If nothing else, Adam McKay has impeccable timing.
The director of Don’t Look Up, a 2021 satire about global environmental disaster, chose the day this winter’s first El Niño storm arrives to launch his latest urgent — and darkly funny — climate warning.
Headlined “New Exxon El Niño Commercial,” the YouTube spot starts innocuously enough.
“We at Exxon have always been committed to the well-being of our community, and most of all you, the customer,” intones a voice instantly recognizable as Woody Harrelson‘s. The images are of a shimmering ocean, kids running on the beach, sunshine, a wedding proposal and a wholesome graduation ceremony.
Then, even while Harrelson’s Texas drawl remains comfortingly mild, the images start changing. We see a stormy sky, an oil refinery belching smoke, a hurricane battering an offshore platform, floods, riots and wildfires.
“There will of course be a lot of finger-pointing and blame,” says the Emmy-winning actor soothingly. “Which is why we at Exxon want to make sure you blame the correct people.”
Click on the video below to see where it goes from there.
“I’m glad to see oil companies like Exxon acknowledging the threat this climate supercharged El Niño poses by ducking and defecting responsibility,” quipped McKay to Deadline.
Earlier this month, NOAA placed the chances of “a historic event that would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950” at about 70% for November through January. Some experts, including Daniel Swain, a climate scientist in the California Institute for Water Resources within University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, have pointed out that, “as of mid-October, the 2026 El Niño event has already become the strongest on record by almost any metric.”
An El Niño-fueled Kelvin wave of warm water has already raised local sea levels by 6-12,” according to scientists. Couple that with more, stronger hurricanes tracking closer and sending more swell to California because of the warmer water, and you get flooding and massive beach erosion in places like Malibu, Long Beach, Newport, Dana Point and San Clemente. Just ask folks like Nicolas Cage, who has been racing to combat a sinkhole that recently opened up in the driveway of his beachside Malibu home. And, as anyone who remembers the El Niño winters of ’97-’98 and ’82-’83 can tell you, the worst is yet to come.
The State of California’s just-released Climate Change Assessment estimates that, due to sea level rise and more severe storms “24–75% of California’s beaches could disappear seasonally or permanently by 2100, with highly developed areas of Southern California facing especially severe losses.”
The Exxon “commercial” follows an El Niño Warning Letter petition that McKay launched earlier this summer expressing alarm at “the lack of public discourse, urgency and planning surrounding what is an impending, large scale, historic public emergency” to come this winter. It was signed by McKay, Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix, Jane Fonda, Rory Kennedy, Rainn Wilson, Javier Bardem, Hannah Einbinder, Chelsea Handler, Daryl Hannah, Mandy Moore, Evan Peters, Sarah Hyland and many more.
This isn’t McKay’s first viral jab at Big Oil. He was behind the devastating 2022 faux “Chevron Ad” that blew up online, garnering 5M views in its first 24 hours.
These spots are produced by Yellow Dot, a non-profit production studio founded by McKay to fight back against climate disinformation and inaction.
Yellow Dot Managing Director & Producer, Staci Roberts-Steele said in a statement, “Big Oil has spent precious decades and ungodly sums of money lying about its product to keep us hooked on it, and now the planet and public are facing the real bill in the form of scary, costly extreme weather. These same companies continue to kill the clean energy that is not only cheaper, but try to side-step their glaring responsibility for the increasing cascade of climate disasters. At Yellow Dot, we look to make entertaining projects to bring awareness to Big Oil’s treacherous bullshit, and to show that it doesn’t have to be this way.”