FilmAnnotation1

Title: The Great Green Smoke Screen Director: Tom Clarke Release year: 2007 The main argument in this documentary was that although it is good to go green and to reduce our impact on the planet we need to be cautious of falling for companies that aren’t as green as they claim to be. The documentary follows a U.K. science correspondent as he investigates companies’ claims of carbon offsetting. His first and one of his strong arguments was that many companies claim to be carbon neutral when in fact the places they buy carbon offsets from don’t actually offset the carbon emissions. He shows this by traveling to a BP sponsored pig farm that traps their methane release and burns it off. BP claims that their pig farms can offset the carbon footprint of 750,000 cars, when according to the documentary’s research the farms could only offset 250,000 cars. This not only doesn’t offset the planet as much as it claims to be able to, it also makes the public as well as some government officials believe that the country is doing more to be sustainable than they really are.

Another persuasive argument that the documentary showed was that buying carbon offset payments sometimes are just going to help projects, such as tree farms and hydro-power plants, that would happen even without the funding. But then later in the documentary a critic stated that the projects were barely lacking funding to start-up, at least until the organization gave them the donation. These projects are usually heavily invested in by large companies like Avis, Dell and Honda. And I believe that they are simply saving themselves money by having concerned people donating to the projects. The offset solutions that aren’t proven to work are cheaper than investing in actual solutions. Actual would require much more effort at the expense of the company to build new, green, power plants.

Many power companies only have as many as the green power plants that they do is because of government puts tariffs on the companies requiring a certain ratio of ‘green power’ and ‘dirty power’. Because of this government requirement many companies take it upon themselves to advertise that they are green and that they have green energy solutions. They simply fail to say that the only reason for that is because of the government. This affects us because we are shown that companies are going green when really most of them could care less about the environment. One really needs to do research before investing in a company to see if they are really going out of their way to create green solutions or if they are just going what is mandated. Luckily the documentary shoes that the British government is catching on and was threatening the companies with not allowing them to use the term carbon neutral at all if they aren’t careful with how they use it. They also plan on incorporating a way of regulating the carbon offsets to measure their effectiveness.

Although many citizens didn’t know it, every house in England pays 7 pounds per year that goes to investing in green energy. Much of it goes towards the carbon trust. The carbon Trust is a 18 million pound per year project with the goal of reducing England’s carbon footprint. One of their ideas according to the documentary is to place a label on all products that shows the product contributed to the environment, from the potato to it being shipped. This, of course, has its problems. Not only is it inaccurate but it also takes a lot of research just for one product.

The argument I liked least in this film was the one that addressed the celebrity movement to being sustainable at home. Of course every little bit counts, but the changes were so minimal that even if everyone participated a country would only cut about 1% of all of its carbon emissions.

This documentary was aired in England back in 2007, so its audience was mostly geared towards the English public. It was well put together in my opinion and although it was presented at an adult level one doesn’t have to be very environmentally conscious to be caught up by it. Besides the part in which the celebrities addressed what can be done at home to reduce household carbon emissions, most of the intervention that was happening was within the government. This made me interested to see if our government is doing anything similar to what the British government was doing back in 2007. According to smartplanet there is no national standard for renewable energy in the united states. Nonetheless the United States is high up, if not the top producer of various types of renewable energy. This does not mean it is top percentage-wise. In fact the USA only produces 10.1% of its energy from renewable resources while Sweden is as high as 39.9% and Germany was over 16% by 2009 and is aiming for generating all of its power from renewable resources.

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