Joshua Tickell has put together a powerful documentary on America's addition to oil, and like a street-corner junkie, we're driven (so to speak, by our SUVs, etc.) to get our fix anywhere and anyway we can.
I was glad to see Jimmy Carter highlighted as a President who quickly began to move on the energy issues, installing solar panels on the White House, but it all ended when the Great Liar was elected. Reagan pulled the solar panels and eliminated Carter's initiatives on energy.
Since everything is politics, one way or the other, this is a "political" documentary in its commentary on our plight, but without undo prejudice. It's clear in the telling, however: Bush and Gang gave the country away in order to perpetuate our fuel addiction. Everything from tax write-offs for SUVs over 6000 lbs to the fabricated "war on terror" to justify our incursion into Iraq. Bush and Gang were all oil people - a cartel if ever there's been one, and what Iraq and everything else, the cartel has made enormous profits at our expense.
But the thrust of "Fuel" is not just what's wrong and the myriad of mistakes and calculated moves we've made, but the alternatives, and there are plenty!
The original diesel engine, designed by master engineer, Rudolf Diesel (who mysteriously disappeared from a transatlantic ship, and whose body was found a few days later by fishermen) ran on peanut oil (bio-diesel).
Henry Ford himself built his cars to run on alcohol, but with the passage of Prohibition (supported by oil magnate Rockefeller), Ford gave up and began building engines to run on gasoline.
There are plenty of options, including algae production farms located in sunny arid regions of the world using waste water - the algae is harvested and transformed into bio-diesel, a safe form of oil that smells like vegetable oil and can be eaten. Other sources of bio-mass from fast-growing trees specifically grown for this purpose. Not to mention solar, wind and tidal energy. And then redesigning our cities: bicycle-friendly, better and more light-rail, pedestrian friendly, and planting trees on every rooftop along with solar panels, and vertical farms and residences. So many good ideas, and maybe now is the time for us to take a collective deep breath, admit our folly and chart a new course for the future.
This is not a question of technology - we have it, and it's ready.
It's a question of political will!
And challenging our elected official to rewrite the policies that have kept us oil-addicted!
Filled with interesting statistics such as - a diesel school bus burning petro-diesel is likely to have an inside pollution index four times higher than outside, and this is the air our children are breathing. And we wonder why so many children develop asthma.
Hats off to Joshua Tickell for putting this together. He's an entertaining presence when on film, and his personal story gives it punch. Having lived a good portion of his life in Louisiana, the greatest concentration of petro-chemical plants and refineries in the United States, and one of the cancer corridors of the world, he knows whereof he speaks - that his mother had nine miscarriages speaks profoundly to what we're doing to the environment with our addiction to oil.
This is a must-see film.
No comments:
Post a Comment