I Fuel Good!

Last night, my husband and I went to see Fuel. I heard about this documentary by accident. I saw an internship posted on Pepperdine’s career services website and I got in touch with the company that produced the film. As it always happens in life, one conversation led to another and last night, I’m at the AMC theatre in Santa Monica expecting to see just another documentary. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was more than that.

Josh Tickell, the man behind the project, has spent more than ten years of his life finding a way to replace the oil we are so dependant on with something else that is renewable and nontoxic. And as it happens so many times, the answer was right there. It had been invented many years before. We all heard about it. And not only that, but some European countries were already using it. It was diesel fuel. Yes! The original one, that is. The one that Diesel himself invented, the one that was made out of vegetable oil: biodiesel fuel.

Then what stood between Diesel’s invention and its use on a large scale? Well, it was Rockefeller, Standard Oil, Exxon Mobil, interested governments and partnerships. I won’t spoil all the fun for you, I would just suggest you go see Fuel and form your own opinion about it. It recently won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary and through the energy of supporters has made it to a cinema near us. It is definitely a documentary worth seeing. It will first make you angry and then hopeful because it doesn’t just show the problem, it also offers solutions!