Fuel is indeed the most hopeful movie I have seen in a while – after seeing it I wanted to whoop with delight! An inconvenient truth, The age of stupid and others could take a few tips from producer Josh Tickell.
Fuel is indeed the most hopeful movie I have seen in a while – after seeing it I wanted to whoop with delight! An inconvenient truth, The age of stupid and others could take a few tips from producer Josh Tickell.
The environmental documentary's New York Times review sums it up perfectly: “…an informative, buoyant tone and the director’s own restless intelligence, the film preaches to the unconverted with passion, energy and graphics so clear that they would make Al Gore weep all over his Power Point”.
The theatre was packed when I watched Fuel. The 1 hour 51 minute movie takes you on a vibrant and colourful journey, often aboard Tickell’s “Green Machine” (Veggie Van) through 11 years of fact-finding. A self-confessed eco-evangelist, Tickell endears himself to his audience. He is as courageous in challenging his own biases (for example towards ethanol) as he is in scrutinising the world’s addiction to fossil fuel.
Tickell is a promoter of clean, renewable energy. He believes in biodiesel because it offsets carbon emissions and helps reduce toxic outputs. It’s not perfect, but some of the green celebrities interviewed, like Julia Roberts, Larry Hagman, Woody Harrelson, Sheryl Crow and Neil Young agreed, they choose biofuel because they care about the future of their children.
Fuel is also full of fascinating information about things like the internal combustion diesel engine invented by Dr Rudolf Diesel in the late 1800s. It ran on peanut oil – a form of biodiesel. Diesel was keen to make use of easily adaptable sources of energy, partly because he cared about protecting the interests of small businesses.
Well hello, Grahamstown, we have a small biodiesel manufacturer right here on our doorstep: Garth Cambray of Makana Meadery. Problem is, the stuff isn’t commercially available.
It also shows us how green algae, which grow rapidly in human waste, could meet all our fuel needs. And guess what, algae fuel production is being researched right here in Grahamstown at the Institute for Environmental Biotechnology at Rhodes University!
So how can we make a difference? Fuel concludes with a list of tips, including to get off our individual butts to make a collective difference. Top of the list is “change your government” – vote for politicians who are not addicted to fossil fuel. Hmm… perhaps a tall order?
See Fuel to understand the rallying cry: “Change your fuel, change the world!”
Fuel is no longer showing at Movie Zone in Pepper Grove Mall but look out for it when it comes out on DVD.
