Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: The Climate Reality Project (Page 1 of 2)

Highway to Hell:  Car Culture and Hollywood’s Hero-Worship of the Automobile

June 21, 2023 / / 44 Comments

With road-trip season upon us once again, here’s an examination of how American car culture has been romanticized by the entertainment industry; how automobiles, far from enablers of freedom and individuality, are in fact “turbo-boosted engines of inequality”; and how Hollywood can help remedy an ecocultural crisis it’s played no small role in propagating.

In any given episode, the action reliably starts the same way:  a wide shot of the Batcave, Batmobile turning on its rotating platform to face the cavemouth, camera panning left as the Dynamic Duo descend the Batpoles.  Satin capes billowing, Batman and Robin hop into their modified 1955 Lincoln Futura, buckle up—decades before it was legally required, incidentally—and the engine whines to life as they run through their pre-launch checklist:

ROBIN:  Atomic batteries to power.  Turbines to speed.

BATMAN:  Roger.  Ready to move out.

A blast of flame from the car’s rear thruster—whoosh!—and off they’d race to save the day.

By the time the 1980s had rolled around, when I was first watching Batman (1966–1968) in syndicated reruns, every TV and movie hero worth his salt got around the city in a conspicuously slick set of wheels.  Muscle cars proved popular with working-class ’70s sleuths Jim Rockford (Pontiac Firebird) and Starsky and Hutch (Ford Gran Torino).  The neon-chic aesthetic of Reagan era, however, called for something a bit sportier, like the Ferrari, the prestige ride of choice for Honolulu-based gumshoe Thomas Magnum (Magnum, P.I.) and buddy cops Crockett and Tubbs (Miami Vice).  The ’80s were nothing if not ostentatiously aspirational.

Even when cars were patently comical, they came off as cool despite themselves:  the Bluesmobile, the 1974 Dodge Monaco used in The Blues Brothers (1980); the Ectomobile, the 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel in Ghostbusters (1984); the Wolfmobile, a refurbished bread truck that Michael J. Fox and his pal use for “urban surfing” in Teen Wolf (1985).

The DMC DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future is clearly meant to be absurd, designed in the same kitchen-sink spirit as the Wagon Queen Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), but what nine-year-old boy in 1985 didn’t want to be Michael J. Fox, sliding across the stainless-steel hood and yanking the gull-wing door shut behind him?  And like the characters themselves, the DeLorean evolved with each movie, going from nuclear-powered sports car (Part I) to cold-fusion flyer (Part II) to steampunk-retrofitted railcar (Part III).  “Maverick” Mitchell’s need for speed didn’t hold a candle to Marty McFly’s, who’s very existence depended on the DeLorean’s capacity to reach 88 miles per hour.

Vehicles that carried teams of heroes offered their own vicarious pleasure.  Case in point:  the 1983 GMC Vandura, with its red stripe and rooftop spoiler, that served as the A-Team’s transpo and unofficial HQ—a place where they could bicker comically one minute then emerge through the sunroof the next to spray indiscriminate gunfire from their AK-47s.  The van even had a little “sibling”:  the Chevrolet Corvette (C4) that Faceman would occasionally drive, marked with the same diagonal stripe.  Did it make sense for wanted fugitives to cruise L.A. in such a distinct set of wheels?  Not really.  But it was cool as hell, so.

The Mystery Machine was the only recurring location, as it were, on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969), and the van’s groovy paint scheme provided contrast with the series’ gloomy visuals.  Speaking of animated adventures, when once-ascetic Vietnam vet John Rambo made the intuitive leap from R-rated action movies to after-school cartoon series (1986), he was furnished with Defender, a 6×6 assault jeep.  Not to be outdone, the most popular military-themed animated franchise of the ’80s, G.I. Joe:  A Real American Hero (1983–1986), featured over 250 discrete vehicles, and the characters that drove them were, for the most part, an afterthought:

With the debut of the 3 ¾” figures in 1982, Hasbro also offered a range of vehicles and playsets for use with them.  In actual fact, the 3 ¾” line was conceived as a way to primarily sell vehicles—the figures were only there to fill them out!

‘3 ¾” Vehicles,’ YoJoe!

