Shortly after the midpoint of this documentary, Sean Casten, the CEO of Recycled Energy Development, a company that sees great financial opportunities in transforming the wasted heat generated by manufacturing plants into energy, states: “I don’t know of any bigger opportunity to make more money reducing more CO2 than this one. So if you don’t give a damn about the environment, do it because you are a greedy bastard and you want cheap power.” In this statement, we find the most depressing thing about this loudly optimistic documentary: The solutions for many of our environmental problems are available but underutilized. America simply refuses to change course in any major way. The whole country is stuck in the past. Even greed can’t get us moving.

Wind farms, solar power, electric cars, and renewable energy programs are simply not entering the mainstream of our culture. Carbon Nation features all sorts of smart people making rational and often market-oriented arguments about why green technologies are good for the economy and environment—but the world we live in is completely irrational. The real is irrational; the irrational is real. “If all these solutions are such great ideas,” says the narrator, Bill Kurtis, “why haven’t they happened yet?” The answer to this question, which the doc hints at but does not fully express (Carbon Nation attempts to be politically neutral), is that capitalism is not really about capitalism. All of this talk about the greatness and naturalness of markets and entrepreneurship is just that—talk. If it were more than talk, if green technologies were competing in an actual capitalist economy, then there would be no reason to ask why nothing has happened yet—the cleaner and cheaper technology would simply win the day. In short, the world is going to die.