[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY__KBYJjMM]
Freed from the nice-guy constraints of being Josh on the West Wing, Bradley Whitford was clearly having a grand old time as a Machieavellian oil industry lobbyist in Burn Up on BBC2 last week; Neve Campbell and Rupert Penry-Jones (from Spooks) completed the ensemble cast for a production that cost the BBC $15 million to make. Watch it if you haven’t already – if you live in the UK, you’ve got until 10.29pm on Wednesday 30th July to stream or download both episodes via the BBC’s Iplayer (if you download, you then have 30 days to watch them).
It was a riot – above all because, notwithstanding that this was a political thriller, the scriptwriter (Simon Beaufoy of The Full Monty fame) had really done his homework on climate change and energy policy (a task in which he was helped by Joe Smith from Open University, who co-edited Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? with Andrew Simms).
So we were treated to climate summits with delegates negotiating square bracketed text through the night as the US and OPEC countries raise flags to object to use of the word ‘mandatory’; China playing it both ways, cutting a deal with the EU for carbon sequestration before dropping them like a stone when the US offers free nuclear power instead (agonised British head of delegation: “the Chinese have stitched us up!”); and even – ta da! – the sight of climate negotiators agreeing a climate framework based on per capita convergence, with proper terminology and everything.
However (spoiler alert: stop reading now if you plan to watch it), all of this then falls apart when ‘moderates’ in the US delegation (“Withdraw that proposal, Tuvalu, or kiss your AIDS funding goodbye”) are replaced by even nastier military-industrial-spook types, who – it later transpires – have a Secret Plan, the gist of which is that the US is deliberately allowing climate change to happen on the basis that if it will damage the US, it will really screw China.
As prospects for a global deal recede, oil company CEO Rupert Penry-Jones (who has had a Damascene conversion to the path of climate righteousness after watching an Eskimo set herself on fire in protest at global warming, and then seeing methane hydrate plumes catching fire in holes in the Arctic pack ice as positive feedbacks start to kick in) decides to start playing real hardball: so he leaks secret geological data from Saudi Arabia to environmentalists (and thence the media), which shows that – ta da ! – Peak Oil is upon us. The film closes with snippets of media reporting of the massive economic crash that follows, and the prospect of something called the ‘third energy age’.
Only thing is, it’s not entirely clear why Penry-Jones has abandoned his earlier view that to tell the world that the oil peak is already passed would be a Very Bad Idea on the basis that it would (a) cause economic Armageddon, (b) kill thousands if not millions and (c) cause World War Three. I was sort of with Bradley Whitford’s evil lobbyist when he suggested that allowing the news to leak out ve-e-ery gradually might be a better approach. Leaking the news of Peak Oil being already behind us also looks to me like as much of a recipe for tar sands, liquids from coal and all US corn going to biofuels as it does a recipe for solar, wind and the ‘third energy age’.
But hey. Top marks to the Beeb for definitely the edgiest (and most politically accurate) climate drama we’ve seen so far. Eat your heart out, The Day After Tomorrow.
