17 January 2013
Fuel: Film Post
Choices are everywhere in life, no matter who you are. The movie "Fuel" explored some of the choices our culture has to make concerning our environment and energy sources. When looking for a movie review I came across the New York Times review of the fuel movie. http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/movies/18fuel.html?partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes&ei=5083&_r=0 I have to say the first paragraph could of been a paraphrased review of the entire movie. You can tell the Josh Tickell put a lot of time and hard work into his movie. However he brings way too much politics into his views on foreign oil. Josh argues that the Iraqi war was solely for the purpose of controlling foreign oil prices. I would disagree with Josh on his view of the Iraq war. I believe foreign oil did play a small role in our military presence in the middle east, but i'm not convinced that it's the only reason. Josh's goals are very respectable, but his means of portraying his views on how to get there was very unconvincing. Josh took us on his cross country tour in his biodiesel veggie van showing us his campaign for sustainable energy. It seems counterintuitive to drive across the country to advocate using a greener lifestyle. The two hour movie spent the first hour and a half talking about biodiesel. After that he crammed several other potential energy sources into a half hour segment. Josh seemed very biased towards biodiesel which I find interesting. He failed to show the emissions of regular gasoline compared to the emissions of Biodiesel. Biodiesel engines have been around since 1893 yet we've never made it readily available to public(hmm... I wonder why?). Altogether the movie was pointing in a good direction that our culture needs to move toward, but I don't think Josh's movie will effectively get anyone moving. Americans hold value as a top priority and as a country we're too cheap to value the environment above cheap oil. In order to get America to move towards more sustainable energy, you have to change the values American's have. I think the price of alternatives will have to be competitive and as convinient as our current fossil fuels. Or in the worst case scenario, our fossil fuels will have to become so scarce that it becomes cheaper for us to explore the use of alternative fuels rather then oil. Our society is so focused on short term gratification that they would rather have cheap oil, then a clean environment or sustainable energy. Until society starts thinking about the long term as a whole, Josh's little "fuel" video won't make a difference no matter how educational or well he presents sustainable energy.
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You're right that the filmmaker spends an inordinate amount of time on biofuels. I imagine this is because of his own extensive experience with biodiesel, but I also suspect that he's trying to find realistic solutions to the problem of fueling the American fleet of cars with something other than oil.
ReplyDelete"Biodiesel engines have been around since 1893 yet we've never made it readily available to public (hmm... I wonder why?)"
Biodiesel engines are simply diesel engines, which is explained in the film. As such, engines that run on biodiesel have been available to the public since Rudolph Diesel introduced the engine in 1893 (right up to today). In fact, the original Diesel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil.
So the question isn't the market viability of the engine--which is how I understood your line of argument--but, rather, a question of why we've focused our attention almost singularly on oil. And that, of course, is an entirely different answer to your "I wonder why" question.
"Until society starts thinking about the long term as a whole, Josh's little 'fuel' video won't make a difference no matter how educational or well he presents sustainable energy."
How would you propose getting society to start thinking about long-term energy solutions? It seems like the filmmaker is hoping that by educating people--through speaking around the country and making this "little video"--he can move the conversation more in the direction of sustainability and long-term solutions.