Don’t Look Up’s environmental message is ringing less hollow nowadays

If you can’t quite remember, Don’t Look Up was a comedy-drama-eco-fable, that used an approaching comet as metaphor for the climate crisis, in a star-studded satire of the current moment. 

And I do mean star-studded. Its cast includes Leonardo di Caprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Mark Rylance, a list I’m only cutting off there because rattling off Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, and Ariana Grande, plus cameos from Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, seemed so bizarre that I actually had to look up the cast to make sure I’d not misremembered.

In the film, two astronomers (Di Caprio and Lawrence) discover a comet that’s going to hit Earth in six months, and try to alert the government and media to the realities of what’s coming. 

They’re met with complacency at all turns; politicians prevaricate, media figures chuckle and change the subject, and a tech CEO hijacks the eventual response with a scheme designed largely to enrich himself.

Perhaps ironically, this comet caper didn’t land for me at the time. I could admire its venom, and its ambition in pitching a spiky satire about climate change to as wide an audience as possible but, in the end, I couldn’t help but find its broad comic moments and lurid caricatures a little heavy-handed and hectoring.

Unlike with The Big Short — director Adam McKay’s previous, more successful, exercise in blockbuster agitprop — I couldn’t shake the sense I was being patronised. 

Indeed, if you were to write a thesis on why Don’t Look Up didn’t work for me, you might well call it ‘Don’t Talk Down’.

Increasingly, I feel one of Don’t Look Up’s major problems was timing. It arrived while the world was still reeling from covid, and everyone was half-mad from lockdowns. 

I wonder would we have been more amenable to a celeb-stuffed morality tale, if our ears weren’t still ringing with the 2020 rendition of ‘Imagine’ we were treated to by Gal Gadot and her famous friends.

And timing is, sadly, of the essence. Don’t Look Up’s central conceit was that the prospect of an impact in six months should be enough to get The Powers That Be to take it seriously. 

This is a handy cinematic shorthand for the urgency of climate change, but it doesn’t quite track to the messier metrics of something as complex as global warming.

This week it was announced that summer 2023 was the hottest in 2,000 years, and that every month since has broken a temperature record. The problem is I don’t quite know what to do with that information, let alone to fix the problem as an individual.

We’ve all heard climate science refrains like “if we don’t do X in five years, Y will happen in 10 years”. These are laudable for refusing to sensationalise with “the comet will land next week” deadlines that don’t exist in nature. 

But they also risk diluting the urgency of the current moment for ordinary people, with our jobs and worries and the constant squeeze put on every cost in our lives. Which brings me to the unstated additional issue of such warnings: who, precisely, is “we”?

I want to be clear that individual responsibility is a key component in whatever action we take against climate change. It’s a coward’s bluff to say I shouldn’t care about recycling just because Taylor Swift takes a private plane from her bedroom to her kitchen if she wants a glass of water every night. 

In a world which seems increasingly desperate and rudderless, there is something enticing about letting ourselves off the hook, and we should resist that urge. 

But it is not mere self-interest to say that we bear several thousand times less responsibility than the governments and corporations who are failing us at every turn.

A survey from the ESRI last week found nearly half of Irish people saw no need to cut down on red meat consumption, and a quarter would be incapable of using their car less. 

In some quarters, this was viewed as Irish people being indifferent or complacent about the current crisis. 

Given that the same study found a large majority of people were aware of, and worried about, climate change, I find it hard not to link it directly to the government’s own commitment to promoting its agricultural sector, and a reluctance to institute broad public transport reforms.

Instead, we are given saps to make recycling ‘easier’ with deposit return schemes, their cost passed always to the individual, breeding resentment among people already experiencing a cost of living increase, without tackling the larger issues facing our climate.

In 2020, Climate Case Ireland took the Irish Government to its Supreme Court and won, on the grounds it was failing in its duties to take adequate action on climate change. 

In April, a similar victory was handed to a group of Swiss women by the European Court of Human Rights, granting that “Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate”. 

Two weeks ago, the UK High Court found its own government’s climate plan unlawful for packing its Net Zero plan with untested technologies and refusing to explain how targets would be met.

In all such cases, ordinary people took their governments to task for failing future generations. We should all realise that if we are to wield our own power in this fight, it won’t just be at bottle banks and rewilded gardens. 

It’ll have to be in courthouses and at town halls and on our streets. 

If we want to secure a sustainable future, we should all be looking up, not down, for answers.