Lights, Camera … Propaganda

Joe and Jill Public have no idea how deep-state actors and green billionaires are manipulating them about global warming and renewables. For convenience I’ll call the manipulators the Green Blob.

The Blob dominates education, print, radio, and “newsy” TV. The Blob has now set its sights on TV streamers and movies. So far only a barely-noticeable fraction includes “climate” nudges. The Blob’s ambition is to get most or all of screen entertainment pushing the net-zero mantra by around 2030. It will be mostly injected slyly through almost subliminal tweaks of what seems to be straight-forward screen plots and dialogue.

The Blob knows that viewers don’t want to be preached at. So it’s funding clever and dedicated specialist teams to get at the script-writing community. These creatives are pretty green-left-minded anyway but don’t want “climate” turning their drafts into career-tanking flops. The Blob is re-assuring them that climate references are OK and providing templates on how to work them in surreptitiously.

The Blob is operating on too many fronts for me to catalogue in one essay. Instead I’ll just focus on Good Energy, a pint-sized but billionaire-funded operation specifically targeting Hollywood. The stakes are enormous: movies influence Western voters by the billion, myself included. I’m just your average lounge lizard but I’ve lost count of what I spend annually on movie outings and Netflix-type subscriptions. In Good Energy’s own words,

We support TV and film creators in telling wildly entertaining stories that honestly reflect the world we live in now—a world that’s in a climate crisis. We aim to make it as easy as possible to portray the climate crisis on-screen in entertaining and artful ways, in any storyline, across every genre.

I don’t want to sound doleful about it. The Good Energy zealots are simply too ridiculous to actually succeed with their brainwashing ambitions. For example, their playbook for unconvinced scriptwriters includes some imaginary “loglines”- that’s jargon for one-sentence movie descriptions. As Good Energy suggests to scriptwriters:

Try out a climate crisis story for the protagonist of your favorite show or the last show you worked on. What if Tony Soprano [in The Sopranos] started selling counterfeit solar panels? How would he cope with the uncertainty of climate change?

Good Energy provides this fictive logline for a Seinfeld episode — very topical as Jerry Seinfeld was successfully touring Australia this month, give or take some interruptions by Hamas-loving ferals. Here’s the Good Energy-tweaked Seinfeld script:

Logline: When George starts dating a climate activist, Kramer goes berserk after talking with her, trying and failing to find the right way to act. He stops eating meat, stops showering. What is the best way to be!?

Then there’s the political drama Scandal.

Logline: A huge protest against an oil pipeline is raging outside the White House. When a famous Indigenous youth activist, Melanie, receives multiple death threats, Olivia wants to help but has a conflict of interest: Melanie has uncovered that President Grant’s campaign donors are major funders of fossil fuel pipelines.

I loved Fleabag – a Brit “dramedy” about an appallingly unfiltered Londoner.

Logline: When the hot priest invites Fleabag to a climate protest, she agrees to go for one reason only: to troll for end-of-the-world sex, the best kind of sex there is.

Good Energy is particularly keen to normalise renewables in toddlers’ receptive little minds. It provides this imaginary episode of the Rugrats cartoon:

Logline: Susie invites Tommy over to her house to see the “stroller panels”— creatures that live on the roof of her house and eat sunlight. Tommy is afraid, and it takes an adventure up to the roof for him to realize the [solar panel] creatures are friendly and “make Earth happier.”

Elijah Aron was a scriptwriter for BoJack Horseman, an adults’ cartoon about a half-human horse. Elijar has provides Good Energy with this:

Logline: BoJack goes to his high school reunion, only to discover all the monarch butterflies he was in drama club with have died.

Sex sells, so Good Energy re-writes a plot of the popular British sitcom called Chewing Gum. The actual sitcom stars its author as 24-year-old shop assistant Tracey Gordon, a religious virgin who wants to have sex and learn more about the world.

Logline: Tracey wants to have sex with Connor, but he’s gone plastic-free and refuses to wear a condom.

You might well have concerns for those running Good Energy. Chief executive is Anna Jane Joyner. She’s described how global warming perils had reduced her to tears, the “kind of the moment where I knew that there was nothing else I could do but work on climate.”

She’s described how global warming perils had reduced her to tears, the “kind of the moment where I knew that there was nothing else I could do but work on climate.”

The group’s 2023 990’s filing shows her doing 60 hours a week and drawing a $US100,000 paypacket ($A150,000) from the Blob. Her second in charge, Alisa Petrosova, works only 50 hour weeks for $US92,500 or $A138,000 (p7).

