Resources

Netflix Resources

• Netflix Sustainability
• 2023 ESG Report and blog by Emma
• Low Carbon Production at Netflix
• Net Zero Commitment video
• Behind the Scenes of Netflix Productions [Part 1 - Electric Batteries]
• Behind the Scenes of Netflix Productions [Part 2 - Electric Vehicles]
• Behind the Scenes of Netflix Productions [Part 3 - Hydrogen Power Units]
• Clean Mobile Power Initiative
• Netflix studio campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico: major expansion project with many decarbonization features including geothermal water loops, solar & battery storage systems and EV fast chargers. Hear more from Emma on these investments.
• Netflix Sustainability Stories: 200+ shows and movies featuring sustainability themes and storylines, including comedies like Unstable, documentaries like You Are What You Eat and Life on Our Planet and dramas like Leave the World Behind

Entertainment Industry Resources

• Clean Mobile Power Initiative
• BAFTA's Sustainable Production Studies
• Screen New Deal
• Metro Vancouver and Green Spark Group, 2023
• Sustainable Productions Alliance 2021 White Paper
• Film London's Fuel Project (Phase II)

Host and Guest

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative (LinkedIn)

Guest: Emma Stewart, Sustainability Officer at Netflix (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Emma Stewart:

So it's now a kind of open debate. Does something have to mention climate to be a climate story? Does something have to mention sustainability to talk about clean tech? There are so many creative angles to kind of chronicle this major transformation our economy is going through, and that is felt palpably by society, you don't need to beat people over the head with it.

Mike Toffel:

This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I'm your host Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS. This is the second episode in our series on business and climate change in the media and entertainment industry, where we explore the influence of storytelling and media platforms on climate action. In our previous episode, we featured Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN, Bill Weir.

Today I'm joined by Emma Stewart, sustainability officer at Netflix, to discuss how one of the world's largest entertainment companies is integrating climate themes into its content and operations. We'll dive into Netflix's strategy for sustainability. Emma will also offer advice for those looking to contribute to climate efforts within the entertainment industry. Here's my interview with Emma Stewart from Netflix. Emma, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Emma Stewart:

It's my pleasure, Mike.

Mike Toffel:

So Emma, you're the Netflix sustainability officer. Can you tell us a bit about, first, how you even got to that role? And then let's talk about the role itself.

Emma Stewart:

I would love to. I've been in the corporate sustainability world for the better part of two decades. I will be honest, I never anticipated working at Netflix or an entertainment company, but couldn't be more thrilled to have landed here. I started out more in the sciences, applied research and the academic world, knowing that I always wanted to put that research depth and rigor into play to help corporates formulate science-driven environmental strategy that drove business growth and business opportunity. At the time, the field of corporate sustainability didn't exist, the term sustainability wasn't really utilized outside of maybe the UN circles with sustainable development. So it's been really a privilege over the past 20 years to be able to put these skills into effect and to really see them rise up the ranking in terms of corporate priority, policy priority, and public interest.

Mike Toffel:

So where were you before Netflix?

Emma Stewart:

I was at ENGIE, which is a global energy company based out of France, about 170,000 people. They are the utility in a number of European countries, and they were one of the few energy companies to declare really robust net-zero targets and they're leading the transition in that industry. I joined their new consulting arm, which is about 1,000 people strong, and my first client was Netflix. So I was only at ENDGIE for a brief period of time before I jumped into the in-house role. But it was a wonderful time and, in fact, we continue to work very closely with the crack team over there at ENGIE. And before that I was at World Resources Institute.

Mike Toffel:

Oh, right. Interesting. So science background, NGO experience, private sector energy, and now here you are in the entertainment space. Am I correct, you're the first Netflix sustainability officer?

Emma Stewart:

Yes, I was the first sustainability hire for the company. That's not to say, however, that there was nothing going on. Employees on their own volition were, would you believe, calculating electricity use in certain parts of the company, buying renewable energy credits. But for no one was it their day job or their professional area of expertise. That was late-2020 I was hired. It was a bit of a standing start, to be honest, but we were able therefore to set up a sustainability function from the ground up, hire truly the best people in their respective areas. Sometimes a late start comes with advantages, we were able to leapfrog certain things and move quickly in order to catch up with our peers.

