Climate awareness is growing in the real world, but it remains rare in popular entertainment, as illustrated by some new research on climate in film. In this episode, Anna Jane Joyner discusses the efforts of her nonprofit, Good Energy, to help screenwriters tell climate stories better (or at all).
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Climate people have long been upset about the way climate change is portrayed in popular culture — or more to the point, the way it isn't portrayed in popular culture. Even as the scale and severity of the problem grow more clear and an ambient anxiety about it sinks in, especially among younger people, it remains oddly invisible outside of news media.
There have been novels that incorporate it (The Deluge) and a handful of movies kind of about it (The Day After Tomorrow, Don’t Look Up), but nothing that has really caught on in a big way. What's more striking is that climate change so rarely seems to exist in art that’s set in the contemporary world, even in the background.
In 2019, Anna Jane Joyner set out to change that with a nonprofit called Good Energy. In research and discussions with people in the entertainment industry, she tried to suss out what was stopping them from translating their climate awareness and concern (which they do feel) into stories. Using what she learned she produced a playbook for screenplay writers to help them grapple with the subject; now she consults on TV, movie, and podcast projects.
This week, Good Energy, in collaboration with the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment at Colby College, released a new report on the visibility of climate change in film. Using the “climate reality check,” a kind of climate twist on the Bechdel test, it determined whether, in the world of the movie, a) climate change exists and b) a character knows it. Just 9.6 percent of the movies passed the test, and in only 3.6 percent was climate mentioned in more than one scene.
I thought it would be fun to have Joyner on the pod to discuss these and some of the other findings of the research, and the subject of climate change in popular culture more generally. So, with no further ado, Anna Jane Joyner, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Anna Jane Joyner
Oh, thank you so much for having me. It is an honor. I have been following your work for a really long time, so I'm really glad to be here.
David Roberts
Awesome. And let me just check, is it Anna or is it a Southern style Anna Jane?
Anna Jane Joyner
It is a Southern-style, Anna Jane.
David Roberts
Oh, love it, love it. Okay, good, Anna Jane. All right, well, let's start with how in the world did you end up here? I'm sort of torn — you know, when I contemplate what you're doing, I'm sort of torn between thinking, "What a weird place to end up." And then on the other hand, "Why are you the only one there where you ended up?" So maybe just tell us how you ended up being where you are and kind of the only person where you are.
Anna Jane Joyner
Well, thankfully, I'm not the only person now. There is a little bit of a small ecosystem in the industry supporting writers, but there was not when we first started this back in 2019. Do you want the short story or the long story?
David Roberts
Well, let's do the short story. Let's do the short story. We got a lot to get through.
Anna Jane Joyner
Well, actually, you did play a big role in my kind of early climate epiphany, I like to think. I studied climate communications in college and, of course, sort of began to understand the intellectual severity of climate and did work on it in my early career. But in, I guess it was 2013, I was in a Showtime documentary series on climate change, really the first effort to do cinematic storytelling on climate, or very, one of the very early ones, certainly in TV. And I was like, well, I should brush up on all the latest climate science and information since it had been a few years since I graduated college and I came across your TEDx talk.
And it just, I have, like, a specific memory of driving between my parents' house and Charlotte, North Carolina, which is kind of from Asheville, North Carolina, to Charlotte. And the stretch of road I was on, listening to your TED talk. I wasn't watching it while I was driving, I was listening.
David Roberts
You weren't missing anything.
Anna Jane Joyner
Well, I just, at the end, I mean, the whole thing was so great. I just thought you did an incredible job of really simplifying and bringing this home and compelling ways that were really accessible to a broader audience. But I'll never forget your ending on that.
You know, "Our role, anyone who hears this, is to make the impossible possible." And that has really driven me and been a mantra in my work. And so, I thank you for that. And also, as a really big turning point for me on climate, it was really, I mean, I cried and I, it was the moment that it really hit me on an emotional level what we were up against and kind of the moment where I knew that there was nothing else I could do but work on climate. So, thank you. You played a big role.
David Roberts
Well, thank you.
Anna Jane Joyner
But, yeah, so how Good Energy started. So —
David Roberts
Wait, wait. Can we just — I know I said the short version, but I just want readers to know because I find it sort of amusing what your role was in that Showtime documentary about climate change back in the old days.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, so it actually is related to how Good Energy started. So, my father is an evangelical megachurch pastor, very far right. And we spent a year trying to convince him that climate change is real, and introduced him to Katharine Hayhoe and Bob Inglis, the former congressman. So that, and I was just like, basically, annoyed all the producers, being like, "Can you tell me everything we are doing badly at storytelling and what we could be doing better?" But, you know, I do think growing up in a pretty intense religious setting, most people who grow up in that kind of environment sort of innately understand the power of story because religion is just a set of stories that has a huge impact on individual people's lives and obviously on our larger world, in both good and very bad ways.
So, I think that was part of it. I was always, and also, like, I'm thankful to have been raised in a family. My dad is also an author — he's working on his hundredth book. Not the kinds of stories I tend to like, but I am, you know, my mom's a musician, all of my siblings are artists. And so, we just grew up in an environment where reading, writing, story, and art was very highly prioritized and also, like, allowed. Like, we were encouraged to go into those fields. And so, I always was trying to draw art, music, story into my work.
Even in the early days of working on kind of more traditional climate campaigns, because I could tell really early on that there was a big gap in the climate movement. You know, we have a lot of great science, technology, and policy, but a lot of the communications are still very technical and scientific or kind of wonky policy-wise. And, you know, we need stories, we need art that moves us on a heart level and an emotional level in addition to an intellectual level.
David Roberts
We should just note before moving on, just the result of your year-long effort to persuade your father. Let's not leave people in suspense here.
Anna Jane Joyner
Oh, you have to go watch the episode, season one, episode four [referring to the show Years of Living Dangerously]. But I could give you the broad strokes: We did move him to some degree. I think, you know, it was ironic. It wasn't the evangelicals, climate leaders that we introduced him to that ended up moving him. It was a climate scientist named Dr. Rich Muller who had taken a big grant from Exxon to fund research at UC Berkeley to basically debunk climate science.