But who needs drivers when the vehicles themselves are the characters?  The protagonists of The Transformers (1984–1987) were known as the Autobots, a race of ancient, sentient robots from a distant planet that conveniently shapeshifted into 1980s-specific cars like the Porsche 924 and Lamborghini Countach, among scores of others.  (The premise was so deliriously toyetic, it never occurred to us to question the logic of it.)  Offering the best of both G.I. Joe and The Transformers, the paramilitary task force of M.A.S.K. (1985–1986), whose base of operations was a mountainside gas station (what might be described as Blofeld’s volcano lair meets the Boar’s Nest), drove armored vehicles that transformed into… entirely different vehicles.

Many movies and shows not only featured cars as prominent narrative elements, but literally took place on the road:  Vacation.  Mad Max (1979).  Smokey and the Bandit (1977).  CHiPs (1977–1983).  Sometimes the car was so important it had a proper name:  General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–1985).  Christ, sometimes it was the goddamn series costar:  KITT on Knight Rider (1982–1986).  Shit on David Hasselhoff’s acting ability all you want, but the man carried a hit TV show delivering the lion’s share of his dialogue to a dashboard.  Get fucked, Olivier.

1980s hero-car culture at a glance

As a rule, productions keep multiple replicas of key picture cars on hand, often for different purposes:  the vehicle utilized for dialogue scenes isn’t the one rigged for stunts, for instance.  It’s notable that the most detailed production model—the one featured in medium shots and closeups, in which the actors perform their scenes—is known as the “hero car.”  And why not?  Over the past half century, Hollywood has unquestionably programmed all of us to recognize the heroism of the automobile.

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EXT. LOS ANGELES – ONE YEAR LATER

June 27, 2022 / / 20 Comments

I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter.  Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.

Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason:  I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.

As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it.  It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.

(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives.  Sounds on-brand.)

But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.

I can’t say as I blame those folks, really.  That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault.  Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere.  As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.

The high-school experience depicted on “Beverly Hills, 90210” is one I think we can all relate to

The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends.  The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk.  That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.

Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age.  Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced.  Not really.  Not until last month, anyway.

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A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career

January 24, 2022 / / 36 Comments

I’ve alluded to the irretrievable implosion of my screenwriting career in many a previous blog post.  I never felt ready to write about it at length before now.  So, since we were just recently discussing the artful revelation of backstory, here’s mine.

Given the long odds of a career in Hollywood, even under the most favorable of circumstances, the unexpressed question that looms ominously over every aspirant is:  How do I know when it’s time to call this quits?

My wife and I were having drinks at the S&P Oyster Co. in Mystic, Connecticut, when I knew I was done with Hollywood forever—that my ship wasn’t coming.  That was September 24, 2014, during a visit to the East Coast for her aunt and uncle’s golden-anniversary party, exactly thirteen years to the day after we’d relocated from our hometown of New York City to L.A.

Right out of college, I’d landed representation as a screenwriter—though that management company folded a few months prior to my move, catalyzing, at least in part, my decision to try my luck in Tinseltown—and I had a reel full of TV spots and short films I’d cut while working as an audiovisual editor in SoHo, so I felt certain I’d land on my feet in Hollywood, this despite having no contacts there.

So, in the predawn hours of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I left the Bronx, the only home I’d ever known, and met my wife, though we weren’t married at the time, at JFK Airport to embark on our new adventure together.  Perhaps the cosmic timing of our departure (which was delayed by two weeks) should’ve been taken as a sign that the road ahead would be bumpier than I’d naïvely anticipated?

It took a full year in L.A. before I could even get a call returned, but finally I got some opportunities to edit a few independent shorts and features, and began networking my way into the industry.  But it would be another seven years yet before I procured representation as a screenwriter again, during which time I can’t tell you how many contemporaries I watched pack up their shit and abandon their dreams to move back home.  They’d decided it wasn’t worth it, that life was too short.  I’m certain I’d have been one of them were it not for my wife, who remained steadfastly supportive, and for a few friends—notably my buddy Mike—who were also Hollywood hopefuls determined to keep at it, too, through bad times and, well, less bad.  We were going to be the ones that hung in there and made it.

By 2009, things were looking up—considerably.  At long last I’d found representation once again with a management company, this time off a spec I’d written called Leapman, and all manner of opportunities soon followed:  to turn Leapman into a comic-book series; to sign with a big-letter talent agency; to vie for open screenwriting assignments; to develop an undersea sci-fi thriller (in the vein of The Abyss and Sphere) with a red-hot producer.

