If Don’t Look Up, the hit movie, is going to change anything, it will only be if climate organizers seize the opportunity.
Don’t Look Up, the climate change parody film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep that came out in theaters December 10th, has become a huge hit since it started airing on Netflix Christmas Eve. In its first week on the streaming platform, more than 111 million hours of the movie were viewed, putting it in the top ten list for 94 countries (yes, Netflix has an odd way of measuring movie views). It was number one for the holiday week in the United States as well as many other nations.
Let’s leave aside the debate over whether it’s a great political satire or a terrible one, which I wrote about here last week. Don’t Look Up is reaching a mass audience, one that is undoubtedly much larger than the ten to twenty million people who are already on the mailing lists of climate action and environmental groups. When a message movie reaches so many people, the important question becomes: What kind of political impact will it have?
David Sirota is a long-time progressive journalist (and sometime Bernie Sanders speechwriter and political pugilist) who came up with the original idea for the movie, which his friend Adam McKay then turned into its screenplay. Speaking to podcaster Lauren Steiner on her December 24th show, Sirota said he was hopeful about the movie’s political potential. Noting how widely it was being viewed, he argued a version of the law of big numbers to her: Assuming that it will get seen and talked about by hundreds of millions of people, he said, “If we can move one, two, three percent of a couple hundred million people, that can actually contribute to moving the needle.”
That’s not a bad conversion rate. But figuring out if it will happen isn’t a question of hope; it’s a tactical problem.
Speaking in formal organizing terms, this is an opportunity not for persuasion or mobilization, but for absorption. That is, the process by which a moment of outrage or awakening gets converted into the growth of a movement. Without deliberate organizing, absorption doesn’t happen. People may spontaneously march in the streets or share their anger online, but unless organizers move in a timely way to welcome those people into frameworks for ongoing engagement, those moments of mass participation pass.
Unfortunately, this connection is typically not made. Most political groups work according to organizational logics. They make multi-year strategic plans that get converted into annual goals and quarterly programs, and budgets get divvied out and committed months in advance. So while events in the world may present sudden opportunities, many organizations do little more than issue statements.
A dozen years ago, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, leaking millions of barrels into the sea. It took weeks until the spill was capped. All during those months, you could see a live feed of the oil billowing into the ocean: it was on CNN constantly as well as many other websites. But none of the country’s “Big Ten” environmental groups, who cumulatively have budgets exceeding a billion dollars a year and staffs of thousands, pivoted to address the massive wave of public attention caused by the accident.
Fast forward to today, and things are only a little bit better.
I get lots of political emails and text appeals. I have yet to get one about Don’t Look Up. (I bet that’s true for everyone reading this piece.) That may be more because most political organizations have been on autopilot since mid-December, focusing solely on pushing all their end of the year fundraising efforts. A quick glance at the websites of groups like 350.org, the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, the Sierra Club and the Citizens Climate Lobby shows no one pivoting to catch the buzz being generated by the movie. To be fair, the Sierra Club’s magazine offers a friendly movie review; and Extinction Rebellion does have an Instagram post up drafting off the film’s success that’s earned more than 40,000 likes. But the online landscape and engagement efforts of Big Climate haven’t really moved.
With one exception. On the same day Don’t Look Up launched on Netflix, Count Us In, a new climate action group spun out of the TED conference network in 2020, went up with a sophisticated online hub designed around the film. The site tries to meet people wherever they are, offering a range of steps that someone who is new to climate action can take, ranging from personal behavior changes to explicit political acts. And Count Us In isn’t resting there; it also has rolled out an online media campaign in partnership with some of the film’s stars. This video it made with DiCaprio already has close to a million views.
Climate activists may quibble with some of Count Us In’s choices; the group appears to be tilted heavily towards shifting personal and household consumption behaviors, which it says can amount to 25–30% of the total carbon emissions reductions we need to achieve to hold off disaster. Leaders Quest, a British charity that is its fiscal sponsor, gives off more than a whiff of corporate social goodism, a tendency also evidenced by many of Count Us In’s major partners. But at least Count Us In is trying to insert itself in the conversation stirred up by this hit movie.
Given that the governments of the world, including the United States, are falling short on fulfilling their own promises to cut carbon, this next year is going to be a turbulent one not just in terms of how we’re affected by climate disasters, but how activists respond. My prediction, which is included in New_ Public’s “Lookout for 2022” series, is that people are going to start taking matters into their own hands, directly trying to disrupt the most damaging forms of carbon energy use. The story line offered by Don’t Look Up is just a warning, not a prophecy that must come true.