Joshua Tickell is very serious about biodiesel. Also, he just
married a folk singer; he hates pollution; and he has a video camera.
In short: Watch out, America, because there’s a documentary full of
sincerity coming your way.
Tickell begins his film by claiming, against the evidence presented
in the Bible, that some stuff happened more than 6,000 years ago, like
tiny micro-organisms died and turned into petroleum.
Those little creatures created a lot of problems when people dug
them up and started burning them. Tickell’s film then goes on for 112
really heartfelt minutes, with frequent close-ups of Tickell’s
emotionally important face, to explain exactly what’s wrong with
this.
Which, frankly, is a good thing, as there’s a lot wrong with burning
petroleum. And Tickell does a pretty good job of enumerating the
problems: Pollution, war and corruption stemming from a love of profits
do, indeed, proceed directly and indirectly from the burning of
oil.
The problem is that he tries to cover a little too much. He puts
forward, in a few minutes, a case for the Iraq war being motivated by
oil interests. This is a case that can be made, and Tickell starts to
make it. He points out that there were meetings between Dick Cheney and
oil executives before the war, that Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the
weapons-of-mass-destruction story was invented to justify the war, and
that, indeed, Iraq is full of oil.
But those three premises don’t quite add up to the conclusion
Tickell wants to draw. It’s not that you can’t make the case, and
forcefully, that the desire for Iraq’s oil was a strong factor in
leading the United States to war (it was), and to be fair, that’s not
the only support Tickell offers, but the rest of what he gives is more
circumstantial. Unfortunately, Tickell doesn’t really produce a strong
enough argument.
That’s because he also wants to talk about a lot of other things,
like Hurricane Katrina, and how it dumped tanker-loads of pollutants
into the water, and how Louisiana is largely funded by the
petro-chemical industry, and how there’s a lot of cancer near
petroleum-refining plants, and that the Environmental Protection Agency
isn’t doing everything it could to stop this. But again, he winds up
with a group of premises that fall short of his conclusion—that
Louisiana is not only funded by oil, but also has its policy dictated
by oil companies. Again, a case can be made, but Tickell is off to the
next thing, and the next thing, trying desperately to cover everything
that is bad about oil.
In the process, he does bring a lot of this badness to light. But
what he should have done is made a slightly shorter film about his main
passion, which is biodiesel. It’s on this topic that he makes a
compelling argument: Diesel cars can run on biodiesel (i.e., diesel
fuel made from plant sources). The process of making biodiesel is more
energy-efficient than making the ethanol that is being touted as a
replacement for gasoline, and more energy-efficient, surprisingly, than
making gasoline itself.
Tickell doesn’t just look sincerely into a camera and intone facts
in a self-important voice (though he does do that); he also walks the
walk, having gone around the country and the world to demonstrate the
use of biodiesel in a biodiesel-powered vehicle, and to support
business models that use biodiesel fuels.
In the end, he even does the responsible thing and discusses
problems with plant fuels, and offers some possible solutions. These
fuels are not nonpolluting, for example, and some plant fuels aren’t
really economically feasible. Tickell addresses these issues and
discusses new (and old) research that could lead to ways to make
alternative fuels more attractive.
Still, while the later segments on biodiesel were strong, this isn’t
a terribly good film. Tickell has the earnestness of a teenager with a
guitar and a cause, which is grating. He interviews a lot of people in
support of his position, and some of them are well-spoken, but he
spends too much time with Naomi Klein, who thinks that everything can
be reduced to a metaphor about “loss of stories” and the need for
father figures, which is, at best, annoyingly reductive. Tickell’s
onscreen graphics are slickly produced, but the aesthetic is a little
too hipster-cute for its purpose.
The worst feature of the film is the ending, when emotive music
swells up as a series of titles flash on the screen in a greeting-card
array of empowering messages. This would be OK if it lasted a couple of
minutes, but it goes on and on, as though Tickell had filmed 15 ending
sequences and wanted to use them all. After the fifth ending, I started
to think Frodo was gonna leap out and give a teary farewell to
Samwise.
So, in short, I, a grouchy old aesthete who spends his days teaching
logic and critical reasoning, found the film unsatisfying in that it
included some weak arguments and looked and sounded like it was made by
young Sincero McHeartfelt after his freshman year at Oberlin. I still
think that Fuel is worth seeing; I just don’t think it’s worth
enjoying.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.