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Published: 18 March 2010
by DAN CARRIER

FRANKLIN Delano Roosevelt still has the power to move, 70 years after the great American president passed away. Read his speeches – the words he spoke to inspire his country, to get them through the Depression, and then to face up to the growing threat of Fascism, are not just empty rhetoric. They are works of wonderful common sense, presented in a way that sounds beautiful to the ear. 

We all know the “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” line, but one of the reasons he ­managed to keep the Democrats in the White House for so long was his ability to sell an idea with simple words: I personally like “keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.” Cool.

Roosevelt’s political will is used as a bookend in this hard-hitting documentary. 

Did you know the vast majority of oil used by America comes not from the Middle East but from Canada? The country has turned into a petro-state. I’d always thought of Canada as the groovy bit of North America, where ­Vietnam refuseniks could hide out, the place where red-coated Mounties kept the peace in breathtaking wilderness with leaping salmon and growling bears. 

We are taken to the formerly beautiful Athabasca River. It has been turned into a toxic sewer by companies digging out oil from tar sands. It is an expensive business, producing three times as much greenhouse gases as conventional oil production, and uses four times the amount of water and heat per barrel. Developing it will cost over $250billion – if the same figure was invested in setting up a solar farm in the Sahara you’d get vastly more energy without decimating a beautiful environment or pumping poison into the atmosphere. 

The upshot is this is pretty horrific for the world, and is exhausting a resource that we shouldn’t be using anyway. It is obvious to the untrained eye: the film’s photography of the physical scars caused by this form of open-cast mining wrecks the landscape. And the contrast of what was there before makes it even more horrendous: Alberta, which is the focus of the film, was covered in forest. It has just recently lost an area the size of Florida.

We meet a doctor, Irish immigrant John O’Connor, who noticed his patients in a settlement on the banks of the river were suffering from a cluster of cancers. As one interviewee explains: “We didn’t even have a word for cancer in our language until recently.” He became an advocate for his patients – and was prosecuted by the ­government for “raising fears”. Weird. 

But perhaps all is not lost. While there is clearly a battle raging at this very moment, ­perhaps films like this show that the world is waking up. 

Moving footage of FDR comes at the end, as a rallying cry that things can change. The film is essentially calling for a green version of his great achievement, the New Deal.  

They quote Barack Obama as saying: “Oil is dirty, dwindling and expensive. It is the end of the age of oil.” 

This is a doomsday film, with a soundbite ending – whether the people who own shares in the oil companies, and those among us who wish to continue their morally bankrupt lifestyles take anything from it I very much doubt. 

But, hopefully, by the fact it was even made, and is globally distributed, Dirty Oil shows that the winds of change are blowing. 

As FDR said: “The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.” 

That’s the message this film sends to politicians and oil companies.