From “The Abyss” (1989), a movie about deep-sea extraterrestrials akin to the one I was developing

Around this same time, I got friendly with another up-and-coming screenwriter—we were repped by the same management—and he and I formed a critique group, enthusiastically enlisting half a dozen fledgling screenwriters we barely knew.  In short order, we all became close friends, meeting every other Tuesday night at one watering hole or another around Hollywood to trade script notes and war stories.  All unknowns at the time, some of those scribes have since gone on to write for shows including The Handmaid’s Tale and Women of the Movement, as well as WandaVision and Ted Lasso.

I was also, during this period, developing a short film with Mike.  He and I had met in 2003 on the postproduction crew of an indie film; we were on location in the redwoods of Marin County, right down the road from Skywalker Ranch, cutting dailies in a ramshackle cabin that looked for all the world like Ewok Village Hall.  Under those circumstances, it didn’t take long to become fast friends:  We were the same age, came up on the same cinematic influences, and—most notably—shared the same irreverent sense of humor, turning our verbal knives on all of Hollywood’s sacred cows, delighting in making one another howl with one progressively outrageous remark after the next.

Also like me, Mike was married to his teenage sweetheart, sans children, so we were both in the same place:  free to pursue our Hollywood dreams with the support of the women we loved.  It was and remains the closest male friendship I’ve ever made in my adult life.  As Mike continued to come into ever-more-promising editorial opportunities on studio features, my screenwriting career was kicking into high gear.  With aspirations to direct, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking one of my concepts—a horror/comedy I’d pitched him that reflected our mutual sensibilities—and scripting a short film for him to shoot.  So, there I was, developing a big-budget monster movie for a legit prodco by day, and a no-budget monster movie with my best friend by night.  After over a decade in Hollywood, everything had clicked into place.

And then came 2014.  Frustrated with the inexcusable lack of progress on the short—I’d written a script all of us were expressly happy with, and yet years had gone by and we were no closer to rolling camera—I put pressure on the project’s producer, Mike’s spouse, to do her part.  Consequently, for the first time in our decade-long association, our friendship grew strained, and once we both crossed the line and turned our caustic criticisms, the source of so many years of bonding and hilarity, on each other, our relationship eventually became irreversibly poisoned.  I’d lost my closest friend and ally in Hollywood, and that was only the beginning of my troubles.

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The Year of Yes: Why the American Jobs Plan Must (and Will*) Become Law

July 1, 2021 / / 4 Comments

U.S. President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan is the politically ambitious, morally imaginative piece of legislation we need to tackle the ever-worsening climate crisis by rebuilding our country and rebooting our economy through grand-scale public-works projects.  Whether we actually get it, however, comes down to how hard we—all American citizens—are willing to fight for its full passage and implementation.

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic cast a floodlight on the pervasive environmental injustice, wealth disparity, infrastructural neglect, and systemic racism here in the United States, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a fourteen-page nonbinding resolution that prescribed a holistic approach to addressing those interconnected crises known as the Green New Deal.

In 2021, Markey (far left) and AOC (at the podium) reintroduced the Green New Deal (© Greg Nash)

Often misunderstood by the public (it was about defining the problems and establishing aggressive targets for solving them, not proposing specific policy solutions, which were meant to come later), mocked by establishment Dems (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively referred to it as the “green dream”), and knavishly mischaracterized by the right (The libs are banning hamburgers!), the Green New Deal is a straightforward-enough concept undermined by inadequate messaging from its own advocates as well as reflexive outrage from conservative media.  So… let’s try this again:

The idea is a simple one:  in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.  Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.  Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.

In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and child care, and much more.  The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them.  It would also strive for something more amorphous but equally important:  at a time when we find ourselves increasingly divided into hermetically sealed information bubbles, with almost no shared assumptions about what we can trust or even what is real, a Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together.

