Pump!

Any mention of the fact that biofuel production relies on oil? Any mention of top soil depletion? Any mention of problems with Brazilian miracle economy addicted to debt and suffering heavy inflation, having rising poverty rates? Nope!

Sure they mention electric vehicles in order to appear unbiased, but electric technology gets only a few minutes of screen time. Any mention that Elon Musk had to receive a bailout and that his company keeps burning through investor cash like there's no tomorrow? Any mention of bankrupt Fisker? Any mention of Obama's corruption scandal involving solar panel darling Solyndra? Nope!

Any mention of frackers going out of business not due to pollution concerns but because the fuel they produce is only viable economically at $100+ per barrel? Nope!

So who's paying for this propaganda? Every fuel industry has a lobby. Oil has a lobby. EV makers have a lobby. Ethanol corn industry has a lobby.

Well, to find the answer you have to look at which solution receives the most screen time in this mockumentary.

It's guys like these: https://www.change2e85.com

The "feel good" reforms everyone loves so much provided to you by just one of the competing lobbies who doesn't really care about what's best for everyone. All they know is there's a good market and they want a piece of it.

Flex fuel is the miracle fuel - clean burning, job making, tax reducing, war eliminating. When you hear all those promises bundled together, you know it's pure manufactured BS! And it's American, American, American! Sure, throw in patriotism for good measure.

If I could give this film less than 1 star, I would!

Greetings again from the darkness. Documentaries with a message are usually most effective when they engage in debate ... share both sides of the argument, if you will. Preaching from a soapbox typically causes the viewer to tune out, and the opportunity is missed. The one exception to this is when the stance is heavily supported with history, facts, data, research and pertinent interviews. Husband and wife co-directors Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell deliver what amounts to a visual thesis on how to break the big oil monopoly.

Beginning with a colorful montage of beautiful and colorful automobiles, we are quickly reminded of Americans love of their cars which leads to the addiction to oil. The next 90 minutes provides a trek through the key historical events that led to our oil dependency, and ends with a proposal on how to stop it.

The history lesson discusses John D Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monopoly, followed by his political influence to get Prohibition passed. This after Henry Ford called alcohol "the perfect fuel". We then learn of how large companies drove out the trolley system in favor of an interstate freeway system for cars. We re-live the 1973 gas shortage as the Arab countries flexed - or extorted, depending on your take. Jumping to 2008, the surge in oil prices to $147 per barrel is described as the economic earthquake, with the Stock Market crash termed an aftershock. In other words, oil is the foundation of our economy. Today's global market is discussed along with the exponential growth of China's car industry - 15 million cars sold this year. This time-line with specific data leads to the impressive second half of the film ... how to get ourselves out of this mess.

For those who say it's foolish to discuss breaking our dependency on oil because it is used in so many other ways, they are missing the point. The cause is less oil dependency for cars, not a total break from it's use in products such as medicines, clothes, plastics, etc. The filmmakers offer the options of both electric cars and alternative fuel sources.

Elon Musk's Tesla Motors is briefly discussed, with the acknowledgment that battery technology improvement is vital to the future success of electric cars. A more immediate solution comes in the form of alternative fuels - ethanol and methanol. We see the exceptional strides Brazil has made with strong leadership. We see how our current vehicles already have the capability to run on these biofuels, if not for a simple software adjustment built-in by auto-makers. Nine million flex fuel cars on the road now, and many of these owners remain unaware of their options. Why? Because fueling stations are so tough to come by, as only the most independent of stations are not contractually obligated to big oil companies.

The film is exceptionally well researched and the data delivered in an easy to understand format. The Tickell team won the Sundance award for the 2008 documentary Fuel, and their message is even stronger this time out. By the way, Ms. Tickell is a former child actress known as Sam Elliot's daughter in the 1989 Christmas classic Prancer. She and her husband are now renowned environmental activists, and this project is really a call to action ... the choices are available NOW to break the oil monopoly.

This movie is very slick, in both the good and bad meanings of that word. It does not bother with qualifying statements at all. In discussing Ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil, they do not discuss the environmental impact from clear cutting and burning. There is no real discussion of the break even point or capitalization required for methanol and ethanol production.

Several other issues:

* Flex Fuel may require fitting changes as well as a new ECU.

* Modern Flex Fuel automotive equipment was developed by a consortium.

* Trots out the GM trolley car conspiracy without any evidence.

* Claims that Prohibition targeted Ethanol fuel without any evidence.

I wish I could trust this documentary at all.

