You’ve probably seen this snippet from Leonardo DiCaprio’s Best Actor acceptance speech at the Academy Awards Sunday night:
Here’s a transcript:
And lastly, I just want to say this, making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world — the world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production had to move to the southernmost tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous peoples of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children's children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. I thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted; I do not take this night for granted.
DiCaprio’s caught a bit of flak for not knowing that the reason they had to move production wasn’t climate change, but rather the common occurrence of a chinook wind. This happens when warm air is pushed downward as it leaves the mountains and moves onto the flatlands. It can and often does raise temperatures by 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit in the heart of winter whether you’re in Colorado or Alberta, the Canadian province where much of the winning movie was filmed.
Despite that boo-boo, Anderson Cooper ought to ask DiCaprio to appear as a guest moderator for the seventh Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, next Sunday. Not only might that boost the size of the audience, DiCaprio could do what moderators so far have failed miserably at doing, which is to ask Hillary and Bernie a sustained set of questions about climate change. If he got even five minutes of climate policy questions and answers wedged into the debate, it would double the time spent on that subject in the 16 Republican and Democratic debates so far.
But then, it’s not like climate change is a crisis or anything. So, pardon me for even mentioning it.