Mike Toffel:

Neat. How do you describe the role of you and your team now? So you have this, I imagine, relatively small team. Most of the companies have a small team in the corporate level, and then they work with key contacts in the various business units. Is that how it's set up at Netflix as well?

Emma Stewart:

Yeah, our team is just under 20 full-time, and then we work with thousands of employees across Netflix, which is about 13,000 employees right now. It's a very global company. The service is available in 190 countries, we have operations in dozens of countries, so it's very much a global role and a global function. Really, we try to work as a tapestry across those different functions and equip them with the technical expertise they might be craving, make recommendations but not prescribe, that's not really in the cultural ethos of Netflix, to make sure that things are locally resonant so that local teams have the chance to adapt them and conform them to local circumstances.

We have a three-part remit. The first is to decarbonize the company at the speed prescribed by science, which is something I worked on early in my career in crafting these methodologies for deriving a science-based target, and to do so also across the supply chain and the value chain, but through influence as opposed to within our own footprint. The second is to support creators who choose to weave sustainability into their storylines, their subplots, their characters, their settings, and to provide them with the resources and expertise that they feel really confident in doing that. Then the third is to spotlight the many sustainability stories, and even themes that show up across the Netflix service because consumers tell us that they are really interested in this topic, and it's a reflection of their now day-to-day experience. So we really try each day to fire on all three of those, but starting with that first one.

Mike Toffel:

When I think about Netflix and its climate impacts, it's resonant with what you just said. I think of it as the production process, the work that you're doing to create the movies and TV shows, the servers that are hosting your content that feed all of us when we go on Netflix, and the storytelling that you're doing in your movies, and shows, and documentaries. Is that the right scope of what to think about with Netflix and climate?

Emma Stewart:

Yes, I think those are right. The first one is exactly right, the productions. It turns out, we didn't know this until we ran the company's first ever carbon footprints back in late-2020, and that was quite a task for a company that had never collected this data, or crunched those numbers, or converted them to emissions before, so we discovered that, in fact, we are an entertainment studio and therefore our carbon footprint reflects that. Most of our emissions in a typical year come from the making of film and television. The rest come from corporate operations, our offices and facilities, all of which we lease with the exception of two.

Then a very small portion, generally around 6%, come from the digital streaming, and that's in part because the servers that cache Netflix for you locally are so hyper-efficient, it's a very small portion of the overall corporate footprint, and because the digital streaming of video is a shared life cycle, meaning Netflix includes in its footprint the emissions associated with AWS. Amazon Web Services hosts all of the computing. So you might think that they're Netflix servers, they're actually Amazon servers.

Then, the network. So the internet infrastructure is of course shared and owned by internet service providers who we have to partner with because we are not the only company that uses the internet, it turns out. Then the third is the device energy use, and that's in fact where the lion's share of emissions from streaming fall. About 50 to 90%, in fact, of emissions from streaming an hour of Netflix are in the device that you plug into the wall. Those fall outside of our carbon footprint, but we don't view them as falling outside of our realm of influence. So that's where we try to work with those device manufacturers to tighten those up.

On the storytelling front, that's really about supporting creators as a company that tries to be very creator-led and creator-centric. We don't like to tell creators how to do their jobs. They are the best in their field at screenwriting and crafting a creative vision, no matter what genre. What we have found is that a number of those storytellers, screenwriters for film or showrunners for TV series, really do want to reflect a changing world around them on screen, whether that's the revolution in clean energy and clean technology, or that's the fact that climate impacts are now on everyone's doorstep, and so we support them in their writing process in reflecting that properly, and hopefully with great entertainment value.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it sounds like you have a lot on your team's plate, that's for sure. So let's talk about these one by one. So on the production process, I know that there's a big effort underway to transition away from fossil fuels, both to power the production process itself and also in the supply chain. So if you could just tell us a bit about your major efforts there.

Emma Stewart:

When you look at the making of film and television, it's quite interesting to discover that fuel and electricity make up the majority of the environmental footprint there, and those tend to come from transportation, so to, and from, and within a given production, and also from the fueling of those productions. In production, those are really our two key levers, electrifying transportation, then decarbonizing the auxiliary power. Diesel generators have been, in some ways, synonymous with the making of film and television for many decades, and so that will be a big nut to crack for the industry writ large.

