Movie review: The Carbon Rush | canada.com

The Carbon Rush

Narrated by: Daryl Hannah

Directed and written by: Amy Miller

Parental guidance: No problems

Running time: 84 minutes

(In English and in Portuguese, Hindi and Spanish with English subtitles)

Rating: 3? stars out of 5

On one street in the town of Grangemouth, Scotland, three of the world?s top 10 polluters have factories spewing out smoke and pollutants. They?re allowed to do it because they have taken part in ?carbon trading,? a system that allows factories in the rich First World to buy permission to pollute by financing something ?green? in the poor Third World.

In the case of Grangemouth, it?s a eucalyptus plantation in Brazil, where ? it turns out ? big companies are making lots of money growing eucalyptus trees, then burning them for charcoal to make pig iron for steel. The burning creates more pollution, and also money for the big companies. The people who used to live on the land, and grow fruit trees there, have been evicted. The trees also use so much water that the small-scale farmers can no longer support cattle.

And so it goes: in Delhi, carbon credits have helped finance a huge waste management plant that burns garbage and at the same time has thrown thousands of people out of work. They?re the poor who go through rubbish dumps, searching bits of glass or scrap metal that they can sell. ?In those days, sorting waste was a good business,? says one woman in an unconscious (and poverty-stricken) echo of older workers everywhere. In Panama, hydroelectric dams financed by the credits have taken land from peasants and polluted their waterways. In Honduras, a wealthy landowner is accused of hiring hit men to kill the poor farmers who stand in the way of his new green energy: palm oil, from African palm trees.

It?s an old story ? the poor live on the land with the most resources; the wealthy use those resources and set the rules ? that?s told in a new way in The Carbon Rush, a documentary about the evils of carbon trading.

Directed by Canadian filmmaker Amy Miller, The Carbon Rush takes a complex subject and makes it clearer. Carbon-trading ? mandated by the Kyoto Protocol ? is a multi-billion dollar business that has become something of a stock market. Polluters buy and sell credits, and then set up environmentally friendly ?offsets? that often turn out to be vast industrial projects that upend the local ecology, displace powerless natives and enrich the companies even further.

It?s a revealing look at a system that sounds fishy even on the surface: should companies be allowed to buy permissions to pollute? By following the trail, Miller has discovered that it?s often a double-whammy, creating a vast field of windmills in rural India, for instance, while sending the local people off their land and ultimately making money for the giant Tata Motors, India?s largest car company.

The benefits of the windmills, if any, is never explored. The Carbon Rush is firmly on the side of the dispossessed ? everyone interviewed is a victim of the multinational giants ? but the film ends with an impressive list of companies and agencies that refused to talk to the filmmakers. What?s on the screen is an indictment that says the official plan to fight global warming has become just another way to rape the land, oppress the poor and despoil the planet.

CAPSULE _ The Carbon Rush: A documentary on the system of ?carbon credits,? that allows big companies to pollute more in exchange for doing something green somewhere else. Filmmaker Amy Miller has found, though that the ?something green? is frequently just another form of pollution taking place in a Third World nation. The result is a searing indictment of the whole system. 3? stars out of 5 _ Jay Stone

Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/12/20/movie-review-the-carbon-rush/

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