Vattenfall tapped Samuel L. Jackson for an ad promoting wind energy.Vattenfall
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Standing alone on a rocky coastline wearing a seaman-style knit hat, Samuel L. Jackson reaches into a snack bag and gazes intensely through binoculars. Wind turbines spin ominously on a watery horizon.
“Motherfucking wind farms. Loud, ugly, harmful to nature,” the Pulp Fiction actor says. Then, shaking his head knowingly and shifting his tone, he adds, “Who says that? These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels, rising up from the ocean like a middle finger to CO2.”
The 60-second ad, released in July, immediately went viral. It also ran on television channels in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and other European countries. It’s part of a marketing campaign launched by Vattenfall, a century-old Swedish energy giant whose clean energy portfolio includes a famous 11-turbine project built within view of President Donald Trump’s Scotland golf course.
The ad reached 600 million viewers across 33 countries within four days of its release, according to a Vattenfall spokesperson. Trump isn’t named in the video, but Jackson’s script is a comedic wink-and-nod to the president’s frequent anti-wind rants.
“So, what’s it going to be? ‘Motherfucking wind farms’?” Jackson says in a mock angry voice at the end of the video. He then repeats the question, grinning widely and raising his eyebrows cheekily: “Or ‘motherfucking wind farms’?”
Research shows that comedy plays a powerful role in making climate change information salient for public audiences. That’s especially useful now, as the Trump administration works to derail the clean energy transition, but such efforts also come at a fraught moment for comedy in America.
It’s a tough time for political satire. In July, CBS cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after Colbert used the phrase “big fat bribe” to describe a $16 million settlement the network’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump. CBS said the show was killed for financial reasons, but the timing led to speculations that the decision may have been politically motivated.
Then, in mid-September, ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” after comments he made related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk provoked a veiled threat from Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. The network’s parent company, Disney, reversed course on Monday following public backlash, and Kimmel was back on air Tuesday.
“There’s this tragedy of killing freedom of speech. … The reason this is happening is because [Trump officials] don’t have the superpower of comedy,” said Staci Roberts-Steele, a producer for the wildly successful film Don’t Look Up. The 2021 Netflix movie used satire to point out the absurdity of delaying climate action.
America now has a president pumping the brakes on the clean energy transition, most recently by attempting to scuttle numerous US offshore wind farms already in development.
Trump has called wind turbines “ugly,” “terrible for tourism,” and responsible for “driving the whales crazy.” His dislike of “windmills” dates back to his unsuccessful court battle in the UK to stop a Vattenfall offshore wind farm from being installed within view of his Aberdeen, Scotland, golf course. All 11 turbines were eventually built in 2018.
Some Americans who saw the foul-mouthed Jackson ad on social media relished a major Hollywood movie star poking fun at Trump’s favorite anti-climate talking points. Roberts-Steele said she is glad that big European companies like Vattenfall are turning to humor to call out climate disinformation—and that the content is finding American audiences. She hopes it emboldens US comedians and institutions to follow suit.
“The Europeans have been doing it much longer than us…That’s totally true,” she lamented, adding that US public relations firms and film studios have been less bold about taking big swings at climate skepticism.
Don’t Look Up was a rarity for Hollywood. But its chart-topping success mirrors Jackson’s ad in several ways. Both employed comedy to tackle the topic of climate change. Casting major Hollywood actors drew loads of viewers. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill all starred in what became Netflix’s fourth most successful movie of all time.
Hollywood hasn’t generated a major climate comedy since.
At a press conference with UK’s prime minister last week, Trump went on a rant, saying, “We don’t do wind because wind is a disaster. It’s a very expensive joke, frankly.”
Roberts-Steele is now leading Yellow Dot Studios, a new nonprofit aimed at keeping the climate jokes coming. The studio hosts live comedy events, develops podcasts, and produces short-form videos that, among other things, mock the fossil-fuel industry.
But mainstreaming this kind of comedy isn’t easy, even with Hollywood director Adam McKay as the group’s founder and board member. “It hasn’t yet trickled up,” said Max Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies the fusion of climate change and comedy. After years researching the topic, he’s now trying to catalyze it.
Boykoff and his students—in collaboration with CU Boulder theater professor Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke—are part of an ongoing collaboration with some of the nation’s top writers’ rooms.
They’ve been working with writers on “The Daily Show,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and Comedy Central to make climate change news funny and memorable. On Saturday, Boykoff and his students produced a climate-themed comedy show with professional comedians in New York City, timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC.
“Comedy has this power to point out the contradictions in which we live,” said Boykoff. “It’s through comedy that people feel like they’re not being talked down to or lectured.”
With late-night shows facing intimidation under Trump, Boykoff said the involvement of independent academics—like himself—is more important than ever. He added that Europe’s role should not be discounted either.
The Samuel L. Jackson ad was the brainchild of the communications team at Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned energy company that has been around for more than 100 years. It manages a wide range of projects, from hydroelectric dams to offshore wind farms. The company’s long-term goal with its outreach is to spread the idea of freedom from fossil fuels, said Monica Persdotter, vice president and head of brand.
Unlike past campaigns, she said, this one “took off.”
“We’ve always been very bold in the way that we present ourselves to the world, with the messages that we have, which always circles back to fossil-free energy and fossil freedom,” said Persdotter.
The ad hit Vattenfall’s core market—the UK and EU—where the offshore wind sector has grown steadily for decades. For example, offshore wind farms generated 17 percent of the UK’s electricity last year.
Vattenfall operates more than 1,400 turbines across 14 wind farms, with a total installed capacity of approximately 6.6 gigawatts in five European countries, according to Persdotter. Several other Vattenfall wind projects are also in the works.
Meanwhile, the US only has one large-scale offshore wind farm in operation. Four others are currently being built in America’s waters. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused construction on a fifth, Revolution Wind, in August, but this week, the project’s developer, Ørsted, a Danish state-owned company, won a court-ordered injunction lifting the freeze.
Given the contrast between Europe and the US, Jackson, a widely recognizable American actor, was a powerful choice for Vattenfall’s ad.
According to Persdotter, her team got a tip that Jackson had studied marine biology in college and, at one point, considered a career in the field. The actor, she said, liked the script, making just a few stylistic tweaks to better align with his voice.
The ad was filmed along the California coast to accommodate Jackson’s schedule. The Golden State has no wind turbines installed in its waters yet—though the Los Angeles Times reports that the state, despite losing some federal funding, has not backed down from its plans to deploy the technology. The ad’s wind turbines were superimposed post-production using video footage of a real Vattenfall wind farm in Denmark.
As for the snack bag Jackson dips into—that’s a nod to the fact that wind farms can provide benefits beyond generating carbon-free electricity, for example, serving as sites for seaweed farming. The seaweed snack Jackson is munching—which he calls “serious gourmet shit”—isn’t commercially available yet, but Persdotter said it was harvested from experimental seaweed farming “lines” strung between wind turbines at Vesterhav Syd, a Vattenfall project in Denmark’s waters. (Vattenfall sent Canary Media a bag of the prototype snack, and a reporter verified that it tasted like conventional seaweed snacks.)
Trump, who famously cannot take a joke, has continued to call for the silencing of comedians critical of his policies, and he’s also been ramping up his attacks on offshore wind.
Last week, during a press conference in England with the UK prime minister, the president went on an unprompted rant about the clean energy resource, saying, “We don’t do wind because wind is a disaster. It’s a very expensive joke, frankly.”
Trump may not like jokes. But if the popularity of Vattenfall’s video is any indication, Europeans are clearly having a laugh at him. Roberts-Steele said Americans will keep laughing, too, as long as comedians are free to make the jokes.