The biggest opportunity as a company, outside of production, is actually in the procurement of renewable electricity and fuels. That includes renewable electricity through utilities. Again, where we lease, we have to work together with the landlord to bring clean electrons online, and often pay a premium to do that. Where we have ownership and operational control, like in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we've been able to do direct investment in renewable energy projects. We recently broke ground on a 5 megawatt solar and 3 megawatt battery combined system that will actually power all of the electrical needs of our Albuquerque campus, including a major expansion whose ribbon was just cut a couple of weeks ago.

That is even more impressive when you think about the fact that we're installing 50 more electric vehicle chargers and putting in a geothermal system. So the electrical loads are actually going to go way up, but we're able to address them and decarbonize them through this solar plus storage system. So where we have that opportunity, we're digging in directly, and then we're able to match all remaining emissions in a given year in the electrical realm through the purchase of renewable energy credits. But we recognize that those are perhaps not the highest quality of clean energy that one can possibly invest in, so we don't give ourselves credit for those in our carbon footprint inventory. We just buy them to match the electricity emissions that we haven't been able to reduce directly in a given year.

Then lastly, energy efficiency. Business is all about optimization, but you'd be surprised how much waste there is in the corporate sector when things are overlooked. Sometimes for the purposes of simplicity or to just minimize paperwork, you see waste of energy, and this is true across every company, across every sector. So we've been working with our corporate real estate teams to audit the spaces that we occupy, again, together with those landlords to find what I describe as the rotting fruit that has fallen from the tree, it is so low on the branch, so that we can help that landlord really invest in tightening the envelope, and the systems and appliances in those facilities. So across those four, that's where we get our emissions reductions in order to track against our 2030 target.

Mike Toffel:

So part of this effort is Netflix reducing its own carbon impact, but some of these efforts, it sounds like, requires new technology, whether on the fuel side or on the equipment side. I think you're working with some industry partners to try and broaden the demand for those types of equipment. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Emma Stewart:

Absolutely. In the vehicle space, happily, we are seeing passenger vehicles electrify naturally. There's not a lot of juice that we need to give as Netflix to make that happen. What we've been concerned by is the lack of availability of electric vehicles in more of the medium and heavy duty truck classes, so that's an area where we lean in with our transportation vendors. Netflix doesn't own any of these fleets. In fact, we don't even lease many of them, we rent them because productions are quite short when you think about how long it takes to produce film and television versus let's say owning a factory, which would be decades of ownership. What we do is, as we're working with those vendors, we really try and point them to our goals and say, "We'd like you to bring electric versions of these vehicles online, and we will pilot them with crew on productions to make sure that they work." So we've been doing a ton of piloting in the electric vehicle space, specific for production uses.

Then in the auxiliary power world, as I mentioned, for decades film television has relied upon these diesel generators, which it turns out break down quite often. They're often used at lower utilization rates, and when that's true they break down even more often. But the incentive has always been, "Well, we don't want this production to go dark, nobody wants that, so we'll just over-engineer." We'll essentially oversize the auxiliary power, so you get more diesel generators operating at lower utilization rates, which turns out to be quite expensive. Not to mention they're very noisy and the fumes are not pleasant. So it means that you have to cable long distances away from the actual shoot in order to keep those fumes and those noises from disturbing the crew or the talent. It's not the ideal technology, which makes it really ripe for disruption.

So what we've been piloting, as have others in the entertainment sector, is the use of things like mobile batteries. So these are kind of medium-sized batteries, maybe the size of a conference room table or a car park parking lot space, and those work wonders. They're completely quiet. They've been able to power multiple of our productions and, in fact, with such high reliability that the crew feels comfortable unplugging the backup diesel generators, so you're not using both at once. Then the other is called a fuel cell, which many of your listeners will be familiar with, which relies upon hydrogen. In our case, we try and source green hydrogen, meaning the hydrogen itself has been derived using renewable electricity, and the fuel cell effectively catalyzes a chemical reaction on site. So it's making the electricity on site. It's very, very quiet, and its only pollutant is clean water because it's reuniting the hydrogen and the oxygen molecules.

