I’m not a regular viewer of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,”
so I wasn’t aware of how much he talks about climate change in his
monologues and intros until I began reviewing video clips of the
show.
Colbert especially likes to joke about the Trump
administration’s management of climate change — or should I say the
administration’s apparent desire for the subject to just go
away.
Last week, Colbert lambasted the appointment of William Happer
to head a committee formed to determine whether climate change
poses a threat to national security. Happer is a physicist who has
no formal training in climate science, although he served as
director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science under the
George HW Bush administration.
Happer’s claim to fame has been his assertion that global
warming is largely a natural phenomenon and that increased carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere is really a good thing.
“The North Pole,” a seven-part online political comedy, provides
some amusing social connections between climate change and the
gentrification of aging neighborhoods.
Set in North Oakland, Calif., the story revolves around close
friends who have grown up in the area and find themselves
struggling against landlords, corporate greed and ultimately their
own social consciences. The setting could just as easily have been
Seattle or any other city in which low-income housing is being
displaced by condos and cute corner malls.
Samantha Bee’s Halloween show last week is making a big splash
on the Internet. The underlying theme was climate change, and the
program cleverly makes a connection with this particular time of
year, when many people relish the experience of getting scared.
In one segment of the show, which is called “Full Frontal,”
singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson wears a picture of the Earth
while singing an altered version of her big hit “Be OK” (original
version). The revised song, called “Not OK,” addresses the
horrors of climate change.
As Michaelson sweetly sings about the dangers of an altered
climate, members of the “Full Frontal” cast dance around the stage,
representing hurricanes, storms, floods, burning trees and finally
an angry sun, as you can see in the first video.
Michaelson sings, “I am clearly not OK, not OK, not OK. Earth is
clearly not OK today. I’m getting warmer every day, every day,
every day. Climate change is Fu__ing me, oy vey!”
It’s tough to combine humor with a serious message, but
Michaelson’s new words on a tragic theme are made palatable by the
upbeat tune and the silly dancers.
One viewer commented on Michaelson’s Facebook
page that she had ruined a perfectly good song, but the vast
majority of her fans were delighted that she had found an amusing
way to weigh in on an important topic.
I guess something similar could be said for the entire show,
which I decided to go ahead and share on this blog post. Except for
the Michaelson segment, the videos are posted in the order they
appeared on the show. If you’re not familiar with this show, you
should be warned that the language can be coarse at times.
In another segment, more edgy than funny, Samantha Bee goes
after Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency, who has begun to reverse direction on President Obama’s
plans to move the United States away from coal and toward renewable
energy. She points out that before Pruitt became the head of the
EPA, he was one of the agency’s biggest enemies. As Oklahoma
attorney general, he sued the EPA 14 times, largely on behalf of
the oil and gas industry. While she can’t stop Pruitt’s
anti-regulatory approach, she thinks she can poke him in the eye by
demanding a public hearing.
In Act 3, called “(Hot as) Hell House,” Bee takes climate
deniers through a Halloween-style haunted house to see if she can
scare them into caring about climate change. The setting is 50
years from now, when the Earth is ruined, cockroaches are the only
food supply and people cannot escape the droning recitation of Al
Gore’s Ted Talk by a creepy John Hodgman. One climate skeptic said
the experience had changed her mind, but her reasoning — revealed
at the end — was quite amusing.
The haunted house scenes were filmed within the abandoned
Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, the site of Terror Behind the
Walls. It is said to be America’s largest haunted house, listed
as number 1 in the country by Forbes magazine.
