The Facebook page for the movie declares that "America's dependence on fossil fuels is the greatest long-term national security threat facing the nation." Not nuclear weapons being proliferated by non-state Islamists. Not North Korean submarines popping up off the coast of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle and launching ballistic nukes. Not an $18T national debt. Not an energy grid vulnerable to EMP. Oil dependence. Just last week our gravest national security threat was climate change.
I would imagine a Venn Diagram intersection of people who are likely to want to see The Burden looking something like this:
This movie's potential audience is mainly Malthusian environmentalist nutjobs. None of them are going to see a movie that glorifies the U.S. military. The last thing a weepy leftist wants to see is an AC-47 Gunship performing night operations. Perhaps the producers are hoping that they can evangelize people who support the military, into supporting radical environmental policies. Good luck with that.
The news segment begins with the comforting image of a clenched fist, and the phrase Eco Revolution.
The clenched fist is the symbol of every marxist movement. The labor movement in Wisconsin, for example, depicts the state as a blue fist. The logo of radical feminism is a clenched fist within the female gender symbol. And the very idea of revolution is enough to make Trotskyites swoon. The wet dream of every Leninist is to be the one deciding who faces the guillotine.
The young man being interviewed for the news segment is named Tiger Palafox. Eco Revolution is his Youtube channel. He is the manager of a local nursery, Mission Hills Nursery. He has an active Facebook page, but hasn't tweeted in three years. He appears to have a loose affiliation with San Diego Six News. Until I know more, I regard him as a rent-seeker in the ecosphere. He made one extremely problematic comment, though, saying "fossil fuels and oil dependency has created a lot of the wars that they're fighting."
Hey Tiger, if you get a chance to introduce a screening, and there are any active duty military or veterans, you might not want to lead with that one.
The executive producers of The Burden are Jeanine & Guy Saperstein. Guy Saperstein is past president of the Sierra Club. Guy Saperstein believes that President Obama is a conservative. Saperstein is one of those kooks who believes that people who eat meat are destroying the planet. He believes that dogs are worse for the environment than SUVs. He will kindly allow indulgences for environmentalists, however, writing that they just "need to give up their big dogs and turn to small dogs to save the planet."
The idea that parts of the military should run independently of fossil fuels has merit. We already have nuclear-powered submarines and carriers. I like the idea of military bases being off the grid, and running off micro nuclear reactors. I don't have a problem with solar arrays providing power to installations. The problem is what do you do when the sun goes down? Installing battery arrays is the solution, but that involves the logistical issue of transporting all that weight.
One thing that makes the U.S. military without peer is the ability to project power around the world. You can't design a battery-powered F-35. The joules required for mach-2 are available in batteries, but they would add too much weight to the airplane. And an F-35 can be refueled in mid-air. A battery pack cannot be hot-swapped in mid-air.
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