May the expense be with you! Taxpayer foots bill for £200,000 study on Star Wars environmental impact and the carbon footprint of R2D2
British taxpayers will foot a £200,000 bill for a study on the environmental impact of the Star Wars films and the carbon footprint of R2D2.
British taxpayers will foot a £200,000 bill for a study on the environmental impact of the Star Wars films and the carbon footprint of R2D2.
The Environmental Impact of Filmmaking: Using Star Wars to Improve Sector Sustainability Practices, began in 2022 at the Open University and is due to end in March.
The project will examine the carbon footprint of props and costumes used during the films, including sidekick R2D2 and lightsabers.
It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a body sponsored by the taxpayer-funded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which has been handed a budget of £207 million for 2022 to 2025.
During the study, researchers have found that 21 R2D2s, made of sheet aluminium and fibreglass, were produced for the films between 1976 and 1998.
The project will examine the carbon footprint of props and costumes used during the films (1977s Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope pictured) , including sidekick R2D2 and lightsabers
The Environmental Impact of Filmmaking: Using Star Wars to Improve Sector Sustainability Practices, began in 2022 at the Open University and is due to end in March
For the 1977 film Star Wars: A New Hope, the R2D2 produced carbon emissions equivalent to 686.08kgCO2.
In the 2002 film Attack of the Clones, this rose to 4,248.15kgCO2 for the droids appearances.
The carbon emissions created by the 1977 robot would take full-grown tree nearly 33 years to capture, the study calculated, and 202 years for the same tree to capture the emissions produced in the making of the digital version.
Researchers said that their work will feed into a broader study about environmental, militaristic, and socioeconomic histories of Star Wars across the four nations and explore the impact of other props and costumes made for the Star Wars franchise.
Principal investigator Rebecca Harrison said in a YouTube video on the projects launch event in May that an animatronic puppet Baby Yoda was chosen for the study because we thought wed up the cute factor a bit.
Ms Harrison had previously challenged the lack of visibly black stormtroopers and flagged concerns that characters of colour are frequently killed off in a 2019 paper titled Gender, Race, and Representation in the Star Wars Franchise: An Introduction.
Speaking about the current study, Andrew Montford, the director of Net Zero Watch, told The Telegraph: It has been clear for many years that climate change is being used as an excuse to deliver vast funding and academic jobs to a small army of pseudo-intellectuals.
It is quite shameful that this kind of project spending is being authorised at all, let alone spending on the scale that seems to be the norm today. The funding councils are wasting public money on a prodigious scale and ministers need to bring them to heel.
In the 2002 film Attack of the Clones (pictured), the carbon emissions produced rose to 4,248.15kgCO2 for the droids appearances
Principal investigator Rebecca Harrison said in a YouTube video on the projects launch event in May that an animatronic puppet Baby Yoda was chosen for the study because we thought wed up the cute factor a bit
A spokesman for the Open University said: Researching arts and humanities brings huge benefits to UK society and the Open University fully supports Dr Harrison and her work.
We are proud to be holding the film and television industries accountable in becoming more sustainable. With the average big budget film production producing 2,840 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, there is widespread acknowledgement that practices have to change.
Using Star Wars, one of the most successful film franchises in cinema history, allows us to demonstrate the impact of film on the environment and helps smaller, UK-based productions change their ways without needing the power of the Force.