Those tend to be a bit bigger, a bit heavier, less mobile, so one of the things we've been doing with Disney and Rocky Mountain Institute is creating an enabling environment, kind of a technology incubator called the Clean Mobile Power Initiative, where we're really trying to cultivate fuel cells and mobile batteries that work for the very demanding operational needs of production for film and television, as opposed to what they have traditionally been used for, which has been more stationary needs, like a data center. That's been going really well. It's this sort of example where we saw that this worked, but we also saw that there was insufficient supply, and they really weren't meeting all of our technical specifications, so we said, "Well, let's put our money where our mouth is and lean in with the likes of nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute and help these companies grow.

Mike Toffel:

So the idea here is partnering with an organization like Disney scales demand therefore creates incentives for the supplier to actually invest in the production capacity, which then reduces cost and hopefully improves quality over time.

Emma Stewart:

Exactly, exactly.

Mike Toffel:

Interesting. What has been harder or easier than you expected in all these efforts?

Emma Stewart:

Well, in some ways, having this late start has worked to our advantage in the sense that, if I had joined 10 years ago, I wouldn't have had a lot of these clean technology options. EVs wouldn't have been quite so prevalent, even the batteries wouldn't have been quite so available. So our market timing was good in that sense, but that doesn't mean that it's all easy. A lot of the technologies that we need for production, these clean technologies are not available in the hundreds of locations where we're filming in a given year, so sourcing them can be quite the chore. Then you have just the human elements of this. Crew and production executives have been using these technologies for decades, and anything novel comes with risk, especially in a very demanding environment where you have to be on time and on budget, and you're dealing with lots of cast and crew, and local municipalities, tons of stakeholders, you really can't afford interruption just to try something out.

So one of the things we've done is we've financially incentivized the productions to try out this clean technology. We've written a line item into their budget where my team effectively subsidizes the adoption of clean technology. They are welcome to use that. They're welcome to come to us and say, "You know what? This is going so well we'd like more." What they're not welcome to do is to reallocate it to another budget need that they might have over there. So that's really been quite transformative. Then the other thing that we institutionalized was the concept of a regional sustainability advisor. What that means is we've handpicked a set of former production executives who know this business cold, and they themselves have become clean tech experts, and they advise multiple productions in a given region on how, when, and where to implement these clean technologies.

The fact that they can look at a whole ecosystem regionally means they understand the vendors, they know who can provide what, where, and when. They also understand all of the constraints for a line producer who is ultimately their client, and they're able to essentially plug and play these technologies, including sharing them across productions, because they are carrying that bag of multiple productions. Traditionally, the entertainment sector would assign what's called an eco-steward, who tended to be a very junior person, not totally empowered, not given much in the way of financial incentives, if any, and they generally focused on things like waste diversion. So they were kind of assigned the recycling bin, and that was really the extent of it. So this regional approach with much more senior, former production executives who help the crew and the production management on the ground really soften the ground, become receptive to these technologies. Then once they've tried them a couple times, generally they're converted by that point.

Mike Toffel:

Interesting. So on the production side, one of the things that's so interesting and different about studios like yours compared to your average manufacturer is this whole idea of, you have some studio and fixed assets, but then you've got a lot of mobile needs, mobile power, mobile materials, so this idea of regional advisors getting out there, understanding the vendor ecosystem, because not everything's available everywhere, and the expertise to run new technology also quite a bit, makes a ton of sense. That's really interesting.

Emma Stewart:

When I worked at World Resource Institute, I ran the city's program on energy and climate. One might think, "Well, there's no parallel there." But in fact, productions are a little bit like mobile cities, you build them and then you dismantle them. So you have some of the benefits of working with city government in the sense that it's a discrete area, it's small enough, it's containable, and you have some level of control. But because they pop up and disappear and pop up and disappear, it certainly adds its own element of complexity when it comes to sourcing these clean technologies, but also when it comes to gathering the data to make sure that our combined corporate carbon footprint is accurate and passes muster with our third party auditors and with governments who now require us to disclose that on an annual basis. So not to complain, but it definitely makes for an added challenge as opposed to other more stationary, more established types of operations.

