In an interview about the coming Hollywood awards season and his new climate-crisis fantasy film Don’t Look Up, actor Leonardo DiCaprio issued the latest deadline for mankind to get serious about the so-called climate crisis. According to the actor, mankind now has just nine years to get serious about attacking climate change, which used to be called global warming.
“I’ve had two great passions in my life. That has been acting, and the protection of the natural world and getting the message out about the climate crisis. I’ve had a foundation for 20 years. I got to go to Glasgow. I got to see world leaders make some pretty substantial commitments, but much like this movie, there is a ticking clock. I think there’s a worldwide sense of anxiety about the fact that the powers that be, the private sector, governments, are not making the transition fast enough,” DiCaprio lamented.
The actor continued, blaming “fake science” and petroleum companies for the current predicament: “So, this movie is certainly not that far off as far as the urgency of the matter. I think that a lot of this has been shrouded and complicated by fake scientists who have been hired by oil companies all the way back when Exxon found out about and tried to bury and distract from the evidence about the impacts of too much carbon in our atmosphere.
“We literally have a nine-year window,” the actor proclaimed.
Numerous such deadlines have been issued throughout the years on climate action. England’s Prince Charles has set numerous deadlines for action on climate change. In 2009, the future King of England claimed that there were only 100 months to save the planet from climate disaster, giving us until 2017. The prince later amended that claim to 35 years, although during COP26 in Glasgow in November, he claimed that “time has quite literally run out.”
Freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) famously warned in 2019 that the world would end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.
A peer-reviewed paper authored by Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres and others told us in 2017 that the world had but “three years to safeguard our climate.”
Now DiCaprio has issued the latest opinion on just how long we have to fix the climate crisis — nearly a decade, according to the actor. It’s better than Prince Charles’ initial prediction, roughly on par with AOC’s prediction of climate apocalypse and much better than Figueres’ three years, which has already run out.
DiCaprio had advice for people wishing to know what they could do personally to address the climate crisis.
“Vote for people that are sane,” the actor advised.
Of course, sanity is in the eye of the beholder.
DiCaprio’s latest movie, Don’t Look Up, came out in December on Netflix. The movie is a farcical look on climate change that never actually mentions the subject. Instead, a comet stands in for climate change.
In the film, DiCaprio portrays astrophysicist Dr. Randall Mindy, who, along with doctoral student Kay Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers that a large comet is on a collision course to hit Earth and wipe out all life on the planet at a specific date in six months.
It’s not an awful movie. It’s kind of funny, actually, if you can set aside the clumsy and obvious climate-change metaphor. The film also comments on the population’s addiction to social media and our propensity to react to hype over facts.
As the comet nears Earth, Mindy, Dibiasky, and others exhort the world to look up and see the danger that is coming. Meanwhile, the dolts meant to portray so-called climate deniers, led by Meryl Streep, who plays the U.S. president, tell the world, “don’t look up.”
The film falls completely flat when it comes to the climate-change metaphor. Where the movie’s comet is something that can be seen and measured with a definitive time frame for impact, climate change itself is only a hypothesis, predicted to destroy our way of life in some nebulous future, decades or centuries from now. The comet in the movie is a fact. Catastrophic human-caused climate change is largely speculation, peppered with hype — the very type of hype that the movie itself warns you against.
