The world is addicted to oil.
It's time for an intervention.
So runs the tagline of the new Josh Tickell documentary "Fuel", which tackles the American (and global) problem of dependence on fossil fuels.
I attended a showing of this film this past Friday night in Portland. Read on to find out what I saw.
First, watch the trailer:
This film couldn't really have come out at a better time, and I don't think I need to go into why.
I could spend a lot of time discussing what I thought of the film, but I think instead I'll focus on one key aspect of it: how the film deals with a key emotion that this type of film typically engenders: fear.
This is a hopeful movie. It's also an intensely personal film. Josh Tickell is better known as the guy who drove across the country in a van powered by used cooking oil (the "veggie van"). He's grown up and come into his own -- moved from a relentless promotion of bio-diesel to a more measured promotion of a basket of renewable energy technologies, some of which I had not heard about (of which another diary tomorrow).
Back to fear. Unlike so many environmental-energy-economics books, movies and documentaries, Fuel actually balanced a very realistic view of the problem (oil is too scarce, too costly, and too poisonous to be our primary fuel anymore) with a bright look forward, spreading before the viewer the cornucopia of technologies and conservation practices that could save us from a long, slow slide into a low-energy economy.
That blue marble sure don't have a nougaty hydrocarbon center. |
This is a difficult balance to strike. I know many people who have stalled out reading classic environmental texts (from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce) because the plain, dumb facts themselves so filled the mind with numbed horror, the internal moral senses themselves have become overwhelmed and screamed for relief.
This film does not fall like hammer blows. It presents the worst of the worst, indeed -- John D. Rockefeller's support of Prohibition as a diabolical political move to kill ethanol as a clean fuel source, the "cancer clusters" that occur around oil refineries in Louisiana, the Exxon Valdez-size oil spill from Katrina damage that was never mentioned in the mainstream media -- but it presents everything with a wry, sardonic (but never cynical) tone that keeps our thoughts moving from the horror of the problems to the promise of the solutions.
Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is in its ability to clearly, rationally explain the technological nuances of some of these solutions -- such as the ever-thorny difference between corn ethanol (bad) and cellulosic ethanol (better), as well as the promise of advanced biofuels from other sources (algae). The education on that pervasive technological wonder, the Diesel engine, is worth the price of admission alone.
Fuel is currently playing in Portland, Austin and Seattle. If you live in one of these cities, you owe it to yourself and your children to go see it, and begin applying its lessons today.