Hollywood grapples with how to use its climate superpowers

“WHY is it February and hotter than the devil’s booty-hole outside?” So wonders Abbott Elementary principal Ava Coleman in the show’s second episode.

Showrunner Quinta Brunson told a rapt audience at last week’s Hollywood Climate Summit that this wasn’t just a throwaway laugh line. She was trying to get her audience to think about climate change in a cheeky way. “Beating them over the head with a message will make them turn the TV off,” Ms. Brunson said.

That tension — between the messages audiences want and the climate warnings they need to hear — was at the heart of the two-day summit, which brought together titans of show business at the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, the same theater where Academy Award nominations are announced every January. In a series of panels and workshops, actors, producers, writers, and showrunners debated what the industry can and should do to address climate change.

Hollywood has a sizable carbon footprint — making TV and movies is both energy-intensive and polluting — but it has an even bigger sphere of influence. The entertainment industry collectively offers one of the world’s largest platforms for social and political change, one that its stars are increasingly using to draw attention to climate issues.

“Hollywood is a major stakeholder in every global economy,” actress Jane Fonda pointed out during a panel about an upcoming California referendum on oil and gas wells. “I’d like to ask all of you, what do you think are effective ways we can push back against oil and gas and cut off their resources?”

In the same panel, Ms. Fonda rattled off direct indictments of the fossil fuel industry. “Natural gas, it sounds good right?” she asked. “Don’t let them fool you. Methane [the main component of natural gas] is the worst climate-warming gas.”

By shining a spotlight on a referendum on a relatively obscure piece of state legislation, the celebrated movie star is elevating the cause of activists who otherwise might not be heard. (And while obscure, the impact of the referendum on the bill, known as SB 1137, is major. What California voters decide could have a big impact on legislative action in other states when it comes to siting new oil and gas wells.)

Also in attendance was Netflix Sustainability Officer Emma Stewart, who is responsible for shaping both the company’s decarbonization goals as well as climate narratives in its programming, the most recent example being the comedy series Unstable, centered on an eccentric climate tech entrepreneur played by Rob Lowe.

Netflix’s market research shows that audiences want to watch stories about climate change, Ms. Stewart said. But whether or not those audiences are moved to action by climate narratives is harder, if not nearly impossible, to measure.

“We know that Will and Grace had an impact on marriage equality,” Ms. Stewart said by way of comparison, while noting the same can be said for climate change stories.

With big-budget productions like and , it’s clear that climate-centered stories are becoming mainstream in scripted film and TV. The next frontier, according to summit panelists and organizers, is the world of unscripted. That may be a tougher nut to crack.

James Longman, the co-executive producer of the recently concluded The Late Late Show with James Corden, said people come to shows like that for escapism. Climate change is a “difficult” topic to hit when viewers just want to see Mr. Corden do silly things like jump out of a plane with Tom Cruise. (Which, Mr. Longman pointed out, isn’t very environmentally friendly.)

Yasmin Shackleton, who executive produced MasterChef and Next in Fashion, said there are ways to still have fun and get people to think critically.

On Next in Fashion, Shackleton said producers wove in sustainability by intentionally picking some cast members who made clothes from vintage and upcycled materials and were vocal about that approach. The show also had contestants compete in a challenge to make clothes using flowers and plants. “Our job is to change people’s perceptions of what is cool and what is not cool,” Ms. Shackleton said.”

Behind the camera, too, Hollywood still has a lot of work to do to address its impact on the climate. A single hour of television production in the UK, for example, produces as much carbon dioxide as an average American generates in a year, . In LA, the film and TV industry contributed more to air pollution than any other industry except for oil production and refining, according to a two-year .

When asked about the work being done to green sets, Ms. Brunson mentioned switching from plastic to metal water bottles for crews, which she acknowledged was a small change. Others involved in production spoke about the importance of integrating a green mindset as early as the script-writing stage, which can mean, for instance, avoiding writing scenes that rely on plastic waste. That’s something that Universal Filmed Entertainment Group announced it would be doing in March as part of its program.

“Creativity is unleashed by thinking outside of the box, by breaking down the habits that we’ve become conditioned to accept as normal,” said Kat Coiro, director of Marry Me and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, at the Climate Summit.

Progress on more systemic industry shifts has been slower. Diesel generators are a constant fixture on sets and account for about 15% of a production’s overall emissions. Last week, Netflix, the Walt Disney Co., and RMI launched the , an accelerator program for climate tech startups working on less polluting alternatives.

Currently, “no existing products meet the necessary size, scale, mobility, and specific power and energy requirements to fully replace diesel generators used by the film and TV production industry — yet,” the group said in a statement.

In many ways, last week’s summit was the industry reminding itself to keep trying to connect with audiences and walk the climate walk. “There’s a corporate bug that infects you the longer you’re in here where you start to get less and less ambitious, and you start to forget the power of what stories are actually able to do,” said Daniel Kwan, also known as one half of “the Daniels,” the directors behind last year’s celebrated film Everything Everywhere All at Once.

“The stories that we told ourselves about endless growth markets and all these things that have really broken down are no longer serving us,” Mr. Kwan said. “We have to be building these stories that will one day become the systems of the future, and that is a huge task.” — Bloomberg