Naomi Klein, On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26

Klein makes a compelling argument in On Fire, but, alas, the strongest case for a Green New Deal was presented by the pandemic itself.  And after decades of incremental steps in which, time and again, Democrats invariably ceded more legislative ground than they gained—lest they be accused of supporting the kind of Big Government programs Saint Reagan had long since poisonously reframed as unpatriotic and un-American (socialism!)—the candidates seeking the nomination for president last year found themselves jockeying for the green ribbon of Most Environmentally Visionary.  Despite its bumpy rollout, the Green New Deal changed the entire political conversation.  As Klein noted in 2019:

The emergence of the Green New Deal means there is now not only a political framework for meeting the [recommended carbon-drawdown] targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law.  The plan is pretty straightforward:  elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).

ibid., 31

And here’s the thing:  We actually met the first two goals of that “long-shot” plan!

Sort of.

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The Biden Climate Plan: Some Key Goals and Considerations

December 13, 2020 / / 14 Comments

Though it seems like a lifetime ago, I opened the blog this year with a post I’d titled—with entirely unintentional and unforeseen irony—“A 2020 Vision of Hope.”  In it, I discussed a number of auspicious signs that America was on the cusp of finally making a meaningful commitment to addressing the climate crisis—from regional sustainability initiatives, to Gen Z activism, to carbon pricing, to the November election.  So determined was our movement, it couldn’t be derailed by even a global pandemic.  Over the summer, in “What Comes Next:  Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton,” I shared my enthusiasm for the promising ambition of the Biden climate plan, a document that appeared by all evidence to be a real-time reaction to the interconnected crises of global warming, economic inequality, and systemic racism—all of which reached a boiling point this year.

On December 8, I delivered a presentation on the Biden climate plan to the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project; I have reproduced the text of that talk below.

There is no doubt about it:  The tireless work of environmental activists over the past two years moved President-elect Biden appreciably to the left on the matter of the climate crisis.  Everyone here—all of you who selflessly and compassionately allocated time and energy from your busy lives to prioritize this issue, whether by training with Vice President Gore, attending a climate-strike rally, merely dialing in to this very meeting—made a difference.  President-elect Biden hears our collective voice; he shares our sense of urgency.

And though the incoming president will only go so far as to say the Green New Deal provides a “crucial framework” for meeting the challenges we face, much of the language from his campaign speeches, as well as his extensively detailed climate plan, echoes phrasing from the Green New Deal verbatim—a testament to and direct consequence of the pressure and the power of our movement.  In the two years since I trained under Mr. Gore, the climate breakdown has gone from a political lightning rod to a political litmus test.  All of us take a share of credit for that.

Like the Green New Deal, Biden’s comprehensive climate plan, which he intends to fund by rolling back the Trump tax cuts, takes a holistic approach to solving our interconnected crises by calling for a $2 trillion accelerated investment in infrastructure, transit, the power sector, housing, agriculture, and—most crucially—environmental justice, with the bulk of those resources to be deployed during his first term.  The overarching goal is to set the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050, and, in the process, facilitate a just transition by creating millions of good-paying union jobs—yet more language adopted directly from the Green New Deal.

Does the proposal pass every environmentalist purity test?  No.  But the Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future—oof, that’s a mouthful—is an exhaustive plan with a commensurably exhaustive name that I encourage everyone to read, but let’s talk for a minute about a few of its key goals with hard timelines attached.

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Challenging Our Moral Imagination: On Hollywood’s Crises of Climate, Conscience, and Creativity

May 25, 2020 / / 18 Comments

“What about Thanos?”

A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—

—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?

The answer, frustratingly, is:  More than you may realize.

During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones:  What’s everybody been binge-watching?

Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television.  Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose.  And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience.  (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)

The cast of “Schitt’s Creek” (2015–2020)

To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek:  “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”

Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so.  Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service.  To wit:  Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:

Bet you didn’t recall that show being so edgy.  Thing is, the stories we tell about the world in which we live are only as aspirational—and inspirational—as the moral imagination of our storytellers.  Alas, ever since meaningless worldbuilding supplanted purposeful storytelling, the function of popular fiction has shifted from lighting a path forward to drawing us down a rabbit hole of “Easter eggs” and “spoilers” that lead only to the next installment of a given multimedia franchise (meaning:  keep your wallet handy).  As the late Neil Peart wrote forty years ago:

Art as expression –
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely help us along

Talk about advice unheeded.  Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)

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A 2020 Vision of Hope

January 21, 2020 / / 16 Comments

“The good news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable,” Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann said recently.  “The bad news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable.”  Over the two decades preceding Dr. Mann’s good-news/bad-news pronouncement, when what reasonably seemed like a dire existential threat wasn’t quite getting the public attention it arguably merited (on account of, we later learned, orchestrated misinformation campaigns by Exxon and others), I was doing whatever I thought I could for the cause:  swapping out my lightbulbs, carrying reusable grocery bags, voluntarily opting for a greater percentage of renewable energy sources from my local utility.  And I looked to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, having voted for him in 2000 and been inspired anew by An Inconvenient Truth, for direction—and certainly for hope.

