Dying For Your Car

I’m just like everyone else. I grew up with cars; sometimes in the car, actually. My father and I would wash it on weekends. I loved the car, it was fascinating. It went so fast. It took us to the beach, to the funfair, to my grandmother’s. It was a member of our family. Even today despite all the evidence, it’s hard to believe the car can harm us. Us and a few hundred thousand other species. That some parts of the world are threatened by desertification or at the mercy of hurricanes, typhoons and other natural disasters. The car, they tell us, emits carbon gases and this heats up the planet. Cars and other vehicles are responsible for 20% of all global warming. And if in China the number of cars continues to rise by 1,000 a day in Beijing alone that figure will be 50% within 10 years. In other words, today’s car with its fossil based fuel could well and truly end up killing us. Or our children. And yet 4-wheel drive cars that rejects more CO2 emissions than most other vehicles have never been so successful. Especially in the USA, the world’s number one polluter. As if nothing was wrong. And indeed nothing is wrong, at least according to some scientists and lawyers who are generally financed by the petrol and car industries. Any massive reduction in CO2 emissions means a drop in profits for their businesses. Their lobbyists have produced a remarkably effective campaign to destroy the Kyoto protocol and deny the very existence of global warming. We were able to film an oil industry’s “mole” infiltrated in the White House. His job was to tamper with climatologists’ reports in order to reassure the public everything was fine. When “busted”, he had to quit. This documentary shows the true face of a man who had always dwelt in the shadows. Five years were lost. The car and oil companies have had it all their own way since the 1930’s. Today we’re witnessing the first global war for the control of petrol and yet, our desires are still widely manipulated by advertising. Facing the dangers of climate change, the hardest challenge seems to be changing ourselves. Get rid of our odd passion for the fast and furious machine.