David Roberts
Oh, I remember that. I remember that whole episode.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, and he ended up doing this big study, a ton of grad students involved. And at the end of the day, we're like, "There's no other explanation. You know, we input volcanoes and sunspots and all the other things that could be causing this, and there's no explanation other than human contribution."
David Roberts
Yeah, you would have thought that'd be the end of it, right? But no.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, so the hearing, I think because Dr. Rich Muller, which is his name, he was more moderate. You know, he's a big believer in nuclear power early on, like fracking, as a transitional fuel — which obviously I disagree with. But, you know, just because he was able to speak to the kind of more moderate approach to climate, I think that was compelling to my father. And then also older white man, you know. Even though he was not an evangelical, he was decidedly an atheist.
David Roberts
Oh, funny. So, that all led you to the need for better stories and the founding of Good Energy. So, tell us a little bit about that and what the impetus was.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, well, after that, I was hooked on storytelling and knew it was a big gap. So, I went on to produce a couple of my own short documentaries, music videos, and short scripted films. And I had a friend who worked for Color of Change, and Color of Change has had a program in Hollywood supporting writers around racial justice for over a decade. And I knew that there are other organizations in Hollywood doing this kind of work. You know, Define American does incredible work on immigration storylines and representation, IllumiNative on indigenous storylines and representation.
David Roberts
I met — and this was actually at the Norman Lear Center. I met a woman from the Norman Lear Center, I remember way back in my Grist days, who was doing this for healthcare, who had set up a big thing for healthcare. And her results, I remember — I don't know if I ever wrote anything about it — but I remember being blown away, like, the accuracy of health information in broadcast TV measurably and substantially increased.
Anna Jane Joyner
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're one of our partners, USC's Hollywood Health and Society, because obviously there's a lot of intersections with public health and climate change and incredible work. And there's this huge legacy within the industry of these kinds of support for writers on different issues that we care about. There's also a big legacy from entities that, you know, I would not be as big of a fan of, including the fossil fuel industry.
David Roberts
Oh, yeah. And I bet AG. I bet like, the beef people. I bet they have a whole, like, Hollywood team.
Anna Jane Joyner
Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, the fossil fuel industry, oil industry in particular, has been investing in Hollywood since the beginning of Hollywood, you know, funding Oscar-nominated films. You know, Shell had a production studio for decades.
David Roberts
And the military, too, also comes to mind.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yes, the Department of Defense has had a Hollywood program for almost a century, since World War Two, where they produced and funded over 300 films. Roosevelt called it a critical part of the war effort. And so they funded both Top Guns or partially funded. It's the biggest recruitment tool in US history.
David Roberts
Totally.
Anna Jane Joyner
And so, there's the CIA, has a Hollywood program, the FBI has a Hollywood program, the LAPD takes writers out on patrol. So, it's just like a no-brainer to me. If the fossil fuel industry and the US government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this industry to create the narratives that we all now live in, they intentionally use Hollywood to create this narrative that fossil fuels equate to modernity and prosperity and that these high carbon intensive lifestyles are what we should all be aspiring to and doing, even directly. You know, like super smart, but like, the American Gas Association funded Julia Child's show to include gas stoves.
David Roberts
Right. I remember that now. I watched that show, "Julia." Yes, it was really good last year. And they had a bit about that.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah. So. But there wasn't, you know, at that point, anything on climate. And I got into this also kind of related to my childhood story. There's a writer on "Madam Secretary", and they wanted to do an episode about a young woman challenging her powerful, evangelical father on climate change. And he somehow got in touch when he was doing research with a former intern of mine. He was the director of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action at that time. And he was like, "You know, that's a real person, right?" And so he connected Alex Maggio, who's now a really good friend and one of Good Energy's advisors, to me.
And my brother went to film school and is a filmmaker. And I had read a lot of scripts and given a lot of notes on scripts, so I knew enough about the screenwriting process to be really helpful. And it was just a really great partnership. And through that, I was basically like, "Alex, can you just introduce me to all your screenwriter friends so I can get on the phone with anyone who will talk to me and get a sense of why we're not seeing climate more in scripted TV and film, what we can do to change that, what kinds of support systems writers and creative executives need."
And that's really what started Good Energy. That was late 2018, early 2019. And then by April, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Sierra Club came on as our two first partners and funders. And we launched Good Energy in July 2019.
David Roberts
And this is still an ongoing concern? You're still consulting with this? This is all ongoing?
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, we've had a huge amount of demand within the industry since the very beginning, but it has been a sea change in the past five years. I mean —
David Roberts
Really?
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, we've never been able to meet the demand anywhere near close. You know, just because climate philanthropy is still not investing a lot in narrative change and storytelling.
David Roberts
Shocking. What kind of staff do you have now? Like, what kind of —
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, we have about eight full-time equivalents. There's three of us that actually are full time. It's a big team of around 10 to 15 people, just depending on what projects we have going on right now. And I really intentionally built it with screenwriters and industry experts and with climate experts and people who really understand the climate landscape. And everyone is, you know, we're very rigorous in training because working with creatives and writers is a super specific skill set and there's a lot of ways you can do it wrong. And so we make sure that all of our consultants and our team are very trained on how to work with this audience.
And we do a lot of qualitative research. So, our director of strategy comes out of Ideo and he managed their qualitative research. And so, we've adapted just a really high-quality process for constantly being in dialogue with our audience. And we've built the whole organization, all of our programs, all of our resources are based on that qualitative research, which I think is one of the reasons we've been really successful in the industry. Which is funny, going into this, I would have thought breaking into Hollywood, which is notoriously difficult, would have been the harder piece, but it's actually been getting climate funders to invest more in the space.
