Netflix’s Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay declared Tuesday he is “past politeness” on climate issues and has pledged $4 million to the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), a network which delivers grants to those who pursue “disruptive activism” in the public space.
It’s the largest donation the fund has received since it started in 2019 and McKay’s biggest personal gift.
CEF’s co-founders are Trevor Neilson, Rory Kennedy, and Aileen Getty — whose family fortune, ironically, was made in the oil business. Their money funds mass protests staged by “Extinction Rebellion” amongst others.
McKay joined the organization’s board in August, AP reports.
Climate change is “extremely alarming, extremely frightening, and quickly becoming the only thing I’m thinking about on a daily basis, even as I’m writing scripts and directing or producing,” McKay said in a recent interview with the news service.
From the overthrowing of monarchies to labor movements and the Civil Rights Era, activism is an “incredibly kinetic, powerful, transformative” force that’s created change throughout history, he said.
U.S. filmmaker Adam McKay wears a shirt reading “Just Look Up” as he participates in a rally to protest City National Bank and Royal Bank of Canada’s financing of climate crises and disregard for the rights of indigenous peoples, in Los Angeles, California, March 18, 2022. (RINGO CHIU/AFP via Getty Images)
The CEF has previously awarded $7 million to organizations supporting mostly volunteer climate activists around the globe.
Those activists have done everything from marching in the streets of France to urge people to “look up” — a reference to McKay’s film — to demonstrating on the water near West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s boat about the need for federal climate legislation.
As Breitbart News reported, McKay has a long record of backing immediate action to tackle “climate change,” using Oscars season earlier this year to re-invent himself as one of Hollywood’s most vocal climate change activists.
At the same time it has been revealed he and his wife have owned homes in Los Angeles and Ireland — a 10,000 mile roundtrip that gives the celebrity couple an elephantine carbon footprint.
He has called climate change the most serious threat facing mankind, demanded the defunding of a natural gas pipeline, and even claimed that anyone who dislikes his movie isn’t serious about global warming.
The director says he has gone past calls to action and is happy to fund others as they take to the streets in disruptive protests.
“I really do believe, without any hyperbole, scientifically speaking, this is the greatest challenge, story, threat, in human history,” he said.