Mike Toffel:

Right. So let's shift gears and talk about how climate appears on screen in the storytelling that your colleagues develop. You've mentioned already one of the roles of your group is to support the creators, and to recommend but not prescribe. I imagine that you must deal both with inbound inquiries like, "Can you help us figure out how to tell this story?" Perhaps you receive inbound inquiries. And then also, there might be an opportunity for some outbound advisement when you hear about a project that's handling the potential to handle climate, or the potential to bring climate into the story, or maybe the draft you've heard about brings it in a way that you think might not be accurate. Talk a little bit about both your inbound and your outbound efforts on the storytelling.

Emma Stewart:

This service that we provide internally is a responsive service, so content executives are coming to us. Those are the folks who are commissioning and developing film and television, and now games. They know that we are available to them and to their writers free of charge. They regularly pass us scripts. They also sometimes ask us about things to consider licensing or acquire. We're really there as a technical resource.

What's interesting is, we have staff members who have both the technical environmental science backgrounds, but also creative writing and screenwriting, or documentarian backgrounds, so they know exactly how to support writers, and certainly how to stay in their lane when it comes to providing them creative prompts, and ideas, and research that localize something or humanize something, make it feel really real, and rich, and nuanced, because that is more likely to lead to an entertaining story, as opposed to coming in with a dry set of charts and graphs, which is kind of how I was trained, to say, "Here's the way the world would look." So it's very adaptive depending upon which genre is coming to us. We have rom-coms, and light indies, and spectacle series, and comedy. They all know that our door is open to them, and the writers who we interact with in the writers' room seem genuinely grateful for the additional support.

Mike Toffel:

Great. Can you give us an example of how this went down, whether anonymized or with names, as you please? Some of this work where they came to you, and your team, and you gave them some input?

Emma Stewart:

So some of the titles in our sustainability stories collection, which is now over 200 strong, would you believe, some of those we have supported, others we haven't. We really give credit to the writers for the end result, so I won't distinguish which ones we support and which ones we didn't. But a number of them are really fun and sometimes surprise people. Often people assume that we would only support the docs, the documentary or docu-series teams, and we love supporting them. We do a ton of research for them. We provide them... What are the hot topics? What's happening in different parts of the world? But on the scripted side, there's an equal if not greater appetite for this sort of support. In the comedy realm, we support the series team and the film team. Even in the reality realm, you've seen an uptick in these sorts of storylines.

One example is Next in Fashion, which is a reality show about making different types of outfits. I'm sure I'm using the wrong term there. The second season actually focuses quite heavily on upcycling and, if I may spoil it for a moment, the winner of the whole season is the upcycler, the person who professionally views his craft as upcycling. You also have darling family fare, like Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, big title, certainly in my family, which has very strong storylines around the ills of industrial agriculture, and is all about chickens kind of discovering how they can have a better life in a delightful claymation style, inspired by Wallace and Gromit and done by some of the originators of that series.

You have big, meaty, dramatic, dark titles like Leave the World Behind starring Julia Roberts, where it's often unspoken, but the director has talked about how this is a storyline that was inspired for him by the impending almost cloud that is climate change in his life. And then you have the sorts of satires, like you mentioned, Don't Look Up, which literally never mention climate or sustainability, if you look at the script, but are very clearly appointed satirical treatment of the absurdity of humans inability to respond to what is an existential threat.

Mike Toffel:

Was there any discussion in the Don't Look Up writing and production process about whether to ever mention climate? Or is that from the beginning part of the ethos of the film, was going to be we're not going to talk about it, it's a parable?

Emma Stewart:

You'd have to ask the writer. My team was privileged to support the campaign for that, so we brought in technical expertise to the marketing and publicity teams. We brought in key thought leaders in the scientific community. We brought in key policy makers. We had the White House Secretary, John Kerry. We had a number of influencers who have real credibility in this space. We really looked to support the filmmakers and the publicity teams, and what they wanted to do, which was land this with very high entertainment value, but also make the point, land the point that the director and writer was hoping to make, which was, we need to act on this as opposed to politicize it.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it's so interesting having seen that film and enjoyed it, the idea that it didn't speak about climate, but that everyone in the theater, at least the theater that I attended, knew very clearly it was about climate. I wonder though, there's a risk sometimes in not mentioning it, whether everyone got that analogy? Do you think that's a risk?