So, when I decided to do more than simply recycle and make the occasional donation to a green group—when I sought to become an environmental activist—I knew instantly the organization I wanted to join:  Vice President Gore’s Climate Reality Project.  I applied to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, and was trained by Mr. Gore in 2018.

Since that time, I’ve had no shortage of opportunities to participate in climate rallies hundreds of thousands strong (in Downtown L.A. and New York), take meetings with elected officials (also in both L.A. and New York), give public presentations, and directly help to bring U.S. counties—including our most populous—into the County Climate Coalition, a nationwide alliance of jurisdictions committed to upholding the standards of the Paris Accord.  The Climate Reality Leadership Corps has opened a world of opportunities—of hope—for me.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (Paramount Pictures)

And along the way something unexpected began to happen:  Just as I had looked to Mr. Gore for hope—and still do—people in my life started looking to me for reasons to be hopeful.  They’ve seen the coverage of climate change–caused catastrophes that have been (at long last) dominating the headlines, heard repeatedly about something called a “Green New Deal,” and—right here in L.A.—choked on the acrid, ember-speckled smoke literally right outside their front door.  Friends and relatives have contacted me asking what can be done about climate change (a lot), or where they might move to avoid the worst effects of it (alas, we are all in the sacrifice zone now), and—most tellingly—if there’s any cause left for optimism on this crisis.

There is.

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Naomi Klein’s “On Fire” (Book Review)

October 18, 2019 / / 20 Comments

Since I trained under former vice president Al Gore to serve in his Climate Reality Leadership Corps just over a year ago—a period in which no fewer than eighty-five federal environmental regulations have been rolled back, greenhouse-gas emissions have spiked (after leveling off in years prior), polar-ice melt is outpacing predictive modeling, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has strenuously warned us we have a mere decade to halve our current rate of carbon-burning if we hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change—there is one distinct emotional state that has been entirely absent from my life.

Despair.

I might, in fact, be happier and more optimistic than at any other point in my adult life.

Activism, I’ve discovered, is the antidote to despair, to doomism.  Over the past year, I’ve given public presentations on the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would charge fossil-fuel extractors for the privilege of pollution—of treating the public commons of our atmosphere like an open sewer—they’ve thus far enjoyed free of charge.

This past March, my Climate Reality chapter was proud to enlist Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition, an alliance of jurisdictions across the United States, formed by Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, that have formally pledged to uphold the standards of the Paris Accord.  Less than six months later, we were in attendance as the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OurCounty sustainability plan, one of the most ambitious green initiatives in the United States.

And just last month, I joined 300,000 activists in Lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike as we swarmed the streets of City Hall, marched down Broadway, and rallied at Battery Park—where no less than Greta Thunberg addressed the crowd.  None of that, as it happens, has left much time to actually worry about the climate breakdown.

Greta Thunberg at the Global Climate Strike in New York City on September 20, 2019 (photo credit: Sean P. Carlin)

But that level of activism, I acknowledge, isn’t something to which everyone can readily commit.  So, if you want to share my profound hopefulness about the solutions to the climate crisis—if you want to appreciate the world-changing opportunity humanity has been handed by history—do yourself a favor and read a book that might admittedly be outside your comfort zone:  Naomi Klein’s On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

Naomi Klein’s “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal”

I promise:  You won’t be inundated with scientific facts and figures; if you want to understand the basic science of global warming, Mr. Gore’s documentaries An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and An Inconvenient Sequel:  Truth to Power (2017) are both excellent primers.  Naomi Klein’s On Fire is a recently published collection of her essays and lectures from the past decade, bookended by all-new opening and closing statements on why a Global Green New Deal is the blueprint for an ecologically sustainable and socially equitable twenty-first century:

The idea is a simple one:  in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.  Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.  Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once. . . .

. . . In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.

