Wednesday, December 30, 2009

After the Crash

So, we watched A Crude Awakening last night. I probably should have learned my lesson from reading the food book, but I'm trying to anticipate the right moment to convert my 401K to canned goods and ammunition. The film gives a pretty early impression of being a Chicken Little hatchet job by people who hate America,* and that impression never completely one hundred percent goes away. But there's math, and graphs, and this dude that sort of reminds me of Ross Perot, with a cartoon voice and a bunch of graphs, who apparently predicted that America would stop being the world's top oil producer in about 1970.

People thought he was a nut job. Actually, he kind of seemed like a nut job. But he was right. And intercut between some hilarious old films about how great oil is for civilization, a bunch of old guys with chicken necks and pretty good credentials lay out some pretty disturbing facts. The two most disturbing facts are that oil production is very unlikely to ever increase significantly ever again, and that demand will grow by almost an order of magnitude over the next 20 years. Oh, the third disturbing thing is that the old film strips are right -- practically everything in our modern civilization is built on the assumption that oil is plentiful and cheap.

So, great. I'm not convinced that it's time to cash out, but I may start building some shelves for the canned goods.

Happy New Year!
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* This group includes liberals, environmentalists, vegetarians, anyone who wears sandals, democrats, socialists, gays, muslims, people from New England and the poor.

3 comments:

  1. i'm finishing "omnivore" and was going to start "in defense of food" but decided to throw Hansen's book on climate change in between just to scare myself differently. may have to add this flick just to keep it balanced....

    aaaaaaaaaargh!

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  2. daisyfae: I probably need to read the climate change book. Maybe this is why old people are afraid all the time.

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  3. I am in the process of trying not to buy things made of plastic. That is my contribution. It's really hard, though, with garbage bags and all that.

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