The Most Environmentally Unfriendly Movie Plots

For decades, moviegoers have been transfixed by natural calamity on a global scale. But apocalypse is nothing without a villain, and there is no greater nemesis of all creation than man. Be it global warming, nuclear proliferation or meddling with the mantle, in the eternal battle between humans and nature we’re the Globetrotters and the earth is the lowly Washington Generals. So let's revisit the many ways in which we've dreamed of destroying our planet!

The Simpsons Movie (2007)

The Toll: Thousand-eyed squirrels combine with the untimely demise of Green Day to foreshadow the environmental quarantine of geographically-ambiguous Springfield.
Blame It On... Homer Simpson. His reckless disposal of a silo full of pig waste into already polluted Lake Springfield touches off a series of disasters that nearly destroys the town.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

The Toll: Al Gore travels America in an SUV aiding people with sleep disorders by using facts about the expeditious rate at which the earth is becoming Cleveland.
Blame It On... You, us, everyone. By simply reading this you've already melted a polar bear.

Firestorm (1998)

The Toll: Approximately a Tuesday in August worth of hinterland destruction in Southern California.
Blame It On... A group of convicts who start a forest blaze, then pose as firefighters to make their escape. Fortunately, Howie Long's dramatics extinguish everything in a 500-mile radius.

The Abyss (1989)

The Toll: An underwater alien race is annoyed out of hiding, then nearly blown up.
Blame It On... The troops. An overly aggressive Navy SEALs team is dispatched to rescue a sunken submarine and comes dangerously close to war with PETA.

Evan Almighty (2007)

The Toll: A bedroom community serving the nation's capital gets submerged under a surge of lake water, rendering the decorative towels at Bed Bath & Beyond even more useless.
Blame It On... Government corruption. Corner-cutting in the construction of a DC-area dam validates the quirks of a congressman chosen by God to build an ark, when the dam bursts.

Fire Down Below (1997)

The Toll: Untold amounts of fish and human life are the cost of toxic dumping in rural Kentucky... followed by untold amounts of aikido-powered ass-kicking by an EPA agent with a ponytail.
Blame It On... Corporate polluters. Dumping is so lucrative that everyone profits, from the local coal-mine owner to citizens paid to keep quiet. Plus free, universal birth defects for all!

Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986)

The Toll: Students in a New Jersey high school begin spontaneously mutating, reproducing orally and melting into slime at a rate far greater than most students in New Jersey high schools.
Blame It On... Radioactive runoff from an adjacent nuclear power plant. Sure. That's the reason.

C.H.U.D. (1984)

The Toll: In New York, disappearances are up and the homeless populace is mysteriously down.
Blame It On... Regulatory oversight. Toxic waste, prohibited from transport through the city, is instead stored underneath it, where exposed vagrants mutate into cannibalistic fiends. In real life, they've all since moved to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

City on Fire (1979)

The Toll: An unidentified Midwestern city is engulfed in petrol flame, not to mention the tons of noxious sputum released into the atmosphere. (Seriously, the movie doesn't even mention that.)
Blame It On... A disgruntled civil servant, who sets a rapidly-spreading fire at his landlocked oil refinery, which is improbably situated smack in the center of a densely-populated metropolis.

The Core (2003)

The Toll: A super storm crumbles the Coliseum, unfiltered sunlight evaporates the Golden Gate Bridge and every stated law of physics is roundly ignored in order to get earth spinning again.
Blame It On... Electromagnetic chaos caused by the suspension of earth's rotation... caused by a secret project that uses earthquakes as weapons... caused by Dick Cheney, probably.