Celebrity Precedents: Assessing New Politicization and Climate Change Policy Rhetoric in Leonardo DiCaprio’s "Before the Flood"

Abstract

• This article juxtaposes the demonstrated prevalence of celebrity politics with that of climate change policy inaction in the United States, to contextualize Leonardo DiCaprio’s ecodocumentary, Before the Flood within its current sociopolitical moment. I argue these components work in tandem to structure DiCaprio’s message within a social framework accommodating him as a political figure. In turn, the documentary can be conceived of as both a contributor and a product of new celebrity political discourse serving to further the politicization of climate change. Anthropogenic climate change is the most pressing issue of the 21st century and beyond, as humans’ ability to continue living on Earth and maintaining business as usual affects every conceivable industry and social construct we have collectively built. In November of 2018, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a federal agency, released the “Fourth National Climate Assessment,” (2018), with over a thousand pages of evidence from nearly 300 scientists, presenting clear, unequivocal proof that humans have caused climate change. The second chapter, “Our Changing Climate,” consolidates findings from observed warming, as well as formal detection and attribution studies, such as computer models and simulations, to support the conclusion that humans have contributed to a total “likely...global average temperature increase” of 1.1°F to 1.4°F (0.6°C to 0.8°) between 1951 and 2010 (p.76). The report points specifically to greenhouse gas emissions, aerosol production, ozone depletion, and changes in land cover, such as that due to deforestation, as causes. Following the evidence of human impacts to the climate, the assessment outlines how, after leaving climate change largely unattended to since our first inclinations of its existence, we have nearly reached the point of no return from a world to be inundated with not-so-natural disasters, droughts, famines, and floods of near-biblical proportions. The report was not the first of its kind, or even the beginning of climate change research, which begs the question of how climate change policy in the United States has seemingly failed to enforce stringent guidelines in the face of over 185 years of what William Forster Lloyd (1832) conceptualized as a tragedy of the commons, an unwillingness for society to maintain the environment without a directive to do so. Joseph Fourier’s 1824 discovery of what became known as the greenhouse effect led to Svante Arrhenius’s conclusion in 1896 that the industrial burning of coal was contributing to global warming (Crawford, 2018). However, neither an approaching 200 years of climate change research, establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), or consensus among scientists on the dire state of climate change has prompted consistent governmental intervention in the United States to mitigate the consequences or reduce the nation’s carbon footprint to pre-industrial levels. The United States is a world leader, yet it has largely resisted full commitment to the global conversation around climate change mitigation as a civic duty until now. The United States Congress set forth six findings detailing the consequences of human-made climate change in the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and the act mandated subsequent updates, including the 2018 report (“Legal Mandate,” 1990). Yet the word “climate” is markedly absent from its title, obscuring the purpose of the act from the average American, and in the following years since the original decree, the knowledge offered through these reports has not amounted to significant action. In 2006, former vice president Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), but even this explicit call for action on climate change did not see immediate mobilization despite winning an Academy Award, prompting Gore to release a sequel in 2017 (The Climate Reality Project). LITERATURE REVIEW Overview of Climate Change Research and Rhetoric in the United States Communication, CCAS ‘19, lisablitstein5@gwu.edu