Good Energy’s ‘Climate Change’ Playbook Endeavors to Increase Portrayals in Narrative Scripts

Good Energy: A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change, a resource for any screenwriter or member of the public, was just made available online. Designed as a guide for screenwriters, producers and other creatives to better incorporate climate into narrative film and television scripts, the playbook features tools, data, storytelling examples and interviews, all centered on the current situation.

At the helm of the project was a core team of co-writers — Anna Jane Joyner, founder and director of nonprofit story consultancy Good Energy, TV writer Carmiel Banasky and journalist Scott Shigeoka — and roughly 15 people worked on it overall, including an editor, research director and creative director.

“We’re not talking about a separate genre of story, like climate stories — it’s really a lens to look through the world of your story with,” Joyner said. “If your characters were real people living in our real world, how would they naturally be encountering climate change? How would it be affecting where they live? How would it be affecting them emotionally?”

The Good Energy team also collaborated with USC’s Media Impact Lab at the Norman Lear Center to get relevant data; together, they conducted a research study concluding that 1,046 (2.8 percent) of 37,453 analyzed scripts from 2016-2020 included “climate change keywords” like climate crisis, climate emergency, global warming, sea level rise, solar panels and different kinds of fossil fuel terminology.

Beyond offering information on climate psychology, science and suggestions on how to bring real-life climate situations onscreen, the playbook features a chorus of Hollywood voices in support of greater climate representation in scripted storylines across all genres. These include Zazie Beetz, Scott Z. Burns, Rosario Dawson, Lyn and Norman Lear, Adam McKay, Mark Ruffalo, David Rysdahl and Sarah Treem.