David Roberts
I'm putting this on my "irritated at climate funders pile," which is a towering pile at this point. I can't, we can't get mired in that. Let me, if you will, indulge me just like a one-minute rant here as a preface to this question. So, one of the things that I have never forgotten about my early career, this would have been around, like, 2007ish, in the wake of "An Inconvenient Truth," right? So, An Inconvenient Truth came out, it was a big deal. And all of a sudden, everybody cared, or at least felt obliged to pretend to care about "green."
So, like, everything was frigging green for a while. There were like the green issue of Vanity Fair and the green edition of this and green this and that. And it was just like absolutely a fad that took over everything. And one of the outgrowths of that was Green Week on NBC. And I remember thinking when they announced that, I was like, they announced, "We're going to incorporate green content into all of NBC's lineup," basically. Like, this was their big thing. Like, "Look how wonderful we are." And my initial thought was, you're going to make all these TV writers include green content.
It seems like that could go wrong in a lot of ways. And then I watched Green Week on NBC and it was horrific. I have never forgotten it because, and this is getting to my question, if you just go to a random TV writer in LA and say, "Incorporate green content," they don't know anything. They don't know anything. And so what do they do? They reach for the only cultural associations they have. And that meant in every show I watched that incorporated green content, the way they incorporated green content was one of the characters got seized all of a sudden with a manic obsession with tiny lifestyle changes, and they started nagging the other characters to do these lifestyle changes, "stop eating this, recycle that."
They just became the green scold. And the episode ended by them getting over it, basically, and moving on. Like, that really was the model in almost every show because all TV writers knew at the time was green: those are people who bug you about annoying little things in your day-to-day life. Like, they're self-righteous nags. That's what green means. That's what it meant. And so all Green Week did basically is just incredibly intensely reinforce that, which is everybody who's green is a tedious, self-righteous nag about obviously trivial things. And so I don't know if you remember that or lived through that.
It was quite scarring for me. And it basically left me with the sense of like, "I don't want these people anywhere close to my subject. Just shut up. Go back to being non-green, thanks." So, when I hear about your project, when I hear about your whole thing, the first thing that came to mind was like, "Oh, my God, what if a bunch of TV writers start talking about climate change on their shows? It is literally going to kill me. I am literally going to die if I have to watch that." So anyway, I'm sure you're cognizant of the many, many, many ways that this could go wrong.
So what steps are you taking just to make sure that they have something in their arsenal, that they have good facts or good frames or just good approaches that aren't that?
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, it's a great question. And it is, you know, we did this research with USC's Media Impact Project, which is a program, the Norman Lear Center, that Hollywood Health and Society is also a part of. We looked at climate frequency in television and film from 2016 to 2020, looked at over 37,000 scripts that aired during that time period and looked at all the various ways you could say the word "climate change", but also all these keywords like "sea level rise" and "solar panels", and tried to get a pretty holistic look at how this could be showing up in dialogue. And only 2.8% of those scripts even mentioned climate change.
Stories about climate change were far lower. And obviously, that is way less than we are actually experiencing it in our real lives. But on the rare occasion that it does show up, there are kind of three primary tropes. One is the apocalypse, one is the eco-terrorist, and the other is exactly what we're talking about, it's a shame narrative. It's a character — we call it the "bitchy, annoying neighbor yelling at you about your recycling," but it's exactly that. It's somebody shaming someone else about their plastic straw or their flying or their SUV.
David Roberts
I think it was Chandler on Friends who got all upset about plastic straws or something like that specifically.
Anna Jane Joyner
That's actually, I think, in a lot of ways — and we are intentionally non-prescriptive because one, I just really, we're working with some of the best storytellers in the world, and I really believe in supporting their vision for their stories. However, the shame narrative in particular is one we do more actively try to steer people away from, just because nobody wants to be that character, you know, nobody wants to be the scold or the nag. And so we're like — and also, it's like, I do put a little bit of the blame on the climate movement, too, because a lot of our communications have been scolding and nagging and, like, self-righteous.
And, like, if that's the primary form of communication about climate change that you're seeing, that is, you know, going to be reflected in your stories. I also have a theory; when we did the qualitative research for the playbook, we saw that showing a lot up in, like, writers' personal lives. So they felt so ashamed and guilty about their personal carbon footprint that it was hindering them, feeling like they could authentically write about it.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting. That's the result of the shame narrative, right? Like, that's what it gets you, is not a bunch of people who will nag other people, but it's just a bunch of people who go quiet, right?
Anna Jane Joyner
Yes, it shuts you down. No, it doesn't inspire you. It doesn't help you process your grief, your confusion, or your anxiety. You know, it's definitely an emotion that, unless you're the fossil fuel industry, I think, is more harmful than helpful. So that, you know, we do a lot in our playbook and in our consulting and all of our different program areas to kind of emphasize Bill McKibben's, you know, "the price of admission into the climate movement is hypocrisy." And that, you know, it is not our individual faults that we were born into an economic system shackled to the fossil fuel industry.
I don't even like it when people say humans cause climate change. It's like, no, a very specific small group of powerful, largely white men made the decisions that have gotten us into the situation. It is not universally humans' fault. And, yeah, that is definitely a narrative that we do encourage people to steer away from. And most people are very receptive, you know, like they want to know how to tell these stories in a more riveting way that connects with their audience, that does depict climate in an accurate way. And certainly, that doesn't create more problems, you know, for this issue.
And I do kind of like, for the most part, subscribe to Katharine Hayhoe's "The most important thing we can do about climate is talk about it." So, nine times out of ten, if you're even just acknowledging climate, that's better than not. But I do actually think the shame narrative in some ways is more dangerous than even not including it at all.
