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Laura Klivens: This is Forum. I’m Laura Klivens, in for Mina Kim. I’m a climate reporter here at KQED. I’ve written about wildfires, heat waves, the strain on our energy grid, and I read plenty of stories that hold powerful groups accountable or report on system failures. Those stories are necessary, but are they enough?
For the people who may not read that kind of reporting, how else can climate messages be shared? There’s this episode of Ted Lasso where one character realizes his team’s sponsor is connected to an oil company causing destruction in his home country of Nigeria.
Ted Lasso (clip): Dubai Air is owned by a horrible company, one that has turned the southern coast of Nigeria, my home, into a hellish, fiery swamp. I can no longer wear that name on my chest. Never again.
Laura Klivens: He starts a movement among the whole team, and they put duct tape over the fictitious sponsor’s name on their jerseys. It’s a climate message without saying too much about being a climate message.
It turns out there’s a whole network of people intentionally bringing climate into the entertainment industry this way—directors, TV writers, advertisers. Can inspiring action on climate be more effective when we approach the issue through culture?
We’ll break that down today. Joining us are Sammy Roth, author of Climate Colored Goggles, a newsletter about climate and culture; Tamara Toles O’Loughlin, national climate strategist, founder of Climate Critical, and board member of Good Energy, an organization focused on Hollywood climate storytelling; and Jessica Kutz, lead climate reporter at The 19th. Welcome, everybody.
Tamara Toles O’Loughlin: Thanks for having us.
Jessica Kutz: Thanks for having us.
Sammy Roth: Happy to be here, Laura.
Laura Klivens: Great. Thank you all for being here. I want to start off with a story I thought was really impressive—that Ted Lasso example. What’s one great climate story each of you has recently seen on film or TV? Sammy, can we start with you?
Sammy Roth: Oh, that’s such a good question. I recently wrote a piece about the new Pixar film Hoppers. I’m glad you brought up the Ted Lasso episode, by the way, because that’s such a fabulous example and one of my favorites as well.
Hoppers, I would say, is even less explicit. There’s no oil company, no story centered on a heat wave or renewable energy—nothing you can directly point to as a climate plotline. But if folks haven’t seen it yet, it’s about animals coming together to stop a freeway overpass from destroying a forest glade, one of the last protected wild spaces outside a city.
The movie keeps poking fun at human car culture and the drive for bigger roads and bigger cars. There’s even a joke that the freeway would only get people places up to four minutes faster. The city is called Beaverton, named after the beavers who are the main characters, and the proposed “Beaverton Loop” would literally connect Beaverton to itself—a truly pointless freeway project.
The main human character is a teenage girl who loves nature and wildlife. She uses this fictional technology to “hop” into the mind of one of the beavers and help them protect their habitat. It’s a great parable about development and whether humans can learn to value things beyond their own convenience and consumption. There’s even a fire at the end. It’s a fabulous story, and I’d recommend people go see it.
Laura Klivens: Okay, thank you. Tamara, what about you?
Tamara Toles O’Loughlin: Oh my gosh, I’m such a nerd about this stuff. Over the holiday season, two films unexpectedly brought climate change into the story in ways I thought were both subtle and really effective.
One of them was Turkey Hollow, narrated by Ludacris. It’s a classic Muppet film where the villain is basically a large-scale industrial farmer, and the hero is one of those “darn environmentalists.” It just drops into the plot at the beginning and then moves on naturally.
Then there was Dashing Through the Snow, the Christmas movie with Lil Rel Howery as Santa Claus. At one point, Santa mentions that they stopped putting coal in stockings because it’s bad for the climate, so now everyone gets cauliflower instead. I loved that. I even went online afterward just to say I saw that moment and appreciated it.
Laura Klivens: That’s great. I love that. Jessica, what about you?
Jessica Kutz: In a story I recently wrote on climate change and storytelling, someone brought up an episode of Grey’s Anatomy centered on a heat dome. It was meant to mirror the one that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021.
The episode focused on the public health impacts and how a hospital responds during an extreme heat event. I really connected with it because I live in Tucson, where we recently had one of our earliest 100-degree days on record, and we’re only a couple hours from Phoenix. Heat is always on my mind.
It was interesting to see a weather event like that dramatized for a larger audience. I don’t even think they explicitly mentioned climate change, but it really captured a situation people have lived through recently.
Laura Klivens: Tamara, what element of storytelling do you think makes these stories effective, especially compared with the doom-and-gloom headlines we often see?
Tamara Toles O’Loughlin: As I mentioned, I’m on the board of Good Energy, which is a fantastic group working to improve climate storytelling. They came up with something called the climate reality check, which is basically a test for whether climate is actually present in a story and whether it matters.
There are three parts: first, the story is set on Earth. Second, the story acknowledges that climate change is happening, or has happened if it’s set in the future. Third, there’s a character who recognizes it.
It’s a really useful shorthand for asking whether climate change is meaningfully present in a film. In both of the examples I mentioned, climate was tied directly to characters and plot, even in subtle ways.
Laura Klivens: So you’d be fine with the cauliflower stocking?
Tamara Toles O’Loughlin: Absolutely. I love cauliflower.
Laura Klivens: Sammy, why do these smaller, passing references matter?
Sammy Roth: They matter because, if you look at polling, most Americans say they care about climate change and are concerned about it. A large majority say they support climate action and clean energy.
But when people are asked how high a priority climate is when they vote, it ranks much lower—behind the economy, immigration, and many other issues. So the more reminders people get in everyday life, the more it stays present in their minds.
Laura Klivens: Thank you. We’re talking about climate storytelling and the role of entertainment in conversations about climate change with Sammy Roth, Tamara Toles O’Loughlin, and Jessica Kutz, and we want to hear from you.
What have you noticed about how climate change is discussed or represented in film and TV? Did you watch Don’t Look Up? Do you have opinions on that? Have you made changes based on climate stories you’ve seen? Give us a call at 866-733-6786.
