Oil is the family business. But Zelda, a young Black climate scientist, is alarmed by the connection between emissions from burning coal, oil and gas and the climate crisis. When her research begins to expose the multi-decade campaign of misinformation and climate denial engaged in by the fossil fuel industry, she becomes a target – and her oil company executive brother looms as her biggest foe.

SYNOPSIS:

Zelda is an LGBTQI+ Black woman who overcomes the rejection of her father and personal demons to become a climate scientist. She joins an ice core drilling project in Antarctica to conduct research for her doctoral dissertation and makes a romantic connection with a French scientist. In early 2009, she publishes research confirming the causal relationships linking increased atmospheric CO2, rising global temperatures and sea level rise. Her goal is to drive increased urgency at the Copenhagen Climate Summit coming up in December and persuade world leaders to agree to significant reductions in climate warming fossil fuel emissions.

Weeks before the U.N. sponsored event, hackers invade the private email network Zelda and her climate working group colleagues use to discuss their research. (based on a Nov, 2009 event called “Climategate”). Using email language taken out of context, a media smear campaign is launched to discredit decades of work done by climate scientists. The media storm derails the Copenhagen Summit.

The science network’s investigators determine that the hackers used Zelda’s email credentials, and digging further, that her father and brother Adam both work for an oil company. Under a cloud of suspicion, she’s required to leave the climate science group until an investigation determines whether she was involved in Climategate.

Devastated by this rejection by her peers and the failure of her research to move the climate needle at Copenhagen, Zelda’s youthful self-destructive tendencies re-emerge. Emotionally distraught, she questions the motives of her French lover and tries to sooth her anger with alcohol. She suffers a life-threatening injury in a car accident.

While hospitalized, an anonymous ally provides evidence that Adam surreptitiously acquired her email credentials at their father's funeral and colluded with professional hackers hired by the fossil fuel industry to penetrate the climate scientists' email system. Although this revelation is incredibly disturbing, it gets her back into the good graces of her scientific community. Strengthened emotionally, she begins to heal. Her determination to get back into the climate fight returns and she has powerful visions of the climate crossroads humanity faces, both dystopian and utopian.

In the final act, Zelda launches into a public confrontation with the oil company that generated her family's wealth, accusing them of a decades-long coverup of research conducted by their own scientists. Tensions mount to the breaking point as Zelda and her oil company executive brother Adam find themselves on opposite sides of a titanic struggle.

Current Note: The dramatic arc of my film has as its fulcrum a 2 month period in 2009 beginning in November with "CLIMATEGATE" – (a hack of private email correspondence exploited to smear climate scientists, obviously done on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, but still unsolved). It was clearly timed to influence the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen that happened a few weeks later, which ended up being an abject failure. There’s a new documentary is out about Climategate: https://www.theguardian.com/en...

Comps (3 with strong female leads):

“Dark Waters,” “Erin Brockovich,” “The Insider,” “Silkwood,” “The China Syndrome.”

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sspg...

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