Emma Stewart:

I think if you look at the press coverage of it, it was pretty clear that people got the analogy, but I don't know if I'm the right person to answer that. There's something called the Climate Reality Check out there that's been created by Good Energy, who are story consultants to a number of studios, and it's very similar to the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test is a gender equity test for representation on screen. So modeled after that, it really only poses two simple questions. You have to have two female characters talking to one another, not about a male character. In the Climate Reality Check, one or more character has to acknowledge climate change, and you do have to mention it. It has to be present somehow in the film or television series.

This is brand new, so they're just starting to analyze different studios slates. So it's now a kind of open debate. Does something have to mention climate to be a climate story? Does something have to mention sustainability to talk about clean tech? If you look at Rob Lowe in Unstable, he is a climate tech entrepreneur. He invents carbon sequestering concrete, but it's completely fictional. It's very funny. Not once do they mention sustainable air climate. So there's so many creative angles to chronicle this major transformation our economy is going through, and that is felt palpably by society, you don't need to beat people over the head with it.

Mike Toffel:

Right, and I think there's lots of evidence that beating people over the head of it can be counterproductive, it could turn people off, which was another question I was thinking about. So in our case writing about companies and climate here at HBS, there was a time where some of these cases profiled a lot of bad news, and it was all about risk, or it was about failed efforts to try and mitigate in the early days. And now that there's more successful companies that are navigating their way through, my sense is that students find those opportunities much more appealing than the risk management perspective. So I wonder if that's also part of what you're seeing resonate with your creators, the idea that upside is more attractive to narrative storytelling that will be viewed as appealing than downside?

Emma Stewart:

Isn't upside always more appealing? Nobody really wants to hear terrible things. We have a negativity bias in terms of our consumption of the media, so the media kind of feeds that negativity. But I think humans are wired to look for silver linings. When I was at Autodesk, which was a market leader in design software, I joined the kind of traditional sustainability team, which sat in marketing at the time. And I remember thinking, "We can make the company look good, we can disclose all of the things that people want us to disclose, and we can do the carbon footprint, and all of those good things, but ultimately our software is designing and constructing the build environment."

There is a major profit opportunity for us here to help our customers, who are big architecture engineering construction firms, do that in such a way that it is a higher performing asset at the tail end so that the buyers, the owners, the occupants are happier, the air they're breathing is cleaner, they're more productive because there's better daylighting, the transit flows are better because you have multimodal transit designed in as opposed to simply prioritizing a car. So it became a product function within the company, these sustainability solutions. So it really kind of graduated from protecting the company and minimizing risk, to all about entrepreneurship, if you will, for driving additional business growth.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, that's super interesting. There's two things that resonate with me for that story. One is, you can learn a lot about a company based on where their sustainability function reports to. Is it the marketing department? The legal department? Does it now reach the C-suite, as an increasing number of companies do? That tells you a lot about how it's thought of at the company, and where its efforts inevitably will have to be focused. And the second is the idea to look much more expansively about the opportunities in climate or sustainability, which is why I'm so impressed by Netflix not just thinking about its production process. A lot of companies could just end there. It's the equivalent of a bank thinking about making sure the buildings that they occupy are net-zero without really recognizing that the lending function is actually where they probably can make the most impact. And similarly Netflix, with the content that it puts out there. It really is shaping how people think about world, so it's exciting to see the work that your team's doing in that regard.

Emma Stewart:

In addition to being creator-led and responsive to those creator desires, we're audience-led, so we gravitate towards what our members really love, and enjoy, and double thumbs, and all those good things, and we're seeing feedback from the market that these stories, especially the optimistic ones, they resonate, so it's good for our business.

Mike Toffel:

How would you view Netflix's work in this area relative to Hollywood more broadly? You mentioned that you started a little behind when you joined, sounds like you've caught up, based on a limited amount I know about other studios. Is Hollywood treating climate change in a way that you feel like is the right way, or are there lots of opportunities yet to be realized?

Emma Stewart:

If you think, for every sector there's lots of opportunities. There's also lots of room for new entrants. Tesla is one, if not the most valuable company in the world, and it's a clean energy battery vehicle company. So I think you'll see a lot of change across the traditional sectors over the next few years as the clean economy really comes into its own, and as the older, more conventional fuels start to economically functionally die off. In the entertainment sector, long before I got here, studios were looking quite closely at the environmental footprints of their productions. Often the focus was around waste diversion, as I mentioned, partly because that was more measurable, partly because it's very visible, so it tends to elicit a lot of interest from cast and crew, and very well-meaning employees, who are saying, "Wait a second, why is so much of this going to waste?"

