DiCaprio’s Oscar Speech: All About Climate Change

Leonardo DiCaprio has been acting since he was 14 years old. He has been nominated five times for an Oscar without winning. At Sunday’s awards ceremony, he finally got to hear his name called. It was nice to see him honored for his years of solid acting and good performances. DiCaprio received the award for best actor for his performance in The Revenant. And he spent his speech “educating” the audience about global warming.

After expressing real humility and gratitude and thanking everyone who helped him get to where he is, the 41-year-old actor used the momentous occasion to speak about what really matters to him:

I just want to say this. Making The Revenant was about man’s relationship with the natural world — a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real. It is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, for the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this. For our children’s children and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed, I thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted.

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His speech was very well received by his Hollywood friends and associates. Here’s to hoping that at least some of the people watching at home took the time to fact-check DiCaprio’s claims. If they did, they would find that 2015 was not “the hottest year in recorded history.” In fact, according to the satellite data there has not been any global warming for almost 19 years. That’s right. Leo should have made his speech in 1997, when “Jack” couldn’t quite make it onto that floating door as the Titanic sank beneath the waves in the background. Because since then, outside of the seasonal changes, climate change has been, well, not climate “change.” It’s been more like climate “stay the same.”

And the only place they could find snow was “the southern tip of this planet”? Really? I presume that few people who spent all winter shoveling their driveways and walks — despite not living anywhere near the southern tip of the planet, or the northern tip for that matter — will fall for that snow job.

 

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