Going green at AFI Dallas film festival

I saw one of the documentaries at the American Film Institute’s second annual Dallas Film Festival tonight. “Burning the Future” is all about mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. The movie, which will be shown in Charleston, W.Va. on Earth Day, will literally sicken you if you have the same degree of environmental sensitivity that I do.


One person director David Novack was NOT able to get on camera was Big Coal incarnate, Massey Coal Chairman Don Blankenship. It was Blankenship who, earlier this week, damaged an ABC camera in an attempt to keep from being filmed for a segment of “World News Tonight” and “Nightline,” as I blogged about yesterday. Novack joked about that when I asked him, after the film screening was done, if any coal execs had refused to talk to him.

The movie website has links to a number of other websites, including a petition from Clean Energy Action that calls on us as individuals to demand our elected officials get much more serious than they have now about energy measures, starting with a Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFÉ, standard that provides the conservation level we need on gasoline and starts kicking in immediately.

More radical than that, the petition calls on us to cut our energy use in half by 2050. I believe that is doable and that you should sign the petition.

Oh, DVDs of the movie are available at the website, too.