Naomi Klein, On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26
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Big News from a Small Climate Reality Chapter: Los Angeles Joins the County Climate Coalition

March 31, 2019 / / 4 Comments

What can I do about it?  When it comes to the climate crisis, all of us have thought or expressed that sentiment, even—at some point or another—the most passionate environmental activists.  It can be uttered out of well-meaning curiosity… or genuine bewilderment… or political frustration… or apathetic abdication.  Regardless of which mindset it reflects, it is a universally valid—and perfectly understandable—acknowledgment of the overwhelming complexities of the problem of climate change.  What can any of us, as individuals, really do about it?

Especially when individual efforts simply aren’t going to move the needle on this at the speed and scale required; we have ten years, per the IPCC, to halve our greenhouse-gas emissions if we’re going to keep global warming below catastrophic levels.  By all means:  swap out your lightbulbs, compost your trash, take public transportation whenever possible—but understand the time when “small” personal actions like that could’ve actually made a meaningful difference has passed.

Now this existential crisis must be addressed legislatively, with bold and effective public policy, hence the reason so much has been made of the Green New Deal resolution, and the less-publicized but no-less-crucial Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would (finally) put a price on carbon pollution.  As exciting and promising as those steps are, though, in some respects they only make an answer to our intimate question—What can I do about climate change?—seem yet further out of reach.


Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey outside the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 7, 2019 (Saul Loeb/AFP—Getty Images)

Take me, for instance.  A recovering screenwriter, I’m happy to illustrate at length the storytelling transgressions of Ghostbusters II, or mathematically quantify the similarities between Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the Joker (they’re precisely 60% alike, for the record)—ya know, intellectual stuff—but good luck putting those “skills” to use in service for environmental-policy initiatives, right?

Well, not so fast.  Here’s how a bunch of ordinary laypeople banded together to do exactly that—to make a legislative difference in relatively short order—and how a few tricks I picked up in the Hollywood trenches actually came in handy.

Continue reading

Dreaming Dreams and Seeing Apparitions: On Writing Horror and Fighting Climate Change

October 30, 2018 / / 26 Comments

It certainly occurred to me, ahead of last month’s post, that the blog’s left turn into environmentalism might’ve whiplashed those expecting the customary deep dive into craft or culture.  As part of our training as Climate Reality Leaders, we’re asked to reflect on our personal climate stories—the origins of our interest in the movement—something I’ve invested no small amount of time doing this past month.  To that end, it dawned on me that the very same formative circumstances inspired both my passion for horror fiction and climate activism; they are not unrelated callings but very much part and parcel.

It was at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, my old stomping ground, where many of my first boyhood adventures were undertaken.  My friends and I would scale the towering steel foundational girders of the Henry Hudson Bridge as high as we could climb.  We’d cross Spuyten Duyvil Creek by way of the century-old railroad swing bridge to explore the Indian caves in the vast, lush expanse of Inwood Hill Park at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.  (Incidentally, those caves feature prominently in the 2003 historical fantasy Forever, Pete Hamill’s centuries-spanning ode to Gotham.  Great novel.)

On weekends, my parents would drive us up the Hudson Valley—to Sleepy Hollow or Nyack or Bear Mountain—which was a particularly spellbinding delight this time of year.  It’s a truly magical region that in many respects looks just the same as it did to the Dutch explorers who first arrived in the early seventeenth century—and, more to the point, the Lenape Indians who called the valley their home for a dozen millennia before that.  For the conservation of this land, you can thank—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—J. P. Morgan.

And not just him—George Walbridge Perkins and John D. Rockefeller, too.  Owed in part to the efforts of these forward-thinking businessmen-philanthropists at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the woodlands on the banks of the Hudson was spared from development, as were the Palisades, the magnificent cliffs along the west side of the river.  Consider it:  These capitalists preserved the natural harmony of the Lower Hudson Valley from the ravages of capitalism itself; on account of their preemptive actions, much of it remains to this day virgin forest to be (re)discovered by successive generations.

The woodlands just blocks from where I grew up in the Bronx (photo credit: Sean Carlin, 29 December 2012)

As a writer of supernatural fiction who continues to draw inspiration from this region—virtually all my stories are set there—I walk in the footsteps of literary giants.  Two of the first American authors—horror authors, no less—lived in the area and wrote about it:  Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe.  Savor the way Irving lets this “region of shadows,” pregnant with manes, cast a spell over his receptive imagination in the Halloween classic “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Continue reading

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