Joyner says, “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.” Movies are so powerful because you lose yourself in the story “and your sense of identity kinds of melts away”. In this immersion, you are in a “really vital kind of emotional space for learning new [climate] things and being inspired.”

Her group has eight full-time equivalents. “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.”

Good Energy’s 2023 donor-provided budget was $US999,000. Donors include Bloomberg Family Foundation — 2022 net assets $US11.5 billion, revenue $US1.7 billion and annual giving of $US977 million. Another key donor is the Walton Family Foundation, which kicked in $US225,000 in 2022-23 for Joyner to create a “tool” to “empower more story-telling for climate change”. This foundation passed out $US657 million in grants in 2023 from its $US7b stockpile of investments.

Joyner’s group has hoovered up more than $US2 million ($A3m) in donations and consulting fees in three years, but she still describes funding as an “ongoing struggle for sure, which is frankly, maddening”. That’s because she spies so many missed opportunities to pound audiences with climate messages.

“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.”

Her Good Energy tells scriptwriters:

Do Your Research: It’s key to talk to scientists, experts, and individuals with compelling real-life stories, to ensure your scripts are rooted in expertise and lived experience. We would be thrilled to point you in the right direction. See our Library of Experts for a damn impressive sampling.

I sampled a few of the Library of Experts biographies and need to stress that I am not making anything up.

♦ Favianna Rodriguez, Center for Cultural Power —

an interdisciplinary artist and social justice activist whose art and praxis addresses migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Good Energy’s official biography says, “Favi used her brains—and her vagina, as she puts it—to escape the polluted cement-trap of Oakland. She got a full ride to UC Berkeley as an engineering student, then dropped out to be an artist.

Caught by Covid restrictions back at her Oakland home, she filled her house with plants, broke through the cement outside to feel the soil with her hands, bought an electric car and went vegan.

♦ Dr Peter Kalmus, a NASA data scientist and climate forecaster of coral reef deaths, wildfires and tornados: “He is also one of the world’s most outspoken climate activists.” The ProPublica blog profiled this Los Angeles resident three years ago, when he pushed his family towards what today would be called a net zero lifestyle. He tweeted, “Is this my personal hell? That I have to spend my entire life desperately trying to convince everyone NOT TO DESTROY THE F– EARTH?”

Every time he heard a plane fly overhead, he muttered, “Fossil fuel noise.” He had nightmares about being on planes. “The emissions, you know,” he said. “It feels like the plane is flying on ground-up babies to me.”

“The emissions, you know,” he said. “It feels like the plane is flying on ground-up babies to me.”

Kalmus tried sustainably growing artichokes, eggplant, kale and squash, but was reduced to bringing home waste food he fished out of dumpsters. This earnt him the soubriquet among sceptics of “dumpster-diving climate scientist” but this is unfair as he was quite discriminating about the food scraps he took home.[1] “Dozens of eggs with only one broken. Flats of (mostly not mouldy) strawberries. Bread past its sell-by date.” Arriving in the kitchen for breakfast drove wife Sharon nuts, he admits.

His next carbon footprint reform was a composting toilet in the bathroom, generating “humanure” for the garden Mongolian-outhouse style. Sharon said she liked the local, organic anti-capitalist politics of it. They tackled the smell by adding eucalyptus leaves but bits of plants got all over the bathroom. Kalmus finally re-located the smelly toilet outdoors.

Sometimes, Sharon thought of Peter as being like “John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness, crying out, ‘Repent, repent!’ This was said with love but also annoyance. He agreed: “I do think we need to be talking about the collapse of civilization and the deaths of billions of people.”

Their youngest, Zane, began regular climate strikes at the town hall, without the impact achieved by Greta Thunberg. Sharon grouched about Zane’s dad, Peter, “There’s almost like a pornographic fascination with ‘Oh, I’m going to imagine just how bad everything is going to be.'” She began minor domestic rebellions by wasting hot water on washing up, and shunning the Mongolian-style toilet.

The couple got so tense in a climate argument that Sharon threw a laundry basket at him, shouting “Our entire lives are about climate change!”[2]

This somewhat bizarre feature finishes by remarking that Kalmus now makes climate ads. A correction (one of three) was added,

Jan. 26, 2021: This story originally misstated the rate of the rise in temperature caused by global warming. The temperature will rise by a few tenths of a degree Celsius per decade, not by year. 

♦ Democrat operative, crisis management strategist and decades-long Palestine advocate Rania Batrice doubles as both a Library of Experts guru and a Good Energy director: “The boundary crossing work done by Rania is a great example of the type of work we will need to adapt and mitigate to the climate crisis.”

