Carbon Nation wants to make converts, without necessarily challenging anyone's beliefs. Director Peter Byck loosely structures his optimistic enviro-doc, billed as a film about solutions to climate change "that doesn't care if you believe in climate change," as a road trip that explores ways to curb greenhouse gas pollution that also create plenty of fair-wage jobs.
Byck's focus is on energy: how to generate it without carbon-loaded fossil fuels, how to use less in smart ways that improve people's lives. The film features several entrepreneurs who, despite the absence of any coherent national energy and climate policies, have forged ahead with their clean energy endeavors: digging for geothermal energy on Alaska oil fields, erecting swirling wind turbines above west Texas pastures, turning shocking-green algae into biofuel, and other projects that take advantage of both human and natural capital. It just makes sense, they say, whether the goal is to clean the air, fix the climate, keep the kids at home on the wind farm, or make good money.
An especially moving segment joins green jobs/civil rights advocate Van Jones as he checks in on a crew being trained to do energy efficiency retrofits in low-income Richmond, Calif. The workers -- all of them young African-American men, most struggling to find and keep jobs after arrests and jail -- talk of their hopes that the new skills will enable them to rebuild their own lives, as well as their communities.
Byck gingerly toes political waters with a brief exploration of Washington's stasis on setting price for carbon pollution -- the key move that talking heads affirm would create a competitive market for alternative energy sources. But in the absence of that important economic signal, Byck takes us to a few Army bases that are converting to solar energy, the better to explain how ending reliance on foreign oil sources would improve national security. "Green, baby -- it's the new red, white, and blue," the New York Times columnist and catchphrase impresario Tom Friedman tells the camera.
Viewers seasoned on the issues it covers may find that Carbon Nation is outrun by current events here and there. (Since being filmed for this documentary, for instance, Van Jones has been recruited by the Obama administration to promote green jobs, as well as drummed out of that job by a right-wing smear campaign that the White House chose not to resist.) The film's graphics are cheerful, if high-school-science dorky, and its upbeat percussive score tends to keep things on an even emotional keel.
All told, Carbon Nation is unlikely to follow an An Inconvenient Truth to the Oscar podium. But given our snail-pace progress as a nation toward coherent, effective science-based climate, energy, and labor policies, its clean energy-green jobs meme may remain fresh for a frustratingly long time to come.
