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Almost
exactly 10 years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio
won a Best Actor Oscar (his first) for
his performance in “The Revenant” as an
early 19th century fur trapper who is
injured in a bear attack, then by turns
grudgingly kept alive, abandoned and
left for dead by the avaricious hunting
party he had been hired to lead.
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In
his acceptance
speech at those 88th Academy
Awards, DiCaprio first thanked the
film’s cast and crew. He then pivoted
quickly and forcefully to the
environment. “The Revenant,” he said,
was … “about man’s relationship to the
natural world that we collectively felt
in 2015, as the hottest year in recorded
history.”
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The
rest of what he said is worth a big
block quote; to read it today, the week
after the 98th Academy, during which
politics and policy both receded, is
bracing.
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“Our
production needed to move to the
southern tip of this planet just to
find snow. Climate change is real, it
is happening right now, it is the most
urgent threat facing our entire
species, and we need to work together
and stop procrastinating. We need to
support leaders around the world who
do not speak for the big polluters,
the big corporations, but who speak
for all humanity, for the Indigenous
people of the world, for the billions
and billions of underprivileged people
who will be most affected by this, for
our children’s children, and for those
people whose voices have been drowned
out by the politics of greed. I thank
you all for this award tonight. Let us
not take this planet for granted. I do
not take this award for granted.”
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That
year was something of a heady time for
environmentalists. Barack Obama was in
the middle of his second term as
president of the U.S and though his
climate and environmental policies were
not especially progressive, in 2015 he
did enact the
Clean Power Plan, which had
the stated goal of reducing carbon
emissions locally, and “leading global
efforts to address climate change”
outside U.S. borders.
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Further,
just a couple of months after the 88th
Academy Awards, the U.S. would become
one the 196 parties to sign onto the
Paris Agreement, an international treaty
to reduce the rise of global
temperatures, whose terms had been
negotiated the previous fall.
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Fast
forward 10 years. Donald Trump withdrew
from the Paris Agreement in 2020. Joe
Biden rejoined in 2021. Trump withdrew
again just a few months ago. And in this
second go at the White House, the Trump
Administration has done everything in
its power to tighten the knots tethering
the U.S. to fossil fuels. It has
literally forced owners of coal plants
in Colorado
and Washington
State that want to shut them
down to keep them open. Trump has fought tooth
and nail in court to suspend wind
energy projects that are
fully permitted, under contract and
under construction across the eastern
seaboard. And his administration has
rolled backed numerous efforts to keep
climate change in check, like the
allowance of state-specific fuel economy
standards and the landmark
fossil-fuel endangerment finding
of 2009.
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Meanwhile,
that global temperature record that
DiCaprio mentioned in his acceptance
speech in 2016 seems almost trifling
compared to what has happened since.
It’s been surpassed six times. According
to data from the National Centers for
Environmental Information, the three
hottest years on record are 2024, 2023
and 2025.
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At
the 98th Academy Awards, DiCaprio was
nominated again for Best Actor — his
sixth in that category — this time for
“One Battle After Another.” The film,
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won
Best Picture. DiCaprio lost in his
category to Michael B. Jordan, the lead
of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” so he
didn’t have a chance to say anything
about climate change.
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But
not a single one of the Oscar winners
this year mentioned it.
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Both
“One Battle After Another” and “Sinners”
were produced by Warner Brothers, which
is about to be acquired by Paramount
Skydance, which in turn is owned by
David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison,
one the world’s wealthiest individuals
and noted Trump supporter. Ellison the
younger has already made decisions that
have significantly defanged the
climate coverage at CBS News
— Paramount’s flagship news network —
and it would not be shocking if CNN —
part of the WB — is next.
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Indeed,
one of the defining characteristics of
this show was its dearth of any language
at the awards that could be considered
political.
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Instead
of the fire we got from, say, Michael
Moore in 2003, what we got
was a sort of mea culpa from P.T.
Anderson — who might be the definitional
American Gen X director — in his
acceptance speech for Best Adapted
Screenplay:
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“I
wrote this movie for my kids to say
sorry for the housekeeping mess that
we left in this world we’re handing
off to them. But also, with the
encouragement that they will be the
generation that hopefully brings us
some common sense and decency.”
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I
harbor the same hopes, but it might
require at least acknowledging the
problems first.
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One
thing that does give me some optimism is
that the feted films themselves did a
pretty good job acknowledging climate
change. According to Good Energy, a
consultancy group, of the 16 scripted
features that were nominated for an
Oscar and met the eligibility criteria,
five passed
the “climate reality check.”
That’s pretty good!
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Relevant
especially for those facing the heat
wave right now in L.A. and the rest of
the southwest: a study published earlier
this week in Lancet attempted to
quantify how rising
global temperatures will impact
physical inactivity in
different parts of the world. Chloé
Farand summed it up for the Guardian,
noting the researchers’ projection of
500,000 additional annual deaths due to
inactivity by 2050.
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Meanwhile,
Libby Rainey at LAist wrote about how
the city is preparing for the inevitable
heat
challenges that will accompany the
World Cup games this coming
summer.
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This
isn’t brand new — in fact, it references
the reporting of my former colleague
Sammy Roth — but Alexandra Tey over at
the Nation has a nice roundup of sports fans
protesting their teams’ financial
ties to fossil fuel companies.
It focuses on one of the most visible of
these partnerships: Citi Field, where
the New York Mets play, is named for
Citi group, the world’s biggest lender
to oil and gas companies.
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A
few last things in climate news this
week
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With
gas prices skyrocketing due to the war
in Iran, some Californians have been
wondering why oil
companies in the state can’t just
start drilling more. My
colleague Blanca Begert explains why it
isn’t that simple.
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The
related big question is will the turmoil
in the middle east push countries around
the world to double down
on renewable energy. In the
New Yorker, Bill McKibben makes
the case that this could be the moment
that small clean tech — think solar
panels, heat pumps, induction cooktops,
etc — really takes off.
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Finally,
somehow, some 10 million
tons of manure produced at
California factory farms is
unaccounted for. Seth
Millstein, writing for Sentient,
explains how lax regulation let farms
dispose of 200 Titanics’ worth of animal
waste without telling anyone where or
how they did it.
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