Taxpayers fund £200,000 study on environmental impact of Star Wars

British taxpayers have funded a £200,000 study on the environmental impact of the Star Wars films and the carbon footprint of R2D2.

The project, titled 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.

Researchers will examine the carbon footprint of props and costumes used during the film, including sidekick R2D2 and lightsabers.

The study found that 21 R2D2s, made of sheet aluminium and fibreglass, were produced for the films between 1976 and 1998.

The 1977 R2D2 made for Star Wars: A New Hope, produced carbon emissions equivalent to 686.08kgCO2

This rose to 4,248.15kgCO2 for the droids’ appearances in the 2002 film Attack of the Clones.

The study calculated that it would take a full-grown tree nearly 33 years to capture the carbon emissions created by the 1977 robot 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”.

In a YouTube video of the project’s launch event in May, Rebecca Harrison, the principal investigator, said that an “animatronic puppet Baby Yoda” was chosen for the study “because we thought we’d up the cute factor a bit”.

Her colleague talked about ways to make R2D2’s journey “more eco-friendly”.

They added: “It’s like giving him a script rewrite for a better ending that’s kinder to our planet.”

Ms Harrison is the author of a 2019 paper titled Gender, Race, and Representation in the Star Wars Franchise: An Introduction, in which she challenged the lack of “visibly black stormtroopers” and flagged concerns that “characters of colour are frequently killed off”.

The research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which in turn is sponsored by the taxpayer-funded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which has been handed a budget of £207 million for 2022 to 2025.

Speaking about the 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.”

Ian Pace, a professor of Music, Culture and Society at City, University of London, said: “There’s a general issue with academics working on arts and culture feeling they need to tag their work to ‘big issues’ or traumatic events in order to demonstrate its ‘relevance’.

“This betokens a severe loss of confidence in art, or cinema, or music or whatever, having value in themselves. Conferences are full of papers which are really about academics virtue-signalling about climate change and other issues, with almost no chance of having any wider impact.’”

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.”

A UKRI spokesman said: “We are proud of AHRC’s significant and substantial contribution through research funding to support the UK’s film and TV production industries, which bring in billions of pounds to our economy every year and support thousands of jobs across the country.”