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Film: Fuel

Country: USA

Year of Release: 2011

Director: Josh Tickell

Screenwriter: Johnny O’Hara

Starring: Josh Tickell, Woody Harrelson, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Naomi Klein

♥♥♥½

Fuel tells the story of the growth of the petrochemical industry – or what director Josh Tickell calls the petroleum military complex – over the course of the last 150 years. Filled with fascinated details and tinged with fact-based conspiracies, the film calls for a better world, a world in which we have changed our core energy supply from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and particularly plant-based sources such as ethanol and bio-diesel.

It is this focus on biodiesel that comprises the film’s key narrative. Told from a highly personal perspective, Fuel chronicles Tickell’s evangelical journey across America in his ‘veggie van’ which runs exclusively on recycled cooking oil. As he moves across the United States, acquiring a degree of local fame along the way, there is the sense that Tickell is surfing a new wave of possibility. But when, in 2008, two widely published scientific studies suggest that biodiesel is a very dangerous replacement for petroleum – for a number of reasons – Tickell’s world falls temporarily apart.

The critics of biodiesel had a few valid points – although it nonetheless seems highly likely that the anti-biodiesel agenda was pushed by the petroleum industry, given their generally appalling and manipulative behaviour as detailed in the film. For one thing, we’re on the verge of running out of arable land and there’s little doubt that ethanol and bio-diesel crop production – as well as good old-fashioned greed – is one of the factors that has lead to massive spikes in the cost of food in the 21st century.

Tickell acknowledges this, but also comes to realise that there are other ways of growing bio-fuels, which burn much cleaner and are much less environmentally damaging than oil in every stage of their production cycle. He then adds all of the other possible sources of renewable energy to the mix – including wind, solar and hydro power –  all of which preceded the petrochemical industry but which were edged out by large corporations and the governments they lead by the tail.

Fuel is a film that’s difficult to criticise despite its simple polemic of “oil-bad-renewables-good”. This is because Tickell’s argument is so blatantly self-evident – we urgently need to move away from oil and coal if we are to survive as a planet and a species – although it would have been fun to watch the heads of various oil companies duck and drive from Tickell’s questions. (My guess is that they wouldn’t talk to them, and it seems pretty certain that they’d lie anyway). And while it’s true that Tickell doesn’t exactly provide any counter-arguments in favour of keeping oil as our key energy source, big oil and its core of transnational lobbyists have had a century of dominating the conversation.

The film, though, is caught between two intellectual spaces. On the one hand, Tickell wants us all to shift to a combination of renewable and sustainable resources (although the film fails to point out the important fact that renewable is not the same as sustainable), suggesting that it wouldn’t require a huge change of behaviour. But read more carefully, the film, like many of the far more radical documentaries from whom it borrows information, does in fact suggest that only a massive structural change in our behaviour and attitudes towards the planet can save us.

This second perspective is, I think, a little buried for two reasons. Firstly, Tickell has attempted with a fair degree of success to simplify a set of extremely complex geopolitical issues. But secondly, the film is afraid to scare its audience with too much radicalism. While it points out that a model based on consumerism will ultimately takes us all down with it, the film is not quite brave enough to provide the full-on attack on late model capitalism that it so clearly wants to.

The truth is that it’s not only our dependence on oil that has to change if we are to live happily together at a predicted peak population of 10 billion people by 2050. Everything has to change and that change has to be systemic, from the way we approach development, economic growth, population dynamics and natural eco-systems to the ways that we approach each other.

That is however too much for the film to deal with, and also, much, much more than most people seem prepared to hear. And there is the real problem. We’ve become so entrenched in a particular mode of production, that any other model is an attack on our very selves.