The public debate over climate change and global warming has been referenced in popular movies and TV since at least the early 1970s.
Soylent Green
Crime thriller starring Charlton Heston about a dystopian future (2022) where global warming and the greenhouse effect have led to food shortages.
A TV episode starring Leonard Nimoy asked the question of whether or not drastic weather changes in America's northern states mean that a new ice age is coming.
Warming Warning
An hour-long documentary that aired in the United Kingdom and the United States highlights the effects of carbon emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The number of TV shows in America at the time, featured a discussion on climate change, as did the season 9 episode of Cheers, “Crash of the Titans.”
HARRY: Well, Rebecca, I need to work up the figures, but everything seems to be in good shape. Except for that strange floor deformity.
REBECCA: What floor deformity?
HARRY: There seems to be a depression here. It’s almost as if this bar stool is sinking right into the Earth. I wonder what could cause that.
NORM: Uh, pardon me, pal. You’re standing between me and my cheese doodles.
CLIFF: You know, uh, I don’t think that a ground surface irregularity of this nature is so strange. I mean, after all, the entire east coast is sinking. We all know that. I mean, due to global warming, the polar ice caps are melting and, hey, we’re gonna be all underwater anyway.
The film depicts catastrophic climatic effects following the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, in which a series of extreme weather events usher in climate change and lead to a new ice age.
When Crane, Poole, and Schmidt are sued for misrepresenting their efforts to “go green,” the firm’s attorney notes that the climate debate is not as simple as the green activists suggest.
A 2006 American documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former Vice President of the United States Al Gore's campaign to educate people about global warming.
A remake of a 1951 sci-fi classic about an alien who comes to Earth with the intent to eradicate all humans to save it from climate change.
King of the Hill on Carbon Offsets
In Season 13, Episode 2, “Earthy Girls Are Easy,” the show explores carbon credits, highlighting a local company that devises a clever scheme to trick people into buying them to “offset” the company’s illegal dumping.
Hank Hill: “What the heck is a carbon offset?”
Dale Gribble: “It's like a 'get out of jail free' card for people concerned about the environment, but not concerned enough to actually do anything. You simply pay someone to plant trees or build windmills to offset all the carbon you’ve dumped on the earth.”
Hank Hill: “That’s ridiculous.”
A sci-fi film in which scientists attempted to reverse global warming with an experiment injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, but the experiment caused the earth to freeze over and the last humans on earth live on a train traveling around the world.
"First the weather changed. The deniers knew why, but they still doomed us with their lies. War made the Earth even hotter. Her ice melted, and all her species crashed."Before the flood is a 2019 National Geographic Documentary about Climate change.
“We’ve known about this for decades. For over half a century, top scientists have been warning us.”In season 18, in an episode “Hotter than hell,” the Pacific Northwest experiences a heat dome.
"When the body's exposed to rising temperatures, it has the ability to cool itself down. We sweat, our blood vessels dilate, and our heart rate increases,” - Meredith GreyDon’t look up is a 2021 Netflix comedy that satirizes society’s response to climate change and the lack of global action by using an earth-destroying comet as an allegory for climate change.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a 2023 action movie about environmental activists in post-apocalyptic California sabotaging an oil pipeline to fight against climate change.
Landman
Landman is a Paramount Plus series about the oil and gas industry in Texas, following a crisis executive (Billy Bob Thornton) who speaks frankly about the importance of reliable energy sources.