Batrice’s Good Energy profile says she married her first husband young but he didn’t like her, leaving her “depressed and miserable. So she kept escaping to [climate] campaigns all over the country.” Her second partner was abusive and drove her to financial ruin: her house was foreclosed. She spent the next decade fighting fossil fuel use and pipelines. The biog finishes,

She’s in a healthy marriage now, but she sees gendered conditioning everywhere in the political and advocacy world, where sexual assaults are so often hidden, even in the climate movement. She’s trying to forge a new norm: advocating for women, and turning down misogynistic millionaire clients.

♦ Grace Nosek, a legal scholar, youth climate justice organizer, and storyteller against the fossil fuel industry, centering justice, joyful community and hope into her work and scholarship.

♦ Dr. Britt Wray at Stanford researches the mental health impacts of climate change and has written a book, Generation Dread (Knopf, 2022), plus a Gen Dread newsletter about “staying sane in the climate crisis”. Newsletter items include, “The Climate Therapist will see you now — Good professional support for climate distress can be hard to access, and this new column is here to help fix that.”

GETTING back to Good Energy’s brow-beating of scriptwriters, it wants studios to normalise conversations about climate and renewables — such as through quick, casual references – “they could go a long way toward saving the planet,” according to arts professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson of Colby College, who has done reports for Good Energy. He suggests quick takes of solar panels being installed on roofs, electric cars being charged (certainly not queueing at faulty charging stations) and people eating fake-meat hamburgers.

A winner for Good Energy’s perspective was the sci-fi movie “Happy Death Day” of 2017, where in each of six scenes a climate activist accosts college passers-by to ask if they would help her “stop global warming”. Joyner’s report calls it

a fun and lighthearted example of how climate can be woven into any genre. And by juxtaposing feminism and climate concerns (“sexualized capitalism!”), the film makes the intersectional argument that it’s all connected, all the same bad guy.

What of Good Energy maestra Anna Jane Joyner herself? She was interviewed at great length last May by blogger/podcaster David Roberts. She told him that the CIA, FBI, LA Police Department, the US government, household gas suppliers and the fossil fuel industry had spent nine-figure sums for favourable film scripts, so why shouldn’t net-zero activists get into this space too? So Bloomberg and the Sierra Club[3] became her first Good Energy funders and in July 2019 she was on her way. To her surprise, breaking into Hollywood script creators’ zone was easier than persuading rich funders to give her more money.

To her surprise, breaking into Hollywood script creators’ zone was easier than persuading rich funders to give her more money.

The Walton’s $US225,000 funding for a story-telling “tool” involves a simple test of whether a film or video shows that warming is happening, plus at least one character acknowledges it. Screenwriters, says Colby College’s Schneider-Mayerson, are to apply the tool to “hold themselves accountable and help audiences to advocate for more climate movies”. Joyner sees the tool as “kind of quippy” — simple, easy, “a little playful even”, a little edgy.

It’s a bare minimum standard for climate insertions. Joyner wants 50 per cent of scripted films and TV shows to pass the Climate Reality Test by 2027— scenes, for example, with news broadcasters describing unprecedented heat and characters attending climate protests. But writers should include climate “in a way that’s not shoehorned in, in a way that’s connected to character, in a way that enhances the story world,” says Carmiel Banasky, Good Energy’s editor in chief.

Schneider-Mayerson this year ran the climate tool over 250 popular films of 2013-22. “Only” one in ten films had a climate-aware character. Sadly for identity politics, this cohort was 70 per cent males, 65 per cent white, and 77 per cent middle-aged, rather than emissions-obsessed yuppies. Moreover, only 2 per cent of the films had a character grappling with climate anxiety. Under 4 per cent of films mentioned climate in more than one scene.

Climate-friendly actions were rarely depicted: only 9.6 per cent of films portrayed a character riding a bicycle, and 1.2 per cent of films featured characters who are identified as vegan or vegetarian.

When Good Energy measured up the 13 Oscar contenders this year, only three passed:

♦ In Barbie, teen Sasha scolds Barbie, “You set the feminist movement back 50 years, you destroyed girls’ innate sense of worth, and you’re killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.”

♦ In Mission Impossible, someone says the next world war will be fought over “a shrinking ecosystem … dwindling energy, drinkable water, breathable air”.

♦ In Nyad, a swimmer from Cuba to Florida gets stung by a box jellyfish that had paddled there thanks to ocean warming.

The Hollywood climate plots involved apocalypses, eco-terrorists and “shame narratives” which Joyner deplores — the “bitchy, annoying neighbor yelling at you about your recycling.” They became tedious, self-righteous nags about trivia. Joyner’s interviewer, Roberts, says, “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’.”

