WASHINGTON POST • January 31, 2022
“Don’t Look Up” inadvertently shows us the pitfalls of a common trope of fictional work on the risks of climate disruption. Since depictions connecting nuclear weapons and global catastrophe emerged in the 1980s, extraterrestrial interlopers such as comets and asteroids have often been used to evoke the climate crisis. But such portrayals haven’t been particularly successful in spurring action — because the metaphor doesn’t work. Stopping the climate crisis requires collective political action, not scientific approaches alone. ~ Justin McBrien, environmental historian and lecturer at the University of Virginia