How OnlyFans creators are trying to make climate change sexy

A new series featuring OnlyFans creators like Lily Phillips uses their audiences to explain the climate crisis. The most interesting question? Whether the stunt works, writes Minnie Stephenson.

Climate change has a PR problem.

For years, environmental messaging has sometimes felt preachy: buy less, fly less, eat less meat, recycle more. Important advice, certainly, but in an age of endless scrolling, even the biggest story on Earth can struggle to hold our attention.

So what if the answer is sex?

That is the thinking behind Headline Newds, a new online climate series featuring OnlyFans creators, using their enormous audiences to talk about everything from Big Oil and microplastics to solar panels and carbon footprints.

More net zero than nudes

Yes, we’re airing all of this X-rated eco content pre-watershed. Don’t worry, it’s more net zero chat than nudes.

Among them is Lily Phillips, an OnlyFans star with more than two million followers and linked to superstar Drake.

Known for some pretty extreme publicity stunts in the past, I get the feeling doing an interview with me in a double bed for the news feels quite tame.

As we tuck ourselves in, Phillips says climate change feels different.

“We’re all affected by it,” she tells me. “I’ve never had a summer like this.”

The appeal is obvious. Climate scientists have spent decades trying to communicate the urgency of a warming planet. These creators already know how to make people stop scrolling.

How climate change made Europe’s extreme June heat worse

The project is backed by Anchorman Hollywood director and climate campaigner, Adam McKay, and co-founded by filmmaker and adult-content creator, Jessica Riches.

For Riches, pictured below, the point is not simply to make climate change “sexy”. It is to make people listen.

She argues that climate communications have sometimes been too worthy - climate activists have long been caricatured as “granola” loving, tree-hugger, hippy types, creating the impression that environmental concern belongs to a particular kind of person.

Her solution is deliberately provocative: use the machinery of pop culture against itself.

‘Sex sells’

“Sex sells,” she says.

“That’s kind of how capitalism operates - making things sexy.”

There is another twist. The campaign is not simply about telling individuals to change their behaviour. Its creators want audiences to look upwards, towards the pantomime villains of crisis - billionaires, corporations and industries responsible for a huge proportion of emissions.

Former Skins actor Megan Prescott (pictured below), who directed the shoot, points to The Big Short, where Margot Robbie famously explained the complexities of subprime mortgages from a bathtub.

If a Hollywood star can make financial derivatives understandable from a bubble bath, why not use online creators to explain the climate crisis?

Serious science

There is some serious science beneath the porn.

One strand of the project explores the “wet-bulb” temperature - a measure combining heat and humidity that helps scientists understand when conditions become dangerously difficult for the human body to cool itself.

And as ever, there is a gendered dimension. Research has found that, on average, men tend to have larger carbon footprints. Men eat more meat and their cars guzzle more petrol, hence whole swathes of the internet dedicated to ‘Petro-Masculity’, when male power and fossil fuel consumption collide (but that’s a whole other Substack).

Heatwaves, wildfires and the growing climate challenge

But perhaps the most interesting question is whether the stunt actually works?

Can a climate explainer delivered by an OnlyFans creator reach someone who would never click on a climate report?

In a world where attention is perhaps the most valuable commodity of all, it might be worth trying?

Especially as it’s the END OF THE WORLD we’re talking about.