An obstacle is that the wealthy green-minded Hollywood scripters are conscious of their own huge carbon footprints, and hence reluctant to preach authentically against emissions. Joyner:

Yes, it [shame] shuts you down. No, it doesn’t inspire you. It doesn’t help you process your grief, your confusion, or your anxiety. … So that, you know, we do a lot in our playbook and in our consulting to kind of emphasize Bill McKibben’s, you know, ‘the price of admission into the climate movement is hypocrisy.’[4] It is not our individual faults that we were born into an economic system shackled to the fossil fuel industry.

Nor does she like scripts blaming humans generally for warming. “It’s a very specific small group of powerful, largely white men who made the decisions that have gotten us into the situation,” she says. She overlooks that it’s Chinese yellow men now driving emissions.

Joyner says Good Energy did the “world-building research” for eight-part streamer Extrapolations (2023), set in future decades where CO2 has turned the planet into a hellscape. “So, we worked with scientists to establish … what would the world feel like in all these various places where the different episodes are set?” I particularly enjoyed Episode 4, Whale Fall, set in 2046, when CO2 has literally turned the oceans acid. Heroine Becca then gets to converse with the last krill-deprived humpback, voiced sadly in whale song and humpback dialect by Meryl Streep.

“It’s f—g scary,” Joyner says of the series. “And those are like, you know, those are real impacts based on our actual science and what the world will feel like.”

She discusses the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline. The star and co-writer was Ariel Barrera, 24. “I am just absolutely blown around by her,” says Joyner, no pun intended. She “loved that movie” particularly because of its big ensemble cast of racially-diverse youngsters. “And I actually did find it left me on a hopeful note, 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.”

Interviewer Roberts complains that even if screen entertainment devotes itself to climate, youngsters still don’t get enough of it via social media which is more immersive, more ubiquitous, more influential than ” media” media, than entertainment media, than movies and TV and books.

Joyner replies that funders often want her to get climate added to screen games and digital content.

Joyner replies that funders often want her to get climate added to screen 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.'”

Good Energy has produced what it calls a “Cheat Sheet” for scriptwriters, which includes exhortations to show characters having mental health crises over warming.

“Showing anger, depression, grief, or other emotions in relation to the climate crisis can only make characters more relatable. And don’t forget to take care of your own mental health while doing this work,” Good Energy thoughtfully remarks. It continues,

Let’s show how a low-carbon lifestyle can be sexy! Let’s reimagine what it looks like for a character to eat a plant-rich diet, attend a protest, or upcycle vintage clothes. (And if your story requires a yacht, why not make it solar powered?)

The Cheat Sheet also says it’s critical to have lots of climate stuff from Indigenous people, like the real-life artist/activist Julian Brave NoiseCat who says warming “is yet another apocalypse that we plan on surviving”. Indigenous filmic characters need to be espousing climate reparations, land returns, and defiance so that “they can all help us to imagine a different future”.

Good Energy lauds Glass Onion, a successful Netflix streamer of 2022. It shows billionaire character Miles Bron messing with zero-emission hydrogen schemes. Interviewer Roberts comments, “Yeah, as I recall, it ends up blowing up and going horribly wrong.” It’s spooky how the plot parallels our billionaire Twiggy Forrest’s hydrogen capers, $2 billion poorer.

As I mentioned initially, Good Energy is just one of a myriad of billionnaire-funded outfits foisting the purported climate apocalypse on an increasingly suspicious public. In time, this narrative will collapse from its own absurdity.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Kalmus profile: “Next came dumpster diving (which eventually — and thankfully — morphed into an arrangement with Trader Joe’s to pick up their unsellable food every other Sunday night). Peter’s haul — “seven or eight boxes,” according to Sharon; “three boxes,” according to Peter — included dozens of eggs with only one broken. Flats of (mostly not moldy) strawberries. Bread past its sell-by date. Peter did his best to put things away before he fell asleep because waking up to the mess drove Sharon nuts. But … it was a lot. Low-carbon living was a lot.”

[2] Propublica on Kalmus: “WE NEVER EVEN TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE! DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?” he said. This did not go well. She threw a laundry basket. “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME,” she shouted. “Our entire lives are about climate change.”

[3] On February 2, 2012, Time magazine’s Ecocentric blog published Exclusive: How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Gas Industry-and Why They Stopped that rocked the environmental community and the energy industry. The Sierra Club had accepted donations from Chesapeake Energy totalling nearly $US26 million during 2007-2010.

[4] McKibben is a world-leading climate activist