Environment 101:
Writing Climate Change
Wednesday, April 23, 2025 | 5-6:30 PM PT | Online
2025 marks the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, so this year we’re highlighting the reality of climate change, how writers who wish to weave this narrative into their stories can, and how to do so with scientific accuracy.
Join us as we examine what Hollywood’s gotten right (and wrong) on writing about climate change, what disaster films say about our collective consciousness, and where we go moving forward. Even one voice can make a difference!
Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kRHHE_07SbK3_DN29yXROw
PANELISTS
Anna Jane Joyner
CEO, Founder, VP of Story Consulting, Good Energy
Anna Jane Joyner is a climate story consultant and the founder and director of Good Energy. With over fifteen years of experience in climate communications, she is driven by a passion for storytelling - and helping people find courage in the face of climate change. Anna Jane has worked relentlessly to establish bridges between artists, musicians, faith communities, Southerners, young audiences, and the climate movement. As a strategist at the intersection of climate and entertainment, she produced film and music videos and organized over 300 global partners around a youth-mobilization campaign for the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. Her work has been featured by Rolling Stone, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Glamour, Deadline, CNN, The Associated Press, The New York Times, and more.
Anna Jane’s prior experience spans state and national climate campaigns for “Beyond Coal,” water pollution, federal climate policy, voting rights, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and more. Her efforts to engage evangelicals on climate – including her own father, a prominent pastor – was featured in Years of Living Dangerously, an Emmy-award winning Showtime documentary series on which she collaborated with Ian Somerhalder and Lesley Stahl. For the last five years, Anna Jane has co-hosted “No Place Like Home,” a podcast that gets to the heart of climate change through storytelling.
Carmiel Banasky
VP of Editorial and Learning Initiatives, Good Energy
Carmiel Banasky is an award-winning short-story writer, novelist, and TV writer, staffing on the hit Amazon series, Undone, for which she wrote a climate-related episode in Season 2. She is the Head Writer and Executive Editor of the Good Energy Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change, and she specializes in climate fiction in the TV and podcasts spaces. Carmiel is a Film Independent Fellow and the author of the critically-acclaimed novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop, which Publisher's Weekly calls a "tour de force.” Currently, she is showrunning a climate sci-fi podcast series for Wondery, and she is adapting a feminist cli-fi novel for TV. Her writing has appeared, among other places, in The Guardian, LA Review of Books, and on NPR. She also teaches climate short film classes for youth and adults, as well as climate writing workshops along the LA River. She spent four years on the road at writing fellowships, including time on a ship in the Arctic to study and write about the climate crisis. And she once tried her damndest to open a Planned Parenthood in Mississippi.
ADDITIONAL PANELISTS TO BE ANNOUNCED