The outpouring of birthday love continued on Saturday. Sam baked a dish of potatoes Au Gratin and brought a birthday cake (remembering that my favorite was strawberry shortcake/white cake). 

After eating we went to watch Fuel in Encino.

Fuel didn’t have a lot of new information.  In fact it was kind of annoying, in the way that Inconvenient Truth was annoying when Al Gore started talking about growing up on the (multi-million dollar) “farm” in Tennessee.  Except Josh Tickel is not Al Gore.  I didn’t care that Josh grew up in Australia and then Louisiana.  Guess what buddy, I grew up in a “cancer alley too” – a lot of Americans did.  Oil refineries aren’t the only causes of air pollution.  Switching to biofuels isn’t going to cure the cancer my family members get from living downwind from chemical plants (what an ironic name huh, “plants”).

Of course the film ends with a “total package” of all the ways we can stop pollution.  However, this appeared very thrown together, and in a Q&A with the editor after the film this was a confirmed late addition to the movie.  In fact, all the celebrity interviews were late additions.  Apparently the original film was just this Josh Tickel guys autobiography.

He did show us some interesting things, like the oil producing algea and how no oil company has been held accountable for the damage from millions of gallons of oil that leaked after hurricane Katrina.  However, if you’re going to make allegations like Hurricane Katrina was actually caused by oil companies (warming up the water in the gulf), you’d better spend more than 30 seconds explaining the science behind it.  Also, talking about peak oil and then showing us a schpeel about how we had an oil crisis in the 70s dilutes your point.  When you show someone it happened before if just makes you think “okay, well, it happened before and we still have oil… so nothing to worry about.”

Basically everything in this movie was done better by Zeitgiest II, Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car.  And Josh is confused why his “life’s work” isn’t getting more press/promotion (there were about ten people in the theater with us).