In January 2021, Travis Bradford was welcoming the latest group of students to his Energy Markets and Innovation class, which he’d been teaching at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs since 2012.
Bradford started class by asking everyone to introduce themselves. “It’s notable when a guy stands up and says, ‘I’m a professional comedian,’” he recalls. “It was the first and last time anyone has done that.”
That guy was Rollie Williams, a student who had already made a name for himself on the New York comedy scene playing Al Gore in his sketch show “An Inconvenient Talk Show” at a club on the Lower East Side beginning in 2018.
Williams had been trying to make it as a NYC comedian for five years when he created the show, in which Gore goes on an I-told-you-so tour about climate change and interviews real scientists onstage. Although he had majored in biochemistry and theater at the University of Puget Sound, Williams had never considered bringing science into his stand-up.
But after years of late-night sets to empty seats, Williams was taken aback by the success of his climate-based comedy. “The actual ‘aha!’ moment was that people came to the show,” he says. He never set out to make climate his niche; it just happened to be the subject that resonated with audiences.
After each performance, Williams would grab a beer with the guest scientists from that night’s show. He was struck by what excellent speakers they were and frustrated by the perception that climate had a communications problem. “They don’t have time to crank out TikTok or YouTube videos,” says Williams. “They have a bandwidth problem.”
Williams had the background to help, given his experience as a video editor and content creator, but “it became clear from talking to a lot of very unconnected climate scientists that the problem was big and we did not have our arms around it,” he says.
To take his show and its messaging a step further, Williams applied to Columbia’s Climate and Society program, then part of the Earth Institute, in January 2019. “I wanted to radically ramp up the amount of time I was spending studying the material, so that I could make my comedy show way better.”
That’s how Williams found himself in Bradford’s class in 2021, learning about the technology, economics and politics of energy systems. “Eighty percent of the climate problem is an energy problem,” says Bradford. “And [Williams] was there to learn about climate and the relevant levers and knobs that would be used to impact it.”
“The first couple of months of grad school, I was still doing the live show,” says Williams. “And some of the stuff I was learning in school, I could just turn it into a live bit.”
COVID lockdowns forced “An Inconvenient Talk Show” to close, but near the end of his time in graduate school, around spring of 2021, Williams began experimenting with comedy videos and created a YouTube series called “Climate Town.”
At its core, “Climate Town” episodes are heavily researched, carefully vetted long-form videos that take a satirical approach to climate issues, much as “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” delivers acerbic commentary on current events.
“Rollie occupies a very unusual space of taking deep dives into substantive issues in a humorous context,” says Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, an affiliated center of the Columbia Climate School, who also taught Williams. “The one other person I can think of who does this is John Oliver. They have vastly different resources and styles, but there is that overlap.”
Earning his M.A. in Climate and Society made Williams a better researcher and connected him with the climate experts he now relies on to help craft his episodes. “That level of knowledge has allowed my comedy to flow through a better rational and grounded argument,” he says.
One person Williams often texts for help is Bradford, who sits on the advisory board for “Climate Town” and provides both editorial and business advice. Bradford believes Williams’ strength lies in his everyman appeal, as well as his ability to entertain while delivering bulletproof, evidence-based arguments.
“He’s able to be dogmatic without being preachy,” says Bradford, who regularly attends “Climate Town” live events and brings his teaching team and students along to see Williams in person.
Today, the series has more than 725,000 subscribers on YouTube and has grown into a full media company that produces videos, a podcast, a newsletter and live shows.
Williams works with two other full-time staffers, a podcast co-host, a rotating crew of factcheckers and an investigative journalist who all ensure the content is accurate. “I feel like it’s my job to get the story right,” Williams says. Once they have their facts straight, they write the story.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is the lack of trolls in the “Climate Town” comment sections, and Williams may know why: “What takes so long to edit these videos is that we’re constantly sourcing everything, pulling the actual numbers and doing the math in front of you, and I think it’s helpful to combat the trolls.”
Williams doesn’t plan on changing his focus any time soon and encourages others to invest in climate careers, despite the challenges the industry faces. If future climate communicators are questioning graduate school, Williams says, “I would definitely go…this is a field that is not going anywhere.”