David Roberts
I want to get at a related — I don't know if it's a beef with the work, a question about the work, but I want to do it through the lens of this new report. So, this new report goes through 250 movies, the top 250 movies of the last decade, and applies this climate reality check, which is, as I understand it, climate change exists in the world of the movie. And somehow or another, a character knows that fact. It's a pretty low bar, and almost none do it. But the ones that do, I have some questions about. So, just tell me a little bit about what you found among that sliver of movies that did pass the test.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, and this was, again, a two-year development process where we did a lot of qualitative research, talked to over 200 screenwriters and creative executives and communications strategists. And our goal was to create something like the Bechdel test, which is, it actually started as a comic strip, and it was. She released it the year I was born, so it's 39 years old, and she released it as a joke. And it's also very baseline. You know, it's to measure female representation on screen. And it's essentially, do you have two female characters that are named and do they have a conversation with each other about something other than a man?
David Roberts
Amazing, how few pass it.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yes, even today, like, it's certainly, and that even though it started as a joke, it got picked up and is ubiquitously used in the industry now as a baseline tool to see if female representation is even just like baseline visible. And so, we wanted to create something like that for climate change where it was kind of quippy, it was simple. It's an easy tool. It's a little playful even. And we wanted it to be baseline. You know, we weren't, this is not a tool that is a commentary on the stories themselves. It is a tool to establish whether or not climate change exists in the world of the story.
And the other two conditions are that it is set on earth now or in the future. So it doesn't apply to high fantasy or historicals, although there's great fantasy and historicals who do metaphors and analogies of climate. But we're really focused on stories that grapple with climate as we do in our real world. And so it was very fun to work with Matthew and his team of students to apply this to the 250 most popular films of the past decade.
David Roberts
A bunch of movies passed that made me raise my eyebrow. I'm like, "Really? I don't remember." And then I go and like Barbie, for instance. So Barbie passes this, and then I looked, I was like, "Well, where did Barbie mention climate change?" And it turns out one of the characters says to another character, "You're killing the planet with your glorification of consumerism." And I guess that's like Earth-ish. But how is that about climate change? Like that, it's so loose as to be — Did anyone come out of that with climate change on their mind or did anyone get climate change out of that? How loose are these judgments?
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, and we did go back and forth because, as an organization, Good Energy is very explicit that we are focused on climate change. So, there's a lot of environmental issues that are not related to climate change. A lot that are, but a lot that aren't.
David Roberts
Yes, and part of what's motivating this question is, like, one of the things that haunts me is, and this showed up in Green Week and this I think is still true in popular cultures. People just put climate in that bucket in their heads with green earth, eco, recycling, vegetarianism, just this vague bucket of like greenish eco stuff. And that to me, makes all the negative cultural associations with that other stuff get attached to climate, too. And so I've always wanted to detach climate from those things. So when I see this, like, in Barbie, like, it looks to me like that's just sort of, like, vague green eco stuff, not, yeah, climate.
Anna Jane Joyner
So, I'll tell you how we came, how we made a decision on that one, but totally agree. And, like, that is why if you go to Good Energy's website or you see any of our materials or read our tone and how we just, like, actually communicate about climate change, it doesn't feel like a green group. It feels creative and inspiring and accessible, sometimes even a little edgy. And that was all very intentional. We did not want to be associated with what a traditional green group feels like, even from just like, a visual perspective. And we also emphasize that climate change isn't just an environmental issue.
It's a racial justice issue. It's a mental health issue, it's a disability issue, it's a gender justice issue. It has all of these other pieces that are not just about the environmental impacts. And so, that is really important to us and how we made the decision on that particular mention — because you're right. Like, there's ways that you could kind of loosely talk about protecting the planet, etcetera, that isn't clearly connected to climate. The reason that we did count that one is because the students who were reviewing all the movies. So, each movie had two reviewers.
It was either someone from our team or one of the students that Matthew worked with. And because they were Gen Z, you know, or young, you know, kind of younger reviewers. And this is a younger character. This is a character who's in middle school, they were like, "There is no possible way that she would be saying that sentence without it being connected to climate change." Like, in this day and age. Like, maybe if this movie was made 20 years ago, you can make that argument, but currently, you couldn't make that argument. So we deferred to the students' wisdom on that one.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Anna Jane Joyner
And you're right. Like, a lot of these passing climate mentions, you don't even necessarily consciously notice. Like, you tend to notice if you're people like us, but —
David Roberts
Right. Well, they aren't climate mentions. Like, a lot of them are, like, earth mentions or ecosystems, you know. Like, the word climate is not even involved in a lot of them.
Anna Jane Joyner
Well, yeah, and that also is intentional because there are a lot of ways you can talk about climate change without the word "climate change". But we do, you know, we discounted things like, if there's a wildfire. It has to be, even if you don't use the word, connected to climate, it has to be shown that these wildfires have been accelerating, that they're getting worse. And so we really deliberated on how we made these decisions. And if you want to talk to Matthew, you know, the professor who oversaw that research, he could give you a lot more in-depth detail.
David Roberts
Tell us his name and we can give him proper credit here.
Anna Jane Joyner
Oh, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, or Doctor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson at Colby College, is one of the few academic researchers who study climate narratives, but previously he had studied them in novels and literature. This is his first project with film. And the other reason that I actually — well, okay, just twofold. Just generally speaking, even when it comes up in passing, we also work with climate psychologists like Doctor Britt Wray and a lot of other organizations within Hollywood who work in this space to try to get their issues and their stories out in the world. And even those passing mentions that you don't even necessarily consciously realize are really psychologically important for just normalizing these conversations as a part of our lives.
And also, like, even subconsciously communicating to your audience that this character that you're connected to, that you have a relationship with, is also thinking about this is very validating, you know, even if you don't consciously notice it. And one thing I just loved about that mention in particular is that that was a big character moment for the little girl, you know, who's like one of the main characters, and she goes, you know, Barbie walks up to her school and thinks she's going to be like, you know, adored as, like, this feminist icon. And this little girl just totally takes her down, you know, on consumerism, on feminism, on killing the planet. And it's just a really important moment for this story and for that character.
So, I hear you. And that it was maybe not as explicit as the other two mentions and some of the other others that we decided passed the test. But, you know, I do think especially with the students' input, that is why we decided to include it.
