmental activist to sign a petition over and over again.
The group called its assessment a “Bechdel Test for Climate Change,” after the feminist tool for judging a movie on whether two female characters talk about something other than a man. It was a natural step to apply such forced monomania to global warming.
“We turn to stories to find meaning, joy, beauty, and courage — and we desperately need to see our world reflected in the movies that we watch and love. For all of us, that world now includes the climate crisis,” Anna Jane Joyner, the founder of the environmental group conducting the study, said in a statement. “Like the legendary Bechdel Test before it, the Climate Reality Check is designed to serve as both a creative tool and an invitation to investigate the presence of climate representation on-screen.”
The minuscule presence of global warming in modern cinema reflects the public’s lack of interest in the subject. Dealing with global warming is a low priority for voters in 2024, ranking 18th out of 20 issues polled, according to Pew Research. Only 36 percent of voters agreed with the statement “dealing with global warming should be a top priority for the President and Congress to address this year.” That’s way behind the 73 percent who consider “strengthening the economy” a top priority or the 63 percent concerned about “defending against terrorism.”
Gallup’s 2024 polling similarly finds that “the environment ranks relatively low among Americans’ national concerns” and in fact ranks among “issues evoking the least concern,” ranking twelfth out of 14 issues polled. Global warming wasn’t even a top concern of Americans when Gallup tried polling only environmental issues — ranking beneath other environmental issues such as drinking-water pollution, river pollution, and soil contamination.
Global warming’s low standing on most voters’ priority lists is likely related to the fact that polling suggests only a small fraction of Americans accept the most alarmist doomsday view of global warming. A 2016 study by Yale found that only 4 percent of Americans believe global warming is “definitely” a sign of a Revelation-style end of the world, while another 10 percent believe it’s “probably” a sign of the end of days. Another Yale study found just 17 percent of Americans are “extremely concerned” about global warming and wanted immediate governmental action, while another 28 percent are “concerned” but don’t think it’s an immediate problem. Polling by Gallup in 2024 similarly found that a majority, 55 percent of Americans, do not think global warming “will pose a serious threat in their own lifetime.”
Most Americans seem to accept the scientific consensus that global average temperatures are rising while rejecting radical activists’ claims that global warming will destroy the world and extremists’ repeated failed predictions that it will do so within a decade. As the decidedly non-alarmist environmentalist Michael Shellenberger put it, “Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”
That may help explain why just 39 percent of Americans said they’d personally be willing to spend a mere $10 in extra cash each month to end global warming, according to an Obama-era Associated Press-University of Chicago poll. This poll was conducted when the Obama administration was attempting to implement the Clean Power Plan at a cost equating to about $10.74 a month for each American, although that plan wouldn’t have reduced global temperatures by any detectable extent, much less ended global warming.
After all, in 2019 Obama himself purchased an almost $15 million beachfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, something that’s hard to square with his own doom-mongering predictions of sea-level rise. No wonder the public is cynical about climate policies and more concerned with other issues: Environmentalists themselves aren’t acting very concerned.
The creation of the “Bechdel Test for Climate Change” may well influence Hollywood producers to make more movies mentioning global warming. But the current lack of climate-change plotlines in films is likely a result rather than a cause of Americans’ low interest in global warming. The polling makes it clear that despite endless media campaigns, few Americans care much about the issue. More films like the climate-change-focused Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are probably not going to change that. Making every film revolve around global warming is more likely to lead to box-office flops than to increased public concern.