Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.

During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.

Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.

The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.

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A documentary or any feature film, like a good dessert, needs good texture. Some docs offer light delicate flavors, while others serve up crisp tawdry offerings but Crude, the latest feature documentary from director Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) brings a feel so viscous its some wonder that the film and the emotions within it don’t just ooze into the theater.

And why wouldn’t the film be viscous with center of the film swirling around a legal case about the black gold being pumped out of the jungles of Ecuador. Some have called the case the “Amazon Chernobyl” but whatever the name, Berlinger delves head first into this the David versus Goliath story that circles around one of the longest and most controversial legal (not to mention environmental and human rights) cases ever.

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A government-run US Geological Survey found that 90 billion barrels of oil and a vast quantity of natural gas is waiting beneath the Arctic Circle. These results came to light late last week, once again reenergizing publicity for the future of Arctic drilling.

According to the study, 90 billion barrels of crude, 1,670 trillion cubic feet of gas and 44 million barrels of natural gas liquids, are all just waiting for humans to come and extract them at any cost. Those humans will probably be representatives of the six countries that own – for a given value of “own” – stakes in the Arctic; Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Greenland and the US.

“The Alaska platform really looms as the most obvious place to look for oil in the Arctic right now,” said USGS geologist Donald Gautier.

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How much does business-as-usual cost? This morning, Green Car Congress reported that the US is projected to pay $440 billion for imported petroleum in 2008:

The increase to the estimated $440 billion for 2008 is based on an average $90 per barrel crude oil price for the year. In 2002, before the current bull market for oil began, US oil imports cost less than $103 billion. The preliminary figures for last year came to some $327 billion.

With little prospect for cheaper gas prices in the future, any decrease in the US export bill will have to come from a reduction in petroleum usage.

Which brings to mind two important questions:

1. What percentage of our Gross Domestic Product will the US have to export before things start to change dramatically?
2. Where is all this money going, anyway?

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