PROFILES SUSTAINABILITY
WORDS Katie Kasperson
A leading voice in the film industry and environmental expert, Lydia Dean Pilcher puts it plainly: clean energy and climate storytelling are two key routes towards a more sustainable future. As a co-leader of an inter-guild sustainability alliance (which includes the Writers, Producers and Directors Guilds of America), Pilcher represents roughly 500,000 members. “It’s a vast constituency. We have found that, over the last few years, just about every union and guild has now formed a green committee, eco committee, sustainability committee – this is something that is top of mind,” she shares. As co-chair of the DGA’s Sustainable Future Committee, Pilcher prioritises the transition to clean energy, which mainly involves cutting carbon emissions and reducing reliance on fossil fuels “in the accelerated time frame we find ourselves in,” she says. Having attended the Paris
Agreement in 2015, Pilcher was front row when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) unveiled its special report on global warming. “The IPCC set the 1.5°C threshold, which was the level we needed not to go beyond if we did not want to live in a climate- altered future,” she recalls. “We were hopeful; we really thought we were going to kick this. What we know now is that the last eight years have been the hottest years on the planet. We have hit 1.5°C – and we’re going over it. We haven’t done enough.” While every sector is arguably at fault, the film industry has been especially wasteful at times, using fossil fuels – which ‘play a significant role in global warming’ – to power productions. “We had been sitting there for years talking about recycling, plastic and so on. It was when the carbon calculators for film and television had been invented,
which started to get implemented and the studios released all this data, that we realised we’re not going to change anything if we don’t address the fossil fuel situation,” explains Pilcher. Clean energy is on the rise, with renewable diesel available in areas like California (where many major studios are based), electric vehicles becoming more mainstream and solar panels being added to the tops of trailers. Pilcher argues that these measures be mandated. “Why not?” she asks. “It’s essentially page one now. It works.” Studios have begun introducing climate-centred criteria; for instance, Netflix requires a sustainability advisor to be present on every set, while NBCUniversal recently announced its GreenerLight programme, which vets each project, “requiring it to contain some form of climate storytelling element and have a sustainable
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