As that was happening, climate kind of rose up the ranks of environmental concerns and began to trump some of these other concerns, so fuel and electricity was really where we started. We are now beginners in the waste diversion space. We spent three years focusing on fuel and electricity. I would say the other studios have a big head start, more than a decade, and we've learned a lot by looking at what they've done. There's also a number of industry associations have been doing excellent work long before we got our start, including BAFTA, the British Film and Television Academy, and then you have what used to be at the Producers Guild, the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.

Which between them, I think they have the majority of the market share of all the studios, certainly in the Global North, still lacking some representation from the Global South. They've been pumping out carbon footprint calculators, scope 3 guidance, fuel reports, average carbon intensity of productions. Both are now, just over the past five years, very focused on the storytelling piece, supporting creators, writers, guilds in doing that more robustly, and feeling empowered to tell these stories and to represent them fully on screen. So we've really benefited from the industry momentum there, and hopefully contributed some small part to it, but it's not like we invented any of this ourselves.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, interesting. What advice do you have for those looking to work in climate change and the entertainment industry?

Emma Stewart:

As the joke goes, it's a surprise for me to be in the entertainment industry 'cause I can't name celebrities, I don't watch much television at all, but as some people have assured me, it means I'm maybe objective about the work. But the entertainment industry is one I had to learn cold three plus years ago, so I'm really grateful to my counterparts at other companies who tolerated my ignorant questions, and I was quick to hire people who had spent their whole career in the entertainment industry. But my team is actually mostly non-entertainment professionals. We have electrical engineers, we have carbon accountants, we have mechanical engineers, we have screenwriters, as I mentioned, we have marketeers, we have public policy wonks and analysts, we have folks who specialize in disclosures and investor relations, so I like to think of it as cross-training.

We're bringing the best from other sectors to bear in the entertainment sector which, if I may say, is quite unique, but also doesn't have very permeable boundaries. You don't see a lot of people going in and out of the entertainment sector. So again, it was a bit unusual for me to enter it so late in one's career, and to just be kind of confronted with so many unknowns. But by bringing all of these disciplines into the team, we were able to learn from the folks who knew entertainment well, and they were able to learn from the folks who understood power, or renewable energy, or carbon credits, so there's a ton of that multidisciplinary melding that goes on within the team. And then where other companies benefit from it, we try very hard to share some of that expertise, as do they.

Mike Toffel:

Terrific. We're recording shortly after Netflix just produced its latest ESG report covering 2023. Are there stories in that report that you want to highlight that go above and beyond what we've discussed today?

Emma Stewart:

I'm particularly pleased to see, just a couple years in really to the implementation mode, that we've been able to stay on track for our two public climate targets. One, which is to have our emissions this decade across scope 1 and 2, and in scope 3 that's an intensity target. Then also to match all remaining emissions in a given year, starting in 2022 with high carbon credits or renewable energy credits. Those two things going hand in hand are really important. I'm really pleased that we've been able to track against them, especially given that you can't control for things like a COVID pandemic, or a set of strikes that dramatically affect things like production volume.

I'm also really pleased in the production space that, while we certainly haven't solved the riddle of electrifying transportation or decarbonizing mobile power, we have these wonderful beachheads now. So two-thirds of the productions that Netflix manages have used at least one piece of clean mobile power equipment, and over 50% have used an electric vehicle or plug an electric vehicle. What that means is, we're starting to normalize this. You're starting to see crews, see one or two or three, and soon it will just become, "Oh, well, that's just a common practice." In some ways, I'd rather have those multiple beachheads than to be able to say, "We took one production to zero carbon," because the likelihood of that being emulated is much lower.

Mike Toffel:

Right. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story of Netflix and sustainability, and the work that you're doing on the production processes, the servers, and the storytelling. It's been a really interesting conversation, appreciate your time.

Emma Stewart:

I appreciated the questions. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Toffel:

That was my conversation with Emma Stewart, sustainability officer at Netflix. You've been listening to Climate Rising. I'm your host, Mike Toffel. Sophie Wong produced today's episode. Craig McDonald is our audio engineer. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Climate Rising. See you then.