David Roberts
Did you find any movies that went beyond mentioning to actually, I don't know, deliver, like, substantive information? You know what I mean? Like, go past the first level, like, this is happening. You know, this is happening. It's making the world worse to, like, I don't know what's, like, happening and changing weather patterns, you know, like, one level deeper substance. Was there any, like, climate substance in any movie? I can't really think of one, but I haven't seen a lot of movies.
Anna Jane Joyner
So, we applied the climate reality check to two sample pools. We actually released it in March, right before the Oscars, and we applied it to the Oscar nominees, which is how Barbie passed the test. And the other two that were a part of that pool. One was Mission Impossible, the new Mission Impossible, which I thought was great. One because it does explicitly talk about climate. And the other reason is it talks about it in connection to national security. And it's basically a character telling Tom Cruise's character, you know, the wars that we are seeing now and that we will see in the future are going to be created by, you know, resource depletion, fighting over resources —
David Roberts
"A shrinking ecosystem." I looked, I looked at that one specifically. That's the term he used, a shrinking ecosystem.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yep. Also, love that example because, like, my dad loved Mission Impossible. That movie reached a really broad audience of also moderates and conservatives. But that also was a passing mention, I think an important and great one, but didn't really impact the story. I mean, it's great to include those mentions of the story, but the mention itself didn't change the nature of the rest of the story. And we actually talk about climate representation on a spectrum, which I can share with you, but the other one was Nyad. And that Bening's character is trying to swim from Cuba to Florida and she gets stung by a box jellyfish, which is very dangerous, can be fatal.
And Jodie Foster's character, who's her friend on the follow boat, basically just explicitly says, "You know, these box jellyfish are out of their normal range because of climate change." So she does make that explicit connection. Climate is only mentioned in that one conversation. But her getting stung by this jellyfish, that is very dangerous and is out of its normal habitat, did affect the story. It changed the story. And so that is what we would call on our spectrum a "climate world." The way that we kind of think about it and train writers to think about it is "climate placement," which is when it doesn't even come up in dialogue.
You might see solar panels, a compost bin, an EV, or some kind of impact. One really, an example of a movie that passed the first part of the CRC, "climate exists," but not the second part, which is "the character knows it," is "Parasite," which won the Oscar, an incredible movie. And in that story, there's a huge flood and it destroys the home of the poorer family and really deeply negatively impacts their life. And that, you know, for the wealthy family, inconveniences their camping trips. So you see the kind of economic injustice. And a lot of people would have watched that part of the story, that scene, and maybe not made the direct connection.
However, that is a real climate impact happening in South Korea. That it' s getting worse and deeply impacts a lot of people's lives, particularly people who are not wealthy. And so, we would consider that climate placement. It's an impact that's shown in the background, but it doesn't come up in dialogue. The next one is what we were just talking about with Barbie and Mission Impossible, which we called a climate mention. So, when it comes up in passing in a story, a show, an episode, or a film that doesn't have anything to do about climate, it's just talked about as a world of the story, but it's in passing.
And that has all the psychological benefits that I mentioned previously. And then we would have what I would put Nyad into, which is what we call climate world. And that's when it exists in the world of the story. It does change the story, but it's not the central focus of the story. And then we have kind of the far end of the spectrum, which we see a lot less of, is what we call "climate characters." And that's when, like, the plot and the character's motivation is really driven by climate change. And climate is kind of the central focal point of the show or the episode or the film.
David Roberts
So, those last two categories both strike me as, like, probably pretty thin. Can you name some other movies that are in one of those two categories?
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, for sure. I mean, of the ones that we studied from the 250 report, you're right. Those last two kind of more substantive incorporations of climate are a lot rarer. I wouldn't say any of those films were climate characters, where it was the central focus. The one that I would put into the climate world category is Glass Onion, which was a great film. And that I would put in that category because, you know, it's a big driving part of the story. Not the central driving part, but a big part is this, you know, technology, a clean technology that they're trying to —.
David Roberts
Hydrogen!
Anna Jane Joyner
Yes, to lower the carbon footprint. And it's a big, you know, it's a big part of the story. It really does deeply, you know, impact the plot, but it's not the central focus.
David Roberts
Yeah, as I recall, it ends up blowing up and going horribly wrong.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yes, it does. It does. And there's all kinds of, like, interesting, like billionaire tech, you know, themes in that film that I think are very relevant to climate in a lot of many ways. But other films or shows that I would put in the climate character category, so the ones that really are driven by climate: One is "Extrapolations." The Apple TV show that came out last year by Scott Z. Burns, who's one of our advisors and a dear friend and also probably in a lot of ways, our biggest champion in the industry for more climate stories.
You know, he wrote that show because he wanted to write a show about climate change, and he wanted to create all these compelling characters and drop them into a world where climate was a huge part of it. And one interesting tidbit about that show is a lot of people thought that it was a worst-case scenario because it's f****** scary and it starts in 2036, and then it goes to the end of the century. And even the 2036 episodes, there's two episodes that are 2036, 2037, and 2046. And those are like, you know, those are real impacts based on our actual science and what the world will feel like.
We actually did the world-building research for that show. So, we worked with scientists to establish, you know, in a three-degree scenario, which is exactly what we're headed towards, what will the impacts feel like? What would the world feel like in all these various places where the different episodes are set? On the film side, there's a lot fewer. I mean, you know, "Beasts of the Southern Wild," one of the first films that really explicitly incorporates climate, I love, because it's set on the Gulf Coast. I'm from the Gulf Coast. I live there part-time.
But, it's also, it talks about the racial justice and economic injustice pieces, or it really incorporates that. It's also just like a magical, beautiful film. And so, but I actually would probably put that more in the climate world scenario. So, climate is very integral to the whole story, but it's not the central focus. But, you know, films where it really is the central focus, I would say "First Reformed," Paul Schrader's film.
