Hey, Hollywood - Don’t make the same climate communications mistakes we made as marketers

Note from the authors: Futerra realizes that many lives are impacted by the ongoing writer’s strike, but we also acknowledge that the climate crisis continues unabated. We offer this advice in solidarity and with sensitivity to the challenging circumstances facing the entertainment industry.

Nicole: To say I was excited when I heard about Extrapolations, the new Apple TV+ show on climate change, would be an understatement. It’s the biggest-budget scripted TV show ever made about climate change, and it has an all-star cast list that would turn anyone’s head. Climate fiction is a fast-growing book genre but movies and TV shows focused on global warming and the climate crisis are still few and far between. As a sustainability communicator, I’m thrilled to see more mainstream climate stories like this emerging.

The first episode opens in dystopian disaster - forest fires in St. Petersburg, an escalating protest outside a futuristic COP conference, and Kit Harrington as an evil self-serving CEO. Key issues like freshwater distribution and the reality of exceeding our 1.5 degree scenario also get screentime for the first time. As I watched the episode, my younger Gen Z stepsister and roommate wandered in to joined me.

We weren’t even halfway in when she abruptly stood up and walked out. When I called after her, she replied,

“It’s making me too anxious. If I wanted to see doom and gloom, I would have just turned on the news.”

I was genuinely surprised. Can’t she see how important this is? We need to be talking about the realities of resource depletion and sea level rise!  But the more I watched the show, the more I realized she was right. Most scenes felt like a bleak Black Mirror episode, the characters lacked depth, and the plot offered no moments of relief. Don’t get me wrong – it’s great to see a show get the science right but it came at the cost of good storytelling and people noticed. It earned a mere 45% on the Tomatometer.

I asked Will Patterson, co-author of BBC’s Planet Placement guide and Creative Strategy Director with a background in film and TV, for his take on Extrapolations and good climate storytelling.

Will: Similarly to Nicole, my high hopes for Extrapolations were dashed early on. A very glossy retread on the same apocalypse narrative we’ve seen again and again was not going to have the cultural impact so desperately needed to shift the needle on climate change.

As Hollywood starts to take climate change seriously, there is a risk that well-meaning creatives continue to frame the issue in the ways that have been hindering climate action for decades. In light of this, Nicole and I put together a list of four key climate communication mistakes we have learned from – and how storytellers in Hollywood and elsewhere can avoid them.

The engagement mistake: assuming information will drive engagement

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” - Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Social science research shows us emotion and intuition are more persuasive than facts and reasoning – and yet, we keep trying to leverage the facts of climate science to drive engagement.

Marketers are in the business of storytelling, but when it comes to sustainability, we abandon our craft to focus on an altruistic appeal to avoid ‘selling’. The truth is sustainability itself isn’t a winning marketing proposition. And awareness alone isn’t an effective strategy. Likewise, climate narratives that lean too heavily on the science of climate change without riveting drama and great characters will fail to engage mainstream audiences.

What to do instead:

First and foremost, do what you do best and tell a great story. Parables are a good way to tell a gripping climate-inspired story that doesn’t get bogged down in climate science, whilst still helping your audience navigate our current crisis.

The motivation mistake: using doom and gloom to inspire action

‘Well-meaning attempts to create urgency about climate change by appealing to fear of disasters or health risks frequently lead to the exact opposite of the desired response: denial, paralysis, apathy, or actions that can create greater risks than the one being mitigated’ - Report by the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface between Psychology and Global Climate Change

One of the reasons marketers use facts and fear to communicate climate change is that the communicators themselves are progressive, egalitarian, global citizens passionate about sustainability and justice.

At Futerra, we would call them ‘greens’. Most people aren’t greens but many appeals for climate action feel like they were made by greens, for greens. Research shows us people have different values and therefore differing outlooks and differing priorities. Unlike greens, most people don’t get fired up at the mention of climate change - instead they feel anxious, fearful, guilty, fatigued, or simply disinterested. This values mismatch has led many marketers to leverage distressing facts or gloomy scientific predictions in climate communication in attempts to spur action, often excluding any sense of hope or personal benefits.

What to do instead:

Make room for more than just deep-green heroes with altruistic aims.

There’s been little in climate creative to motivate non-greens. To the average person, urgency is only motivating if they can take immediate and appropriate action. The relationship between your household energy use and ecological collapse is not intuitive and most climate solutions are portrayed as personal sacrifices. But a low-carbon future offers plenty of benefits and excitement. The same way we need better products and services that offer genuine value, we need more inclusive stories about the future that inspire and thrill.

