This story is part of The Hollywood Reporter’s 2023 Sustainability Issue (click here to read more).
Give up your climate guilt.
That’s the title of the first episode, and one of the principal themes, of A Matter of Degrees, a podcast for the climate curious from policy experts and advocates Leah Stokes and Katharine Wilkinson. The idea that fighting climate change is a lost cause, or one requiring an unrealistic level of personal sacrifice, is a kind of trap, they say, that leads to defeatism and inaction and lets institutions off the hook. Stokes and Wilkinson instead cut through the noise by conducting deep-dive investigations into greenwashing and other environmental misdeeds, and by showing how existing technology and policies — if widely and intelligently rolled out — can make a difference on the structural level.
Along the way, the hosts keep things accessible by bringing in big names, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, and bona fide climate advocates like Sonia Aggarwal, Donnel Baird, Jesse Jenkins, Jamie DeMarco and Quentin Scott to talk real solutions. THR spoke with Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, about the impact of the podcast and steps Hollywood can take to combat the climate crisis.
Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
Courtesy of A Matter of Degrees
What have been some of the most interesting stories you’ve run across in making the podcast?
We did an episode last season, in season two, that looked at this fake grassroots campaign in Southern California. It was called Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions. So there was a requirement that if you build a new house, it has to be all electric, which has been done in 75 cities in California. And so Santa Barbara was going to do it, and basically, this front group, which actually was represented by the gas utility, sent text messages to tens of thousands of people in the community lying to them, and all these people wrote to the city council, being like, “Oh my God, you’re gonna take away my gas stove!” or whatever, which was not true. It was lies. We did a whole episode talking about this dark-money astroturfing group. That no longer exists, that fake campaign. There is no more Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions. You cannot go on their website. They don’t exist anymore. So that’s kind of cool.
Have you received an influx of trolling or misinformation from climate deniers?
The vast majority of Americans think that climate change is real — it’s happening now. Deniers are maybe 10 percent of the population. It’s really not the majority by any means. It’s a very small minority. Our show is really for folks who want to go deeper on the climate issue and are concerned about it, which is the vast majority of American people, and we want to get into the details in an accessible way that people can understand, but that actually goes quite deep. In some ways, we’re more like a Climate 201 rather than a Climate 101.
How have you been thinking about the balance between the personal choices people can make and the roles the government and corporations have in combating the climate crisis?
That’s a really core topic to our show. Our first episode is called “Give Up Your Climate Guilt,” and it was kind of a manifesto for why this is not some individual problem for you to go solve by yourself. A lot of folks have lied to us about climate change for years and delayed us. We had [the environmentalist] Bill McKibben on the show, and he talks about how the most important thing you can do is not recycle, it’s to organize and join organizations and be part of the movement.
That being said, at the beginning of season three, we did this miniseries called “What Can I Do?” that does talk about, on the personal level, what are the most important things you can do? What we really try to explain to people is that you have to look at larger systems; for example, if you electrify your life and remove fossil fuels from your home, that is changing infrastructure. That is a much bigger change than, for example, recycling.
People kind of think of climate activism or action in one way, which is really about consumer choices, behavioral choices, and what we try to do is get people to think about structural change, even on an individual level.
Courtesy of A Matter of Degrees
What’s the best way to communicate with family members or people who don’t understand the urgency of climate change or feel the impact of their personal choices?
It’s not really about sacrifice. So much of the branding, both from the movement and also from folks who don’t want us to transition off of fossil fuels, has been painting what we’re doing as being sacrifice. I have an EV, I have solar on my roof, I have two heat pumps — one for my water, one for heating and cooling my home. I have all these things and guess what? I can still take a hot shower; I can still drive around. I can still do all the things that I could do with fossil fuels.
That’s when we’re going to win, when people really understand that, actually, it’s just better to not poison myself while I cook myself lunch by combusting gas in my house. And it’s just better to drive an EV because it’s cheaper and I don’t have to worry about high [gas prices].
What can Hollywood do?
Hollywood has a role to play here too: How do we make sure that the film sets are electric? So many of these things are running off of diesel generators right now, but we have technologies like batteries, and there are new startups that are offering the ability for shoots to be done on electric, and that’s amazing. With the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s tons of money from the federal government to help you do that. You can get 30 percent of the cost back for solar and batteries, for example, through tax credits.
And, of course, Hollywood has a massive platform to tell stories. We need more climate stories. We need more diverse climate stories. And there’s tons of climate people who are willing to work with folks in Hollywood to get the stories right. The stories, I think, are getting better over time on climate.
I watched this hilarious TV show, Partner Track, over the summer about a lawyer — it was on Netflix. The whole plotline was that there was this new clean-tech startup. This entrepreneur was making this new technology, and then he got bought out by a fossil fuel company with the plan to shut him down. What the lawyer does is she shows up at the annual meeting and tries to get the votes to undermine this takeover, which is exactly what happens in the climate space. We do shareholder activism. It was really cool to see this storyline that actually reflects what the climate movement is doing, what technology is like. It was actually extremely well done for a climate plotline, and it’s not like 90 percent of people who watch this show are gonna think that’s a climate plotline.