David Roberts
Oh, yeah, that's a big one.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, with Ethan Hawke. Also, early on in 2017. But that story, I just, I mean, and it is, it's dark if you've seen it, but it incorporates a lot of mental health themes, a lot of spiritual and faith themes. My favorite kinds of climate-related stories, and just stories in general, are stories that grapple with the dark, hard emotions and experiences and how that connects to our values and our spirituality and our mental health. And not necessarily end on a hopeful, everything's going to be great note, but end on a space of expansiveness and possibility.
And that film did, the last scene had this. It wasn't like, everything's great, but it had this kind of almost sacred moment of possibility. And so I love that. And then another one that I actually have similar feelings about is "Woman at war," which is an incredible Icelandic film. What I love about that is it's about an eco-terrorist, which we see a lot of them. And I used to say, "We've seen enough eco-terrorists. Let's move on to other tropes."
However, this film, the eco-terrorists, is about a middle-aged 50-year-old woman who's a choir teacher who's trying to adopt a kid. Who has all kinds of family drama going on, but she's also this badass eco-terrorist running around Iceland, taking out fossil fuel industry infrastructure. And it also kind of really subtly, but beautifully, touches on the justice piece, racial justice in particular, because she's a white woman and there's a cyclist from Spain, a tourist, who's there cycling around Iceland, who's a person of color, and he keeps getting arrested for her crimes. So it touches on that. But it's also super funny, quirky.
David Roberts
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that one.
Anna Jane Joyner
It's great. And again, at the end, it actually ends on — I won't tell you how it ends, but it ends on a scene where the impacts of climate change are very present. But it is the feeling of possibility and hope and that there is a future to be found within this. And I just, I love that kind of story because I think, you know, humans hate uncertainty. Like, we do. We evolved to hate uncertainty.
David Roberts
Well, this is, I mean, if you want to peg, one of the reasons why this has not been a more popular topic for popular culture is that there's no, you know, all it does is introduce big, vague, anxious uncertainty. I mean, that is the name of the game.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, and I do think it's actually psychologically. And Dr. Britt Wray, who's one of our advisors and a preeminent mental health, psychology, and climate expert, and I have talked a lot about this. I think it's one of the reasons that when people wake up to climate change, they often jump straight from not really paying attention, mildly concerned, maybe intellectually understanding it, but not really emotionally facing it and grappling with it. They jump from that position to doom. And "We're f******" really quickly. Can I curse on this podcast or should I restate it?
David Roberts
Yes, we've started beeping curses. This is our new innovation here on Volts. So let it rip.
Anna Jane Joyner
Okay, cool. So, yeah. And I think that's because sitting in the messy middle of uncertainty is, in a lot of ways, more psychologically difficult than believing that we are screwed or believing that we're all good. And so, I think that stories that help us kind of befriend uncertainty, to become more familiar with it, to not be as afraid of it, are really, really important for this moment in our history as we are going into more and more uncertain times.
David Roberts
Well, let me — that's a good segue into my next issue that I wanted to address with you, which is that, and I don't know exactly how to put it, but it seems like all of the mentions, you know, the specific ones that I looked into, mentions that passed this climate test, are just variations of what the Barbie line was or what the Mission Impossible line was. Like, doom is upon us, things are falling apart, the earth is falling apart, ecosystems are shrinking, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, I've always, like, I've just found in my work, I mean, part of the reason I started Volts was therapy for myself.
Anna Jane Joyner
Totally get it.
David Roberts
You know, like, part of what keeps me sane. And I found, and I've heard this from listeners, too, and heard this from subscribers and heard this from people who followed my work from the beginning, just like nothing can kind of ground you and give you a sense of kind of hope and efficacy and everything else, more than seeing people out there doing stuff, solving it. Right. Seeing people out there working on it in all sorts of clever ways. I mean, that's what Volts is all about. It's like, all the different ways that people are having at this problem.
And I just worry that the tone of this whole effort is pushing screenwriters into putting more of this kind of, like, things are falling apart, doomy, scary message in. And I just wonder. I'd like to see more representation in popular culture of electrification, like EVs and solar panels or regenerative agriculture or just. Or policy, I know, I mean, I know, I know, even as I say this, people are laughing. Obviously, policy fights are boring. No one wants to make a movie about policy fights. But I just feel like, what about the whole solutions? You know, what about the whole, like, we're doing stuff about this side of things?
Is that getting lost here? Is that getting conveyed to the tv screenwriters, et cetera?
Anna Jane Joyner
Absolutely. Like the, you know, again, primary tropes, eco-terrorists, which now I have found great writers can do anything, even with tired tropes like eco-terrorists.
David Roberts
Yeah, what did you think of, just as an aside, what did you think of the "Blow up a pipeline" movie?
Anna Jane Joyner
That was actually the other movie I was going to mention, is like a climate character. And Ariel Barrera, who stars in that movie and also co-wrote that movie at 24, which is crazy and raised the first round of financing. I am just absolutely blown around by her. I loved that movie. I loved it just as a movie, even apart from climate change, just as an action film. But for those folks who haven't seen it, it's kind of like an Oceans Eleven meets Gen Z climate activist, and they literally blow up a pipeline. That's not really spoiling anything.
You can see it in the trailer. But what I loved about it is you had this big ensemble cast of mostly young people that were very diverse racially, but also the different places they're coming from in their lives. There's a more conservative, kind of tech, Texan, gun-carrying character. And they all have these different motivations. You know, two of the main characters grew up near a fossil fuel plant that, you know, that affected their personal health, also affected their families, and there were deaths in their families related to that. And so, like, you have, you really touch on the mental health piece.
You really have this really diverse cast of characters that are very well developed and very interesting. And I actually did find it left me on a hopeful note. It left me with a sense of possibility, because even though it's maybe not the solution that many of us would like to see, just seeing these young people take action about something and calling it what it is, which is mass murder.
David Roberts
And also, you mentioned this, but I think it's just worth emphasizing that it shows that caring about climate change is not one singular thing. Right. It's the only popular art I can think of, honestly, that actually says, "Hey, climate change exists. And you can have different ways of approaching it, you can have different ways of thinking about it, you can react to it differently."
