Hyperbole

wonko told me I had to watch this documentary, so given my limited time, I watched it in 15-minute chunks. It's been over a week since I finished it, and it has been haunting me ever since.

I think that I might have dismissed the contentions of this movie out-of-hand as the work of apocalyptic cranks were it not for one of the interviewees featured throughout the movie: Matt Simmons. Matt Simmons is a top investor in energy companies, and is highly connected with that group. He's also a member of the well-connected Council on Foreign Relations. He should be on the side of the oil companies, and indeed he generally is (he supports opening ANWR, and basically drilling everywhere we can to head off the forestalling of oil production.) I disagree with his approach to the problem, and probably disagree with a great many things he thinks our country should do. But this is precisely the reason why he held my attention. As I see it, the companies he invests in would suffer terribly if the things he (and other interviewees in the movie) said were to become common knowledge. But Simmons pulls no punches -- his position on the problem aligns with the other more radical interviewees in the film (even though his suggested response to it differs.) In short, he is not the guy you would expect to be saying these things, and yet he is in the most credible position to say them as he has the most at stake.

So I am forced to consider the implications of this film. And consider I do -- almost every day now I look around me and consider what it took to bring the things around me to where I am, and as a result how much more expensive that item will become to produce/ship/employ if and when energy becomes a scarce commodity.

In some respects, this film only added specifics to what I considered to be general knowledge before. In the 1990's we all said the oil was going to "run out" -- the earliest date we usually suggested was 2050. But we never talked about what that really meant -- just that we would all have to get our cars to run on something else. These salient points emerge from the film:

1. It's not just about oil. It's about fossil fuels in general -- natural gas is as much as a problem (in terms of scarcity) as oil.


2. We will never "run out of oil." It will simply continue to become more and more expensive to produce energy from fossil fuels, until it reaches a point where it costs almost as much energy to produce energy as is produced. (That is, each calorie of energy will consume almost one calorie of energy in its production.)


3. Alternative sources of energy production will never be able to match the price nor capacity dictated by our current level of demand.

and finally,

4. We may be approaching this point very quickly -- it could take a little as five years before it happens.

As I was watching the movie, I started to draw stark, logical conclusions from the divers evidence they were presenting, and was disturbed to find that the film's conclusion presented many of the same conclusions. The point I think which has stuck with me the most is that ALL we consume -- electrical energy, food, water, etc. -- will need to be produced locally if it is to remain affordable. This is in marked contrast to the direction we have been going as a society -- globalization aside, even if your stuff is all "made in the U.S.A" it probably isn't made within the same region you bought it from. Globalization simply magnified this trend which was already in motion, extending the distances even further, and requiring even more of our land resources to be dedicated to energy production. No, the communities of the future will need to be far more efficient if they are to survive.

I could go on writing for awhile on this topic, and will likely revisit it again. For now, I suggest you see the film, and research it further yourself. I haven't made up my mind about this movie -- I think it's possible things could go very differently than they predict. But I don't doubt that we will reach this point of energy scarcity -- I'm just not sure what that will mean to me, my family, my community, and the world. Should I start worrying about this now? (I'm far too good at worrying to let myself simply worry about things willy-nilly.)

Finally, I'll leave you with this fascinating (albeit lengthy) essay from Harper's: The oil we eat: following the food chain back to Iraq.