The fatalism mistake: showing the bad without imagining the good

“We need new kinds of stories, stories that tell us that nature is resilient and can rebound and get back to a healthier state, if we give it a chance to do so. We need stories that tell us that we can collaborate with nature, that we can, as Pope Francis has urged, be stewards and partners of the natural world rather than dominators of it. We need stories about a new kind of happiness not based on material consumption.”

- Espen Stoknes, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate

Climate change is now doing a better job of foretelling its own threatening future than we ever could. Heat waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, toxic air pollution – people around the world are seeing and experiencing climate change with their own eyes. On the flip side, the transition to a low-carbon, circular, just and inclusive future has been vastly underexplored and is hard for most of us to imagine.

From Mad Max to Interstellar (even Wall-E!), the apocalypse has been the mainstay of eco-narratives in pop culture. But if that’s the only story we’re telling, we’re at risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s time for new climate stories, ones that feature solutions.

From regenerative agriculture to smart cities, electrification, rewilding, timber skyscrapers, energy cooperatives, circular fashion, new social norms, collective action and many more. The plethora of solutions to climate change offer a vast palette for storytellers to draw from.

What to do instead: 

Do what TV and film does best – help people imagine better. Show how good the transition to a low-carbon future could be in ways that don’t perpetuate a false binary: utopia or dystopia.

The villain mistake: blaming humanity, not fossil fuels, for climate change

Environmentalists also live in the world we’re trying to change. And despite what the [fossil fuel] industry and its advocates insist, that does not make us all equally responsible for the climate crisis.” - Bill McKibben, Author, Educator, Environmentalist and founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org.

It’s now known that Exxon knew burning fossil fuels would heat the planet and lead to climate breakdown as early as the 1970’s. But for decades, oil and gas leaders purposefully engaged in climate disinformation campaigns to maintain their license to operate. British Petroleum (BP) even went so far as to hire the public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather to shift the blame of climate breakdown away from fossil fuel companies onto individuals in a now infamous “carbon footprint” campaign.

The real villains in this story are the fossil fuel companies and the politicians helping perpetuate their longevity. As some have already noted, Extrapolations curiously side steps this fact by choosing to make the villain of the story a Silicon Valley billionaire CEO profiting off climate adaptation, “vaguely blaming ‘us’—'humanity’, ‘corporations’, and ‘capitalism’ in the broadest (and shallowest) possible terms.”

This is not to say many billionaires and CEOs are not complicit in the climate crisis, but to omit any mention of fossil fuels in a saga about climate change plays right into the hands of those who say we can’t live without them.

What to do instead:

Steer clear of blaming human nature and make it clear that the root cause of the climate crisis is the burning of fossil fuels. We need climate storytellers to focus on the real villain we can defeat – fossil fuel companies who are still fueling climate denial for profit.

Whilst these problematic tropes persist, there are a number of popular eco-narratives and shows that are getting a lot right. They’re blending storytelling, climate science and psychology flawlessly, helping to engage and motivate audiences on climate whilst not perpetuating fatalistic and anti-human themes. Here’s a few of our favorites:

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023) – This is easily one of the best films in the climate fiction genre. A tense thriller that explores the moral lines of environmental advocacy and focuses our attention on the real and personal impacts of burning fossil fuels.

Black Panther (2018) & Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) – The Afrofuturist world of Wakanda is tech-forward, beautiful and just. It gives us an inspiring blueprint of a better future, without lacking drama.

Pride (2014) – It’s not technically an environmental narrative (and it does center on the mining industry) but this crowd-pleasing film is a perfect template for collective action, showing how unlikely allies can join forces to successfully challenge unjust power structures.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) – This wonderful, heartbreaking film is told through the eyes of a child, Hushpuppy. It’s about how rising sea levels are changing her world.

Erin Brockovich (2000) – Julia Roberts is fantastic as flawed, relatable underdog Erin Brockovich, who shows us anyone can become a hero of environmental justice.

Narratives enable people to imagine and make sense of the future through processes of interpretation, understanding, communication and social interaction. - Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Stories are unquestionably powerful. To reach a cultural tipping point on climate change, we need not one new climate story, but a universe of them.

Futerra’s Stories to Save the World is a new resource for storytellers that identifies the most popular and most promising climate narrative frames, with the aim of broadening the cultural response to climate change and speeding up climate action.

"The engineers of the future will be poets."

- Terence McKenna, writer, philosopher and ethnobotanist