/movies/Crude Awakening
I just watched A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. It was produced and directed by the father of someone at work, so this was apparently the first "public" screening outside of a film festival.
It was very very good. On my way down to the canteen/cafe where it was being shown, I was joking about how I'd leave after the third scientifically frustrating statement. By the time they did that (discussing the "Hydrogen economy" solution), the movie was nearly over and I was totally engrossed.
The overarching premise was this: ever since the term "peak oil" was born, shortly before the US hit peak oil production exactly as some had predicted, many countries have followed an extremely similar curve. It is apparent from various pieces of evidence that this is proceeding essentially on schedule in every oil-producing region. Moreover, no substantial new oilfields have been identified in the last ~25 years, despite intensive efforts and new technology a-plenty. I like to consider my self a sceptical person, and it didn't leave me feeling particularly sceptical. They had interviews with several people on a range of subjects snipped up throughout, and while some of what they said seemed over the top, the story seemed coherent and the evidence convincing.
Moreover, there's no reason to think that this won't at some point be the case; it's not clear when, but it's certain that the quantity of oil in the world and the rate at which we are consuming it is not so many orders of magnitude apart that we can ignore it.
The movie was pleasantly surprising in that it never conflated the resource crisis with the entirely separate (but obviously correlated) polution crisis.
There's an interesting parallel with vegetarianism here: ultimately, my reason for being vegetarian is that there are several separate arguments, each of which stands alone as a good reason. (I count among these efficiency and environmental, animal treatment and morality, and health). This movie convinces me of a second compelling reason to get off carbon.
It's important to separate the two distinct fossil-fuel related crises. Imagine two barrels, one full of water, with a padding of sand at the bottom, the other empty. The first is oil-the-resource, the second is the earth's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide without dramatic effects. Now, a couple hundred years ago, we started dribbling some from one to the other, and we've been accelerating it ever since. It is certainly unclear to me which barrel is larger; will the CO2 barrel overflow while the oil barrel still has plenty to go? If so, our economic incentives will be naturally weak -- uncertain, global, future costs versus present, personal gains are perhaps the worst-case for the "invisible hand" to cope with. Only a very significant dose of personal responsibility and political action can help there. Or maybe the absorptive barrel is relatively huge, and we'll first run out of water to scoop up. And then we'll have to go through the painful exercise of getting the last bit of oil...err, water, from the sand at the bottom of the barrel.
However, there's good reason to think they'll actually happen around the same time: by all accounts, that oil was produced from atmospheric carbon being photosynthesized into carbohydrates from a relatively high-carbon atmosphere. The organic matter was then subducted and pressurized. Now, we're pulling it out as fast as we can, at an exponentially increasing rate. It's not surprising that the state before all this and the state after will be similar. I suppose ultimately that this system had some losses, and so some carbon is simply inaccessible, so we can't undo it all.
Several people in the movie state that a barrel of oil has the equivalent of 25,000 hours of manual labour, which is about 12 years at 40 hours a week. I don't know how they calculate it, but even if it's off by and order of magnitude, it's still unfathomably cheap "work", given the < 10USD extraction cost for most oil so far extracted. This has an interesting implications for the Drake equation, particularly fL and fC -- the chances that life on a planet ends up having the means and desire to communicate, and the period of time during which those civilizations live. While an abundant source of easy to obtain energy is not a strict pre-requisite, it was certainly on the critical path in the only example that we know of.
