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Blind Spot

Directed by Produced by Written by Starring Production Company Distributed by Release date Running time Country Language Budget Box office
 * Adolfo Doring
 * Michelle Cicalese (supervising)
 * David Gil (executive)
 * Randall Wallace (executive)
 * Amanda Zackem
 * Adolfo Doring (uncredited)
 * Richard Heinberg
 * Lester Brown
 * William R. Catton, Jr.
 * Roscoe Bartlett
 * Dislexic Films
 * October 3, 2008
 * United States
 * English
 * $170,000 (estimated)

Summary

Blind Spot is a 2008 documentary by American filmmaker Adolfo Doring. The film discusses the dangers of the continued consumption of fossil fuels, focusing on how consumer culture and the American economy drive the continued burning of cheap fossil fuel derived energy. The film explains how the change from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources will be entail changing culture as well as infrastructure.

Synopsis:

According to Blind Spot the earth is beginning to react to the pollutants that humans have been dumping into the environment for over a century and that if we do not make a change that environment will undergo a significant upheaval. The energy derived from fossil fuels, which society has grown so accustomed to would most likely lead to the deaths of large numbers of people. This is relayed through numerous interviews with individuals whose backgrounds are in scientific and mathematic fields, and a substantial number of journalists and authors.

In the film, journalist Richard Heinberg, assert that the ubiquity of fossil fuels in the global economy is due to: their nature as a very potent energy source, occurring naturally in the environment, and the original belief of being an infinite resource. Reliance upon the work of machines that run on fossil fuels has increased to a point where virtually no industrial scale labor is performed by human muscle energy. This is not how mankind performed work majority of its lifespan and yet the amount of energy that these sources produce appear to be the natural order of things to people in the world today.

Due to its increasing demand as the primary fuel fueling the world’s economy and its finite nature, over the last few decades the extraction of oil has exceeded the discovery of new oil under the earth’s surface. These trends, if continued, will eventually lead to decreases in oil extraction of oil and dwindling reserves. According to environmentalist Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, this change would leave the world nigh unrecognizable, and that preparedness for this change has been stifled intentionally.

The film then compares entirety of the fossil fuel industry, as well as oil producing nations, to individual oil fields, in which the rate of production increases until approximately half of the oil has been extracted, from that point the rate of production decreases. While extraction may continue on the site, the amount of oil and the rate at which it is extracted is drastically decreased, a trend which everyone believes will carry out over the industry as a whole.

Doring argues that growth has come to  be equated with progress, and that these views ignore the distress placed upon the ecosystem. Our beliefs in continual growth depends on fossil fuel and yet we have consumed so much of this finite resource that takes more than 100 million years to produce. The market economy is not in check, it does not have a monitor to protect and defend ordinary people.

Society is compared to the Jewish residents of Nazi Germany, who would follow the Nazis orders in hopes of staying alive. To do this you have to pretend that you don’t know what the end result of your action or inaction is. Doring emphasizes that to continue our way of life we pretend that the way we live, and the miniscule actions we take are enough to preserve the planet.

The film continues on to argue that a change from this system would require a change of culture, one where the very principles of capitalism are refuted, and the acceptance that infinite growth is unsustainable. This growth is said to have come from the expropriation of resources from the poor to further advantage the rich and is in effect a form of imperialism in the twenty first century. If principles of the market economy are to be believed then in the aftermath of peak oil production the rising cost of oil will lead to a decrease in consumption. However, because the current system is structured almost entirely around fossil fuels, the economy will not be able to adapt as quickly as a consumer might. This could lead to inflation and well as a recession, a situation that current economic policies have not been able to handle.

Population is believed to be one of the largest problems facing the environment. The large population makes the acts of the few pale in comparison to the acts of the many and in effect negates the environmental protections that we put in place. If the population was to be reduced then the impact that humanity has had on the planet would decrease.

Response:

Eric Kohn of Indiewire describes Blind Spot as “intellectually dense, but utterly gorgeous.”

Gloria Maxwell of Educational Media Reviews Online says that Blind Spot “is a thought provoking documentary that will inspire viewers.”

Carol Smith of the United Nations University calls Blind Spot a “compelling film” which “shows how we have been conditioned by a society centered on an oil-based economic system.”

References:

Further Reading:

Ruppert, Michael C.. Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World - A 25-Point Program for Action. (Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, Vermont, 2009)

McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008.

Rob Perks. "Appalachian Heartbreak: Time To End Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining" in Natural Resources Defense Council Issue Paper. 12 Pages.

External Links:

Samaras, Constantine, Jay Apt, Ines L. Azevedo, Lester B. Lave, M. Granger Morgan and Edward S. Rubin. “Cap and Trade is Not Enough: Improving U.S. Climate Policy.” A Brief Note from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy Carnegie Mellon University. March 2009. http://www.cmu.edu/gdi/docs/cap-and-trade.pdf (Accessed on 2/11/2016)

O’Connor, Tim. “California Dream 2.0: A Possible Antidote to the Fossil Fuel Economy.” Environmental Defense Fund. Accessed on 2/11/2016 http://blogs.edf.org/californiadream/2015/02/02/a-possible-antidote-to-the-fossil-fuel-economy/

Cohen, Bernard L.. “Environmental Problems With Coal, Oil, and Gas” in The Nuclear Energy Option. Pelnum Press, 1990.) Accessed on 2/10/2016 http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter3.html