By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
It turns out you can find more than self-esteem sapping, duck lipped anxiety causing content on Instagram and Tiktok.
So I loaded up TikTok for the first time and searched for “green energy” and there she was, a blue haired, twenty-something TikToker talking about climate solutions and blasting holes in the latest environmental conspiracy theories.
The first video I watched was by Hazel Thayer, an economics grad originally from Edmonton paraphrasing conspiracy theorists who believe the hole in the ozone was a hoax invented by governments to control the public.
Yup, we solved the ozone hole issue with HFCs, but in turn these contributed to climate change in a big way.
Ok, the one thing you need to know is Hazel is a comedian and that’s the superpower that enables her to tackle a global crisis and keep your attention in 60-second rants on TikTok and Instagram. Oh, by the way she just started in 2022 and has 120,000 followers on the two platforms.
And I use the word “rants” here appreciatively, as in “Rick Mercer Rants,” the multi-award winning television comedian whose won umpteen awards for his rants about social and political issues. As if to underline our age differences, Hazel wasn’t familiar with Rick Mercer. Let her know this comparison is high praise indeed.
The next video I watched tackled another favorite topic of the new world order conspiracies.
Her early videos debunking the acid rain and ozone hole conspiracies helped her go viral, but one of my personal favorite topics is 15-minute cities.
The idea is simply to build more compact cities and plan them so many of the things citizens need are 15-minutes away. You know more local businesses, better walking infrastructure, better biking infrastructure, good transit in short good urban planning that makes neighbourhoods great places to live.
Somehow this laudable planning aspiration has been turned into a version of a lockdown like conspiracy in which private property is confiscated, travel is forbidden and essentially the end of life as we know it.
Yikes, as a guy who’s been involved in urban planning issues as a community volunteer for 30 years, these folks need a history lesson. Planners often have laudable aspirations, but plans often wind up with hundreds of rezoning applications and mostly achieve the opposite of totalitarian outcomes. It’s what got us urban sprawl, higher taxes, roads to nowhere and the hodge podge of urban design that is all too common. 15-minutes cities is an aspiration to make more livable neighbourhoods, not a new world order.
Hazelisonline origin story
Hazel pulls no punches, and it seems to be working. So how did she get started doing these climate shorts.
Just as she was graduating from University of Alberta in economics, she was reading the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the severity of climate change. This combined with the impact of watching Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth when she was about 10-years-old led to a realization “No, for real, we have to deal with this…I was like ok, but the grownups are going to deal with it, right?”
About that time Hazel saw Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marching with Greta Thunberg and as she recalls Trudeau declared a climate emergency, said we going to get to net-zero by 2050 and plant 2 billion trees.
“That’s the whole climate plan. And, I went, oh, alright. So, I guess the grownups aren’t going to fix this.”
So, in 2022 Hazeisonline was born, and she began posting mostly short, 60-second video commentaries on climate change, environmental economics and a host of related social issues. She racked up 100,000 followers on TikTok even though climate change may not be one of the social media service’s favourite topics.
When TikTok started getting bad press around the world related to its Chinese owners and privacy issues, Hazel decided to hedge her bets and she started posting on Instagram, the other similar vertical format social media. In her first two weeks she found 22,000 followers there.
If you have watched a few of her videos you will realize she’s quick on her feet, does her homework and can pack a punch in just 60-seconds.
So how does she do it? “It’s either me doing some very bad acting, trying to explain a complicated climate or economic concept. Or, it is just a straight to camera sort of half edutainment, half stand-up set about whatever concept I’m trying to explain.”
Sure, she uses humour, and there are some quick cuts in her productions, but she also rattles off facts and figures like there is no tomorrow. Pun intended.
Hazel was inspired by people who said ‘we can fix climate change, but not in this economy.’
“There are ways to fix both, and I try to do it in the most entertaining, fun way possible, which involves a lot of comedy, a lot of the time,” she says.
Hazel is now also making the move to YouTube. Watch for her upcoming series tentatively titled unf*ucking the planet.
Hazelisonline is on the web, TokTok and Instagram and she is working on a new series enitled Unf*cking the Planet that will be released on YouTube.