Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Let a thousand eco-documentaries bloom!
Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
I say this from the bottom of my heart, with deep conviction: “An Inconvenient Truth” changed the world. Did the Davis Guggenheim-Al Gore PowerPoint-based Oscar winner mark a turning point in global climate change, and the beginning of a carbon-neutral future? Oh, that. I have no idea about that. But it sure changed the world of movies. As any successful film is likely to do, “Inconvenient Truth” established a template for other eco-catastrophe documentaries to follow, and inspired a legion of well-intentioned emulators, wannabes and copycats.
Across the filmland economy, funding dried up for zombie-stripper flicks and Iraq war docs alike, and this year the eco-doc floodgates opened. Filmgoers in 2009 have been barraged with feel-bad flicks, each of them assuring us that the dire plight of the endangered blue-tailed skink, e.g., is dooming our grandchildren to lives of poisoned, skink-free grimness and slavery, and that it is the Unique Responsibility of Our Generation to Do Something. (Cut to mid-level celebrity, say, Eliza Dushku, without much makeup on: “I always thought that skinks were, like, these pretty lizards who lived in my mom’s flower pots. I was like everybody else: I didn’t understand the ancient wisdom of a simpler time! When you’re on the Hollywood Freeway with a triple latte, you’re just not confronting the way skinks are bound with the future of our planet!”)
I jest, but only sort of. The post-Gore wave of eco-docs has produced some fascinating, information-rich and occasionally beautiful filmmaking, but it also threatens to cancel itself out in a cacophonous roar of competing voices. Can you tell “Earth” apart from “Earth Days”? Is “Food Inc.” a sequel to “War, Inc.”? (And when is “Sex Inc.” coming out?) Most of these movies bring life to the phrase “labor of love,” resulting from years of dedicated work and sacrifice at starvation wages. Their directors and producers have defied the odds in getting them released at all, and most have gone on to defy conventional release patterns: They hopscotch from one film festival to the next, screen in church basements and community centers, self-distribute on DVD or online.
…“Earth Days”…
(17 Sept 2009)
Six Questions for Peter Maass on the Violent Twilight of Oil
Ken Silverstein, Harper’s Magazine
Peter Maass, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, is the author of Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, which is being published this week by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
… state-owned companies are venturing outside their national borders. Exxon and Chevron are not paragons of virtue when they operate in foreign countries (or even in the United States), but Chinese and Russian firms, which are becoming key international players, are not known for their ethical purity. Sometimes the requirements of national security are crueler factors than considerations of profit and loss. The upshot is that if you thought the last century of oil, dominated by the likes of Exxon and Shell, was cut-throat and exploitative, the final decades of oil’s dominion could be worse.
… 5. Is the American lifestyle, based on cheap fossil fuels, coupled with the political power of corporations like Chevron and ExxonMobil, enough to prevent the U.S. from significantly reducing its dependency on petroleum?
This lifestyle is going to change, whether we want it to or not, whether Chevron and Exxon want it to or not (and for what it’s worth, I think Big Oil’s power is on the wane). The question is whether this lifestyle will change with extreme disruption when the price of oil returns to triple digits and goes beyond the $147-a-barrel record set in 2008, or when global warming means a portion of Manhattan is under water, or–and this is what I hope happens–our society truly recognizes these threats and begins the painful and costly adjustments necessary for radical shifts toward renewable energy as well as conservation and efficiency.
6. Official positions aside, to what extent has the industry accepted the imminence of peak oil and recalibrated its approach to extraction accordingly?
The oil industry is filled with a lot of smart people whose companies possess amazing technology. There is a debate within this industry about peak oil. Chevron and BP, though denying the imminence of a peak, have been ahead of others in admitting that the era of “easy oil,” as they sometimes call it, is over. The rest of the oil that’s to be found, they say, will be in hard-to-reach reservoirs that won’t be as large as the huge ones in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Oil executives are inherent optimists, because they are accustomed to drilling nine dry holes before finding a good one. So I think their dismissal of peak oil–the idea that the world has reached or will soon reach its peak of oil output–is genuinely felt to an extent. I also think there’s some willful distortion, because admitting to peak oil–which I define as a combination of geological and political limits on production–means their business model, which consists of extracting the stuff, has a dismal future.
(21 Sept 2009)
In 2005, Peter Maas wrote a long article about oil for the New York Times: “The Breaking Point . At the time, he didn’t seem too enthusiastic about the peak oil concept. Now he seems to be completely on board. His book could be an important in bringing the message to a mainstream audience. -BA
Yes Men Hoax: “Special Edition” of NY Post Warns of Climate Change Threat
Rory O’Connor, Alternet
I’ve long been a fan for years of the zany duo of performance artists/political activists known as the Yes Men, ever since their turn-of-the-century stunt of creating their own “corrected” World Trade Organization website at GATT.org (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Soon their fake site began to receive real email queries from confused visitors, including invitations to address various elite groups on behalf of the WTO. Naturally, and hysterically, the Men responded as if they actually represented the WTO – all of which is documented in their very funny and very pointed 2004 film “The Yes Men.”
Now the Men have a new, almost as amusing documentary about to hit movie screens across America – “The Yes Men Fix the World,” which they accurately describe as “a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world’s most outrageous pranks. “
But it is in their actual stunts – and not just in their documentation of them – that the Yes Men truly excel. Of late they have taken to targeting the media directly, such as last fall’s fake New York Times… which declared the Iraq War over, Universities to be free, Bike paths expanded – and even announced the much-anticipated resignation of NYT Op-Ed apologist – oops, I mean, columnist — Thomas Friedman.
Now comes their latest effort — this week’s stunning “SPECIAL EDITION” New York Post, trumpeting the headline “WE’RE SCREWED” in large point type…
(21 Sept 2009)
Barack Obama Must See Michael Moore’s New Movie (and So Must You)!
Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
Michael Moore has proven again and again that he has a remarkable feel for where the zeitgeist is heading. He’s like a zeitgeist divining rod.
Roger and Me was way ahead of the curve on the collapse of the auto-industry. Fahrenheit 9/11 was way ahead of the curve on the collapse of the house of cards the Bush administration used to lead us to war in Iraq. Sicko was way ahead of the curve on the collapse of the US health care system. And now, with his new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, he is riding the wave of the collapse of trust in our country’s financial system.
The film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, and all across the country on October 2nd, is a withering indictment of the current economic order, covering everything from Wall Street’s casino mentality to for-profit prisons, from Goldman Sachs’ sway in Washington to the poverty-level pay of many airline pilots, from the tidal wave of foreclosures to the tragic consequences of runaway greed.
…In the film, Michael describes capitalism as evil. I disagree. I don’t think capitalism is evil. I think what we have right now is not capitalism.
In capitalism as envisioned by its leading lights, including Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, you need a moral foundation in order for free markets to work. And when a company fails, it fails. It doesn’t get bailed out using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. What we have right now is Corporatism. It’s welfare for the rich. It’s the government picking winners and losers. It’s Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.
…Which is why — although you can bet many will try — Capitalism: A Love Story can’t be dismissed as a left-wing tirade. Its condemnation of the status quo is too grounded in real stories and real suffering, its targets too evenly spread across the political spectrum. Indeed, Jay Leno, America’s designated Everyman, was so moved by the film he insisted that Moore appear on the second night of his new show, and told his audience that the film was “completely nonpartisan… I was stunned by it, and I think it is the most fair film” Moore has done…
(21 Sept 2009)
