The movie starts with filmmaker Joshua Tickell driving his biodiesel van cross country as he asks for used cooking oil at drive-thru windows. Owning a vehicle like that has been a dream of mine ever since I saw "Fat of the Land" on Free Speech TV years ago. However, I'm also skeptical that you can replicate that on a large scale without creating serious new environmental problems.
Tickell's cheerleading for bio-fuels is a little more than I'm comfortable with, but the movie did mention problems with current bio-fuels, including the annual Gulf Coast dead zone caused by agricultural runoff. He still could have spent more time discussing the drawbacks of corn-based ethanol.
By the end, he did a decent job of making the case for research on more sustainable bio-fuels, like algae. He's on more solid ground when he portrays next generation bio-fuels as just one of several solutions to our oil problem.
The movie shines most when it argues why we need to get off oil. His segment about oil industry pollution along the Gulf Coast and deep water drilling is even more relevant today. It's far more prescient than the "Drill, baby, Drill!" crowd.
The Director makes his own story the focus for much of the movie. That's largely OK since he keeps it going at an entertaining pace. But after a while, I noticed how much of his story involves examples of what organizers call "lone wolf" activism.
He certainly did some good, but there are limits to how much you can accomplish through the "one man with an idea" approach. It didn't surprise me when he questioned whether his personal crusade had accomplished anything.
I'm glad Tickell is doing his thing, but it's typical for the approach to activism that has kept the environmental movement from utilizing its full power. For whatever reason, many environmentalists haven't learned from the successes of the labor and civil rights movements which emphasized people working together in a unified way.
Despite my criticisms I thought it was a good film overall. I still believe that plug-in electrics and hybrids will be the answer for most car-buyers, but he convinced me that biofuels could play a role. Maybe the semi-trucks of the future will run on algae-diesel.