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, and so I love that film.
David Roberts
Anyway, I interrupted. Sorry.
Anna Jane Joyner
No, no, I'm glad you asked that because that was the other one I wanted to talk about. So the answer, you know, there are a lot of policy shows, there's a lot of political dramas, there's a lot of ways that you can incorporate more policy fights that touch on climate into those kinds of genres where it's a really natural narrative fit. And I would love to focus more on really cultivating those kinds of stories. But I do think that there's kind of, well — twofold, like, one, I get a little bit annoyed with, like, the hope and solutions being like, "all the stories need to be hope and solutions," because I live on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is pretty screwed.
Like, even if we, like, cut off all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow, let alone we could get wiped out by a hurricane this summer, you know, and so it's like, there are places where there are not solutions, where there are not hope. There are already people who have died and lost their homes, you know, because of climate change. That being said, like, obviously, we need a much bigger menu of stories that grapple with all these other elements of climate change in compelling and entertaining ways. And definitely solutions and hope.
David Roberts
Just showing people how they can, you know, a little bit like we were just saying about the movie, just showing people that, like, being engaged with this does not mean you have to go march in the street.
Anna Jane Joyner
Or blow up a pipeline.
David Roberts
Yeah, there are lots of different ways to get involved in this and do something about it. You know, I don't know that that message is getting out enough to —
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, no, I think we do need to see a lot more characters who are taking some kind of action that are working on, you know, these different critical climate solutions like renewable energy and electrification. And so, absolutely, we do promote incorporating more of those things, both in the background, in the placement. If you're showing the exterior of a house shot, put solar panels on. In a car scene, have it be an EV. Absolutely, we do promote that. But the way that we do it is very much through inspiration, because if you have worked with any writers or creatives and you are a writer, you know that no one likes to be told how to do their job. And so if you come in —
David Roberts
There's a reason I work alone.
Anna Jane Joyner
If you come in and you're like, "You have to do it this way, don't do it this way." It's just gonna turn off even the showrunners and writers and executives who do care about climate change, which is the vast majority of them, because they don't want to feel like they're being asked to, you know, write a PSA for the Sierra Club. And so they want it to fit authentically within their story, which we really advocate for because, you know, we do put story first, and that is very strategic and intentional. One, it's because I love the art form of TV and film, but also it's because if it feels forced, if it feels preachy, if it feels inauthentic to the story, then, you know, that isn't just bad for the story, it's bad for climate change, because audiences can feel that.
However, we also emphasize that if your story is set here on Earth, now or in the future, then if your characters were real people, they would already be encountering climate change. So, you can almost always unpack how that does authentically show up in your story. And then, one other just quick thing on the hope solutions, and this is kind of my soapbox, is that I do think that a lot of particular climate funders and other people in the climate space have this idea that those kinds of stories are the only kinds of stories that motivate action. However, even with extrapolations, we did an impact study on extrapolations with USC, which will come out in a month or two.
It's a qualitative study of viewers who are really committed, so watch all or most of the show. And they, you know, the emotions that they reported it evoking the most were anger, anxiety, and fear, like the kinds of emotions that we don't usually associate with inspiring action. However, 80% of them reported taking action as a result of watching the show. So even this story that didn't evoke hope or courage or the kinds of emotions that we think of still motivated them to take action. And, you know, the stories that I think are personally and, you know, from a professional standpoint, in a lot of ways, the most important are the ones that grapple with mental health and the dark emotions.
Because one thing that TV and film does so well is help us feel seen and help us feel less alone, you know? And so, like, even Britt Wray calls it a psychological safety net. It's similar to what therapy does, actually, is even just having a story or a character that's wrestling with those difficult emotions not within the context of doing anything. It creates a psychological safety net that moves you from a place of overwhelm or isolation into a place where you're much more likely to take action.
David Roberts
Right. Well, I mean, that's just like, at the root, at the core of all this is just what they call social proof, you know, social signaling. Like, at the very base level, this is mostly just about like, "you're not alone." People like you think about this stuff, right? We think about this stuff. It's all just like, it's okay to think about this stuff. Just letting the subject out of the box, you know? 'Cause I don't know if you saw this. There's a study just last week, I think, in Nature showing that, like, incredibly high numbers of percentages of people are willing to take action on climate change and willing to do so at the cost of some financial sacrifice.
Anna Jane Joyner
It was 69% who said that they would give up 1% of their income to fight climate change.
David Roberts
But they don't think other people will, right? I mean, that's the thing. They think they're alone in that. They think other people disagree. So, a huge part of this is just like opening up the kimono here and airing all of this out and just letting people see that it's like, oh — you know, that's just such a primitive feature of our brains that we want to know that other people in our tribe, we're on the same page as other people in our tribe.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, it's like why we started telling stories over 30,000 years ago was to grapple. It was really twofold: to grapple with existential crises, death, loss, change, you know, and to help get through those. Like, humans have always used stories to grapple with existential crises. Also, it was because stories are more memorable. So, especially before the written word, the better the story, the more likely it would be for your kids or your grandkids or whoever to remember it and have it affect them and impact their lives. For contrast, we only started using the language of mathematics 5,000 years ago.
And so, like, just like the evolutionary ingrain of story and the impact of story goes back really, really, really far. And that is very, very much true today. Like, we have an advisor named Doctor Angus Fletcher, who's a story scientist. So, he has degrees in literature from Yale, actually, and then he also has degrees in neuroscience. And he has this great quote that I love that, you know, there's this kind of mythology that storytelling is the best form of communication. However, he says it's the only form of communication, because if we are not being given information in the form of a story, we are either attaching it to an existing story that we already have, which is why the left and the right in this country can look at the same set of facts and come up with dramatically different interpretations, or we're just totally blanking out the information.
It's just like we're just not taking it at all.
