Almost exactly 10 years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio won a Best Actor Oscar (his first) for his performance in “The Revenant” as an early 19th century fur trapper who is injured in a bear attack, then by turns grudgingly kept alive, abandoned and left for dead by the avaricious hunting party he had been hired to lead.
In his acceptance speech at those 88th Academy Awards, DiCaprio first thanked the film’s cast and crew. He then pivoted quickly and forcefully to the environment. “The Revenant,” he said, was … “about man’s relationship to the natural world that we collectively felt in 2015, as the hottest year in recorded history.”
The rest of what he said is worth a big block quote; to read it today, the week after the 98th Academy, during which politics and policy both receded, is bracing.
“Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, the big corporations, but who speak for all humanity, for the Indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children’s children, and for those people whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. I thank you all for this award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take this award for granted.”
That year was something of a heady time for environmentalists. Barack Obama was in the middle of his second term as president of the U.S and though his climate and environmental policies were not especially progressive, in 2015 he did enact the Clean Power Plan, which had the stated goal of reducing carbon emissions locally, and “leading global efforts to address climate change” outside U.S. borders.
Further, just a couple of months after the 88th Academy Awards, the U.S. would become one the 196 parties to sign onto the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to reduce the rise of global temperatures, whose terms had been negotiated the previous fall.
Fast forward 10 years. Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2020. Joe Biden rejoined in 2021. Trump withdrew again just a few months ago. And in this second go at the White House, the Trump Administration has done everything in its power to tighten the knots tethering the U.S. to fossil fuels. It has literally forced owners of coal plants in Colorado and Washington State that want to shut them down to keep them open. Trump has fought tooth and nail in court to suspend wind energy projects that are fully permitted, under contract and under construction across the eastern seaboard. And his administration has rolled backed numerous efforts to keep climate change in check, like the allowance of state-specific fuel economy standards and the landmark fossil-fuel endangerment finding of 2009.
Meanwhile, that global temperature record that DiCaprio mentioned in his acceptance speech in 2016 seems almost trifling compared to what has happened since. It’s been surpassed six times. According to data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, the three hottest years on record are 2024, 2023 and 2025.
At the 98th Academy Awards, DiCaprio was nominated again for Best Actor — his sixth in that category — this time for “One Battle After Another.” The film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won Best Picture. DiCaprio lost in his category to Michael B. Jordan, the lead of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” so he didn’t have a chance to say anything about climate change.
But not a single one of the Oscar winners this year mentioned it.
Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” were produced by Warner Brothers, which is about to be acquired by Paramount Skydance, which in turn is owned by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, one the world’s wealthiest individuals and noted Trump supporter. Ellison the younger has already made decisions that have significantly defanged the climate coverage at CBS News — Paramount’s flagship news network — and it would not be shocking if CNN — part of the WB — is next.
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of this show was its dearth of any language at the awards that could be considered political.
Instead of the fire we got from, say, Michael Moore in 2003, what we got was a sort of mea culpa from P.T. Anderson — who might be the definitional American Gen X director — in his acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay:
“I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also, with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”
I harbor the same hopes, but it might require at least acknowledging the problems first.
More culture & enviro news
One thing that does give me some optimism is that the feted films themselves did a pretty good job acknowledging climate change. According to Good Energy, a consultancy group, of the 16 scripted features that were nominated for an Oscar and met the eligibility criteria, five passed the “climate reality check.” That’s pretty good!
Relevant especially for those facing the heat wave right now in L.A. and the rest of the southwest: a study published earlier this week in Lancet attempted to quantify how rising global temperatures will impact physical inactivity in different parts of the world. Chloé Farand summed it up for the Guardian, noting the researchers’ projection of 500,000 additional annual deaths due to inactivity by 2050.
Meanwhile, Libby Rainey at LAist wrote about how the city is preparing for the inevitable heat challenges that will accompany the World Cup games this coming summer.
This isn’t brand new — in fact, it references the reporting of my former colleague Sammy Roth — but Alexandra Tey over at the Nation has a nice roundup of sports fans protesting their teams’ financial ties to fossil fuel companies. It focuses on one of the most visible of these partnerships: Citi Field, where the New York Mets play, is named for Citi group, the world’s biggest lender to oil and gas companies.
A few last things in climate news this week
With gas prices skyrocketing due to the war in Iran, some Californians have been wondering why oil companies in the state can’t just start drilling more. My colleague Blanca Begert explains why it isn’t that simple.
The related big question is will the turmoil in the middle east push countries around the world to double down on renewable energy. In the New Yorker, Bill McKibben makes the case that this could be the moment that small clean tech — think solar panels, heat pumps, induction cooktops, etc — really takes off.
Finally, somehow, some 10 million tons of manure produced at California factory farms is unaccounted for. Seth Millstein, writing for Sentient, explains how lax regulation let farms dispose of 200 Titanics’ worth of animal waste without telling anyone where or how they did it.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.