GHG emissions of films, games and… airports?

There was a story in the Guardian earlier this month that caught my eye: “Disney’s Snow White had higher carbon emissions than the latest Fast & Furious film”. This sort of comparison is possible thanks to the publication of GHG disclosures by Disney associated with the production process. But it’s not as if Disney just created these reports out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. Two key elements are enabling this. First, a facilitator of meaningful emissions disclosures exists for specific Film & TV projects (in this case Disney films). The industry body ‘albert’, which started as a carbon calculator at the BBC before being spun off into an org now part of BAFTA, has a mission to reduce the environmental impact of film and TV productions. With tools for measurement and reporting, it helps to ensure that comparisons between film & TV productions are like-for-like, follows the same methods, isn’t an impossible ask for companies, and so on.

Crucially, however, Disney is also compelled to disclose these emissions by rules around UK film tax credits:

“Studios filming in the UK get up to 25.5% of their spending reimbursed under government plans to incentivise the industry. As part of this process, accounts must be filed for the ­production company behind each movie, showing the cost of making the movie and the emissions generated in the UK.”

This is great because it means the public gets to see what sort of climate costs are associated with films, and companies are incentivised to work to bring those impacts down because when they don’t, they get negative PR coverage like the piece in the Guardian above.

There’s two things I want to just briefly highlight in the rest of this short Good Friday newsletter – and they both emerge from the rather curious comparison that the Guardian piece chooses to make to try and contextualise the impact of the Disney film emissions figures for readers.

First, the authors give a potted explanation of the three “scopes” that GHG emission fall into, with a pretty-good explanation, that is maybe a bit of a simplification (fair enough for a general public piece in the Graun) but they also claim Scope 3 emissions are “largely outside the control of the companies being measured, so many… don’t list them on their accounts.” This is only really half-true, going beyond simplification into error. I can understand why they say it, but it’s just not entirely accurate. But they make the claim to contextualise the next thing they do, which is specify they’re only comparing Scopes 1 & 2 emissions for the remainder of the piece. This is fine, as far as it goes, but its made to enable a comparison of the scale of environmental impact between Disney’s two films and… an airport. This is a terriblecomparison.

I’m trying not to have a go at the Guardian authors, who are probably not carbon accounting experts – but this is a bad comparison. It’s apples to oranges, and doesn’t tell us much. One is the annual account of a physical piece of infrastructure (an airport – and just its direct fossil fuel and electricity consumption) and the other is a mobile, international production project that exists to produce a specific thing (a film) to a specific budget and deadline. You almost couldn’t get two more different types of activity if you tried. But because people associate air travel (quite rightly!) with high greenhouse gas emissions, the comparison between two film productions and a stationary object is made and produces a certain shock or surprise in the reader.

“Wow Disney films are worse than airports!” Well, not really? Maybe yes, maybe no. You might as well be trying to say which is worse: Ebola or a Hurricane Helene. They both have negative impacts! You could probably even put a dollar value on the damage of both if you wanted and evaluate them that way, but it would tell you almost nothing about how to prioritise government spending to prevent one or the other. The comparison is quite meaningless.

You know what would be a meaningful comparison to make to the production of a couple of Disney films, though? The production of a blockbuster AAA videogame! There’s a rich history of comparing games and films over the years – from their value as art, or their ability to compel emotional responses, to most famously their economic scale (did you know that games are bigger than Hollywood??). So why do we have to compare Disney films to airports? It illuminates little and confuses a lot.

I strongly suspect it's because, well, it simply isn’t possible yet to compare films and games. When I wrote DGACC and started my back-of-the-envelope calculations of the plausible emissions footprint of the games industry, I was actually able to read an albert annual report on the film and television sector’s total impact! There's still nothing like that for games – the closest thing is the AfterClimate Net Zero Snapshot, an entirely solo effort by yours truly. But even back in 2021 it was clear that games as a whole had eclipsed their Hollywood counterparts, and that’s only become much, much clearer since. So why isn’t it possible to compare films to games? Why resort to airports of all things?

I think the first reason an airport was the go-to comparison is because, as I mentioned earlier, despite the efforts the authors go to to clarify that they’re just talking about scope 1 & 2 emissions, there is an association in readers' minds with airports and high emissions. The sub-heading at the top of the article has no disclaimer about which scopes of emissions it’s talking about when it offers the following: “[Snow White], combined with The Little Mermaid, created more carbon emissions than some major airports do in a year”. So yes, a good old-fashioned media beat up never hurt the old page views, after all, and the Disney corporation is an easy villain these days (deserved, but irrelevant to any dispassionate analysis). That’s the first part of it.

The second is that we simply don’t know what the carbon emissions associated with most individual game projects are from start to finish! The numbers aren’t available, and can’t (easily? or at all?) be inferred from what we do have access to. I don’t think this is a nefarious thing, either, it’s just that the people responsible for GHG reporting at big games companies are busy and they have a specific remit, and working out how to tally up the parts of their annual inventories, gathering supplier data from all the outsourcing companies that did piece-work on a massive, sprawling new game like Assassins Creed Shadows would be a mammoth undertaking. Until governments or other institutions require these disclosures, they’re just not going to happen.

Look at the French public games funding agency the CNC, which has started requiring carbon footprints for games to receive funding as a leader in this. More of this, please! That’s the first part of an answer, but the second is that it needs to become possible to do – actually it needs to be easy. We need clear, actionable rules, transparent methodologies, and tools that any company can use to put together project-specific reports.

But there’s what’s possible and what’s easy. We know it's possible at least, because that’s exactly what I did for Die Gute Fabrik’s Saltsea Chronicles back in 2023 (though it was by no means simple, and that's a problem). Corporate emissions reporting and compliance programs – in games at least – aren’t geared towards identifying and disclosing specific project-level emissions, at least not yet. We also need to go beyond just providing guidance. Simplicity requires specific rules and methods that specify where to draw boundaries, what the fair way to split or demarcate between different projects is, and the tools to actually apply them. This is what we want to do at the Sustainable Games Alliance with the SGA standard. (So join us, yeah?)

The alternative to being made to do it by governments is to do it ourselves – but that only succeeds if it’s a collective project, with all of us behind it, the industry itself (readers, that means you!) makes it happen.

Project-based emissions disclosures would enable a CO2 emissions label on game boxes and digital storefronts, bringing all sorts of benefits to signal to potential players meaningful distinctions between games and their environmental impacts (I explored the potential benefits of this approach in a white-paper I co-authored with Marina Psaros for Unity).

GHG emissions accounting is a niche subject, and expertise in it isn’t the sort of thing we can expect from every mainstream journalist (at least, not yet? Give it long enough and I think we can all expect to become more well acquainted). So I’m willing to give a bit of a pass for this kind of issue, but I hope it’s been illustrative to see what getting it right could deliver.