David Roberts
And this is to get back to something we were both talking about earlier. It's like, I feel like when climate change first sort of emerged as a topic, a) almost all the communication was boring and scientific, and thus people attached it to existing stories in their head. And the main existing story in their head that they attached it to was, "Oh, here are the greens again, nagging me again about my recycling," basically. That's it. And lacking a different story to attach it to, they attached it to that one.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, and that was also, like, very driven by the fossil fuel industry. Like, when the original Earth Day took off and mainstream Americans became legitimately concerned, for good reason, about air and water, the environment. They intentionally wanted to paint people who care as crazy, radical, right-wing hippie nags, and they were very effective at it. And same with the shame narratives, you know, as we know and probably many of your listeners, BP is who popularized the carbon footprint. And that was an intentional PR strategy, storytelling strategy, to take the onus of responsibility off of the industry and put it on the individual to evoke guilt and shame.
And so, you're totally right. And then I also have a theory that that's why we see it show up more in apocalypse movies. Because —
David Roberts
Yes, another existing story.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yeah, we've had the apocalypse story from the Bible and all kinds of other faith traditions. And so, it's a lot easier when you're faced with an existential crisis to attach it to that story than imagine what an alternative future could look like.
David Roberts
Neither of those are great. I don't really like either of those stories in this context. You mentioned this earlier, that there's more demand for what you're doing than there is supply. Do you think that there's sufficient institutional support for what you're doing or institutional awareness for what you're doing? I mean, I already know the answer to this question, but I just want to air it out. Like, do you think that the sort of funders and the boomers with their hands on all the money get the need for this?
Anna Jane Joyner
No, I think —
David Roberts
Wait a minute. I knew you were going to say that.
Anna Jane Joyner
And really, speaking mostly to climate philanthropy, that is the majority of our funding, but also the world that I come from and know. No, like, you know, what I've experienced is that narrative change in storytelling is getting buzzier and buzzier within climate philanthropy, but nobody actually knows what it means. And in the —
David Roberts
People do love the word storyteller. They do love that word.
Anna Jane Joyner
In the rare occasion that money does go towards com strategy or storytelling, it usually is a kind of funding, you know, campaigning organizations to do Facebook videos or to do a digital email strategy. And it's just like, what I love about the Hollywood strategy and why I've really invested my life into this is because Hollywood is the most powerful storytelling engine in the world, you know, other than arguably religion. And it's like the reach and the impact of Hollywood can shape — Really, what Good Energy is doing, we work on individual TV and film projects, but we've really invested in changing the narrative at the industry level, that this is just a part of our lives and therefore should be a part of the characters' lives and helping them see this much bigger menu of creative possibilities beyond the apocalypse and shame that could be showing up in their stories.
So, no, there's very — the funding piece has been an ongoing struggle, for sure, which is, frankly, maddening, because on the industry side, I couldn't even fathom the amount of success. You know, we're working with writers who have won multiple Emmys and Oscars. We're working with the academies, the guilds, all of the streamers and networks. I mean, we've really created an incredible community within this industry of very high level, you know, people who want to do more of this and need support in doing it. And we are always struggling to provide the support at the rate that we really need to be.
David Roberts
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just funders, if you're out there listening, maybe a little bit more of this, maybe that one next policy white paper that you're thinking about funding. You know, maybe we have enough of those. Maybe you could do something else.
Anna Jane Joyner
Thank you. I appreciate that. And I should say that there are funders, or some of, you know, Bloomberg Philanthropies. We would not exist without them. We have Walton Family Foundation. Like, there are funders who have really, you know, prioritize this and been great partners, and I don't want to diminish that, but it's just, you know, the rate of funding is still really low.
David Roberts
Yeah, well, you've teed me up perfectly for my final question, which then is, you know, I think you could find people who would argue that for young people today, social media is more immersive, more ubiquitous, more influential than " media" media, than entertainment media, than movies and TV and books anymore. And I just wondered if you had thought at all about what an effort like yours would even look like applied to social media, or if you've thought at all about that, or if you just so, like, this is your lane and somebody else can worry about that. Like, if you have thoughts on that.
Anna Jane Joyner
I do have thoughts on that. It is a common response we get from funders. They're like, "Well, can you do games and digital content?" Those are entirely different forms of storytelling. And, like, we, it took us five years to get super excellent at scripted TV and film and podcasts and, like, "Yes, if you want to give me a lot more money, I can develop, you know, adapt our playbook for those forms of storytelling." And I would want to do that in partnership with people who are experts in those forms of storytelling as we do all of our work.
But, yes, I mean, I think the reason that I am drawn to TV and film and podcasts and novels versus some of these other storytelling mediums is because they have really unique psychological benefits. So, like, film has been studied extensively for being the storytelling medium that transports you the most, which basically means that when you're watching a film, you just lose yourself in the story and your sense of identity kind of melts away. And, you know, it's this immersive experience which is a really vital kind of emotional space for learning new things and being inspired —
David Roberts
Assuming you're not, like, on your couch, watching on a laptop and flicking around on your phone at the same time.
Anna Jane Joyner
Yes. And obviously, like, the better the movie, the more likely that is to happen. But also TV, you know, these parasocial relationships that we have with TV characters over time, you know, that is very powerful just because you get more time with them. You know, you're with them hours and hours, and that is very persuasive in a different, you know, way. And so, like, there's these unique kind of emotional and psychological benefits of television and film that you don't get, you know, through digital media as much or through, you know. But of course, digital media has all of the incredible benefits that are, that are different than the forms of storytelling that we currently work with. So very open to exploring that, but would need a lot more funding. We can't just adapt to what we do for screenwriters to digital creators.
David Roberts
Right, right. Well, thank you so much. This is really interesting. It's not something I've — as an old guy, I've mostly tuned out of pop culture. So, I'm very glad you're out doing what you're doing. Thanks for coming on and walking us through it.
Anna Jane Joyner
Oh, thanks for having me. And thank you for your work. I very genuinely mean that. You had a very big impact on my life and my career.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
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