Gas 2.0

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.

During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.

Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.

The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good documentary can change your vocabulary.

Josh Tickell’s new film, Fields of Fuel, has just won the Audience Award for Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The film, which opened last Monday to a standing ovation, is a sharp, compelling look at biofuels and the history of America’s dependence on foreign oil. From home-made biodiesel to OPEC corruption, it covers the myriad reasons why we should be changing our fuel to change our lives.

Tickell, the man who essentially introduced the world to biodiesel, has brought us an outstanding contribution to the discourse on biofuels: Fields of Fuel says in ninety minutes what we’ve all been trying to sum up for years. Here’s the trailer: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a big week for biofuel breakthroughs and new partnerships. While photographing the algae biodiesel cars outside Fields of Fuel yesterday, insiders I spoke with alluded to big news: I just learned that Chevron will be backing Solazyme to produce algae biodiesel (East Bay Business Times):

Chevron Corp. is accelerating its research into biofuel derived from algae. On Tuesday, Solazyme Inc. of South San Francisco announced an agreement with the Chevron subsidiary Chevron Technology Ventures to develop and test biodiesel feedstock made from algae.

The partnership will almost certainly rev up Solazyme’s production and research process, as will GM’s backing of Coskata ethanol. But I still have no information on how the algae will be grown. I’m getting the sense that this is almost cellulosic + algae = biodiesel, since these guys are talking about getting sugar from corn stover, switchgrass, wood chips, and sugarcane, then feeding it to algae to boost production. Take a look at this video from the film: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m here in a bitterly cold Park City, Utah, for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Current temperature outside is 5, and the night before last registered at a polar -10 degrees F.

But hey, I’m at Sundance.

For the next ten days I’ll be on the lookout for films and panels pertaining to biofuels or the planet. It looks like Josh Tickell, the well-known author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank (who’s primarily responsible for the biodiesel homebrew movement in the last decade) has a film this year. It’s called Fields of Fuel.

I’ll also be collaborating with a colleague here to finish a short documentary we filmed last year called Veggie Truck. If it isn’t totally embarrassing (I haven’t watched the footage in almost a year) I’ll be posting it here.

Until then, I’ll be watching movies and fighting off frostbite.