Climate Change and the Koch Brothers Walk Into a Bar
Funny or die. As Fenton told Grist.org, the environmental movement doesn’t use popular culture effectively. An experiment designed to prove him wrong is the new Showtime series “Years of Living Dangerously,” whose creators decided it was high time that professionally trained environmental journalists stopped taking “correspondent” jobs away from hard-working celebrities like Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The series is winning praise from environmentalists but may be preaching to the choir; a 2012 study suggests that both Showtime and HBO have audiences already polarized toward polar bears. And if you think the characters on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” sound serious when they warn that “winter is coming,” just flip the channel and listen to Han Solo and the Terminator discussing climate change.
So how can celebrities, journalists, researchers, and others talk about climate change without being so blanking earnest? Here is what we have come to: kittens. Seriously.