Environment

With apologies to Betteridge, the jury is out. But this is scarcely a ragtag group.

The world, as we know, is in trouble. The last three years have been the hottest ever recorded. Global emissions are still at record highs. The planet is now consistently flirting with the 1.5C limit it promised not to cross. Increasingly, it feels as if we need a genuine miracle to stop us from sleepwalking into catastrophe. Could that miracle be an environmental warning from a woman in her pants?

For those of us on the other side of the pond, that means panties, not trousers.

This is the stated desire of Headline Newds, a new series of web videos by actor Megan Prescott, film-maker Bree Essrig and “climate narrative strategist” Jessica Riches. Released through the not-for-profit Yellow Dot Studios – belonging to Adam McKay, creator of movies The Big Short and Don’t Look Up – Headline Newds is made up of bite-size videos in which the climate emergency is broken down and raunchily explained to us by a variety of OnlyFans models.

It’s an interesting trick, and one that we have seen trialled elsewhere. When McKay made The Big Short in 2015, it was a gamble. As compelling as the story was, it hinged on an understanding of mortgage-backed securities and their integration into the broader credit markets underpinning the 2008 financial crisis. And rather than risk alienating audiences with a long, boring explanation, he hired Margot Robbie to talk us through the subject while wiggling around in a bubble bath.

There is a very short logical step from that to Headline Newds. And so we have the launch episode, The Sun is Daddy, in which Prescott slowly removes her clothes while explaining that solar energy could meet our global energy demands with less land than is being used by the fossil fuel industry. Or, in her words: “Daddy is a giver.”