The general idea of the movie makes a lot of sense, but I am a Brazilian and what they say about Brazil is so terribly wrong and unreal... Sounds like the former president Lula paid for the movie. Just minutes with false propaganda. I can't tell about all the rest, which as I said makes sense, however, the part that I know about makes me think the whole thing wasn't properly investigated at all. Brazil is in a terrible economic crisis... We could say that the movie is from 2012/2013, when things were a bit better, but even though, the ethanol is far far far away from being a competitor beside gas. It was never Lula's, like the movie makes people think. They say 40% of our population entered in the middle class, but what happened is that the government intentionally changed the measuring, so after Lula, anyone who makes 2,500 USD a year (!) can be considered in middle class. It's just ridiculous... and the producers didn't investigate it. They certainly only heard one side of the story... which is the worst thing a documentarist can do.

Obviously, in 2016 it seems a touch out of date, but we should remember that the Saudis allowed the price of gas to fall to current levels… largely as a result of this full flex movement. Gas prices need to hover near the equivalent price per mile that methanol is currently at (before increases in scale, mind you) to dissuade Americans from pushing this issue. The Saudis need to hold off being forced into a newer economy for as long as they can, and this is a last ditch effort.

Having been an advocate for this issue for a number of years and keeping in touch with some of those involved in this documentary prior to its release, I'm thrilled this finally got made and it had some kind of release and recognition. That said, I have a few niggles with it.

First, it's a little too much trying to be all things to all people, as some kind of umbrella or big tent or whatever you want to call it. It's a little lacking focus and pretty much includes nearly every group and topic related to this issue. Laymen watching it may get bored with it as it takes quite a while to arrive at the practical solutions. It's a lengthy build.

Next, I personally would have liked more Robert Zubrin and Anne Korin in this, but there is always YouTube. This particularly would have been useful in explaining the contrast between exploitative single-resource economics around the world and a multi-resource, open market worldwide system. Both have done a fantastic job elucidating just how preyed-upon the poor are right now by the oil structure, not just with indentured servitude to the industry or the lack of opportunity, but the recruitment into fundamentalism and terror that now exists with such low-diversity and low-opportunity economics, and how revolutionary it will be if we can change this.

There's a little too much of the Methanol Institute and other potentially profit-reaping parties in it, which might come off as self-serving.

No mention of the auto bailout czar Steven Rattner putting both an Exxon guy (Ed Whitacre) and a Carlyle Group guy (Dan Akerson) in charge of GM during "restructuring". Before the auto "crisis", GM had promised to voluntarily begin a move to G.E.M. flex. Guess what conveniently happened to that strategy.

Nothing on the FTC strangely considering this issue to be totally separate from anti-trust, though they've gone after some of these same companies for inane things like misstating lawnmower engine horsepower.

Not a peep about Wall Street energy funds, oil sheikhs in the Gulf, and big oil all being the major, unified shareholders and influences on car companies. Don't go thinking the discordant Ford family is a unified voting block.

There was no mention of the late Roberta J. Nichols of Ford Motor. If you'll indulge me on a tangent, I had the opportunity to do a presentation for Ford reps covering this whole thing a while back. My intent was to regurgitate their own (in my opinion, accurate) internal assessments of electric's difficult and low profitability path ahead, followed by pointing out they'd already invented a cheaper, shorter-term technology they could additionally market and own the spin on. Unfortunately, one of my team members got a little ahead of themselves and jumped forward in the script to this surprise concluding reveal during the introduction, causing an attorney watching us to nearly lose his sh-- at how off message we were and outside the scope of what we were supposed to be presenting on. I'm fairly confident the presentation would have received a more positive response had my script (I was team leader) been followed with the argument arc developed in a logical manner. I don't think the Ford reps were ever going to do anything about it, but I wanted to at least get them talking.

Finally, the very title Pump is focusing on the supply-side. I fundamentally disagree with such an emphasis and approach to this topic. The key to success is on the demand-side end. The supply- side always follows naturally after the widespread capability and awareness is first achieved. While the documentary does finally bring up legislative efforts to mandate full activated G.E.M. flex on all new gas-using cars sold at no significant additional cost to anyone, it dwells excessively on the supply-side concerning what is at the pump currently and should be. I prefer focusing on the capability mandate end, and much of the resistance to such mandates can be easily dismantled by going through various other more expensive and basically universally successful such technology mandates. Any time spent on the supply-side I find inevitably leads people on the right to successfully attack their history of problems, and on the left you get people saying all we need is more of the same very slowly, like going from E15 to E25 in so many number of years. It's a waste of people's patience. If they're watching, you have their attention and you'd better make use of it as efficiently as possible.