Climate Change on Screen: What Hollywood Can Learn From ‘Will & Grace’ and ‘Cheers’

When it comes to showcasing environmental and climate change messages on the silver screen, Hollywood could look to the likes of Will & Grace and Cheers for inspiration, Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, said in Toronto on Saturday.

Speaking during a panel entitled “Strategies for Sustainable Cinema” at the industry conference section at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, he said: “While this industry has a carbon footprint that we need to tackle, and everyone up here is working really hard at that, I think we can compare it to industries like concrete — [and] it’s smaller. But where we are much larger is our cultural footprint.”

That means the entertainment industry has a platform to showcase and enable change. “We’ve seen across the years the power that this industry has to affect how people view things,” Read said. “You look at something like Will & Grace and the success of that and how it changed minds on gay marriage and LGBT rights. Or you look at designated drivers, which came from Cheers and sort of use that as a messaging for social impact. We talk a lot about that opportunity to influence and support sustainable behaviors.”

The Alliance, a consortium of entertainment industry stakeholders working to reduce their global environmental footprint and inspire a sustainable future, is always looking at “how can we support creators who want to tell these stories in exploring how climate change is interacting with all of our lives … and what sustainable behaviors could be shown on screen,” he explained. “It could be something as specific as a whole show being written around it, but it also can be something as minor as putting solar panels on a house in the background of a shot. Or, if you’re writing a sitcom and you’re writing the dad as a plumber, can you make the dad a solar panel technician?”

Of course, the key thing is not to force things into content. Read explained that it is important “that we’re not imposing and saying, ‘Okay, you’re writing a costume drama from the 1700s. How are you incorporating climate change?’ That doesn’t make any sense. But if you’re writing a sitcom that’s taking place now, how can you adapt that, how can you input that messaging or those behaviors?”

The panel was designed to put a spotlight on “strategies for implementing eco-friendly methods to meet urgent environmental targets without compromising creative visions, budgets, or production quality,” according to the TIFF website. “Environmental sustainability in filmmaking and festivals is evolving rapidly, introducing cutting-edge practices to reduce on-set carbon footprints from development to post-production.”

The two other panelists were Ontario Film Commissioner Justin Cutler and Arsalan Talebzadeh, director of partnerships at Invert, a carbon reduction and removal company.

The experts emphasized that sustainability efforts should start early on in production planning and need to be honest and serious. First understanding a production’s impact and taking steps to reducing it always comes “prior to us actually taking steps and offsetting,” Talebzadeh shared. “We really don’t want to get our clients with a greenwashing label. We don’t want to be associated with it, and we don’t want them to be associated with it.”

There is constant innovation to keep track of as well. “Reducing the emissions in concrete or building more green concrete” is one current focus for his firm, he shared. “There is a Canadian company called CarbonCure [Technologies] that we’ve supported. It’s able to capture CO2 and inject it into the concrete mix. And what that does, it actually enables you to reduce the amount of cement. The cement industry accounts for nearly 10 percent of the emissions in the world. So, it’s got a two-pronged benefit. Not only are you capturing CO2 and injecting it in there …, but you’re also reducing the use of cement in the value chain upstream all the way to the mining side of it.”

Cutler added that “we’ve had 900 people pass through our carbon calculation training course and our sustainable action courses,” which are free. “It’s really helped to build a community of ambassadors on set.”

Plus, “there are all sorts of opportunities that we could take advantage of,” he told the panel. “Sustainable lockups are a really big opportunity for Ontario right now that we’ve seen being built in New York and in British Columbia, but we’ve seen great vendors in Ontario take up that torch and run with it,” he said. Since the entertainment industry processes vast amounts of material, such lockups house used materials, from costumes, props and set materials to equipment, and redistribute them to other productions or the community rather than send them to a landfill.

Added Cutler: “We also have some really great production designers that are thinking about designing sets for reuse, which I think is really important. So we’re taking a more tactical approach to this, and we’re starting to see great results.”

Read said that the Alliance is creating tools for the industry, such as a carbon calculator that can be used “to measure the carbon footprint of any given production, taking into account fuel and travel and housing and all of those areas.”

It also puts together benchmarking reports. Read summarized one core takeaway from them this way: “About half, give or take, on any given production of the carbon emissions come from fuel, and that’s largely transportation, so the trucks and the cars that are being used to transport crew and equipment, but also diesel generators that are used as a reliable source of mobile power,” he explained. “Our members do a lot of work around clean mobile power and trying to expand access to batteries and work with crews to understand how to get the most out of those batteries as a replacement for a diesel generator, or how to work with EVs and get a replacement for a diesel truck.”