Has climate hysteria finally run its course? I ask because the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the subject seems to have bombed. _Digger_, in which Tom Cruise plays an oil tycoon so intent on drilling that he causes an ice shelf off Greenland to collapse, provoking climatic disaster, took only about $8 million in its first weekend, not great when it needs $280 million of box office takings just to break even. According to seasoned observers it is on course to lose Warner Bros $245 million, which would make it one of the worst cinema disasters of all time. Not even an endorsement from Jane Fonda, who described it as “a new way to wake us up about climate change” seems to have enticed the public.
This didn’t used to happen. In the past climate disaster movies have tended to have a good hearing. _The Day After Tomorrow_, an absurd tale in which New York disappears beneath an ice sheet (how that is consistent with Al Gore’s vision of an ice-free North Pole I am not sure) was taken seriously by easily-manipulated audiences. Five years ago, _Don’t Look Up_, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, broke Netflix download records. That one featured a comet heading for Earth which scientists struggle to persuade politicians to take seriously – an obvious allegory for climate change.
What has gone wrong? Maybe it is that Tom Cruise owns one private jet too many. DiCaprio seemed to get away with his private jet habit, which once involved him taking an 8,000-mile round trip across the Atlantic to collect a climate award. Trouble is that Cruise has three jets in his hangar, which is just a little over the top by anyone’s standards. He has a Gulfstream fitted, apparently, with a jacuzzi, plus a Bombardier and a Honda for those short trips when it doesn’t quite seem worth spooling up the Gulfstream, and there will be no time to take a jacuzzi anyway.
I guess the film-going public has just had a bit too much of celebrities with a yeti-sized carbon footprint preaching climate change to them. You, the little people, need a lesson on saving the world, Cruise seems to be saying; if I need a few private jets to help me spread the message, then that is all well and good.
Sorry, but there can hardly be a conscious human on the planet who hasn’t heard of climate change. We don’t need a Hollywood film to tell us about it. As for the kind of hysteria that it portrayed in this work, that is counterproductive to promoting genuine understanding of the climate. One company’s drilling doesn’t collapse a glacier, and nor, thankfully, does one celebrity’s private jet habit.
This leaves the question of what Cruise really believes. Does he think that the oil industry, as seems to be intimated in _Digger_, bears sole responsibility for carbon emissions, and that its customers – like him – bear no responsibility at all? Does he think, like the people who try to sue tobacco companies for the harm caused by their smoking habits, that he is under some kind of duress to use oil companies’ products? The more you look at it, the more that Cruise comes across as the equivalent of the anti-hero in his film, so tied up with his own self-importance that he turns a blind eye to his own actions.
It is perhaps no accident that Hollywood climate preaching is being rejected now, in the midst of an oil crisis. There are plenty of people who would just like to keep their homes warm this winter, not fly off in a private jet. The reality is, however, that much you might wish the world could switch to clean energy overnight, globally fossil fuels still account for three quarters of energy consumption. We can live without Hollywood movies, but not without the oil industry.