Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Modern life and irreversible oil depletion, 20 Dec 2007
Easily available cheap oil is already half gone. What has taken the planet tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of years to produce, mankind has consumed in one hundred years. Every year, more oil is used and that demand is set to rise exponentially with China and then India's industrial development. Every year, less oil is found. Sooner or later, oil production will peak and demand will outstrip supply. And there is nothing on-line ready to replace our addiction. How did we end up in such an energy cul-de-sac? The End of Suburbia attempts to answer this question.
The End of Suburbia describes how we have ended up consuming such vast quantities of a non-renewable and massively polluting energy source: that by the 1950s, the suburbs were promoted as the aspirational places to live, away from the noise, crime and pollution of the big cities. This move to the suburbs was facilitated by the destruction of public transport by car companies (who were financially punished in the courts) and the growth of the highway. Car-culture and commuting became just another inconsequential part of modern living, hardly something even to be considered. You drive to work. You drive to the supermarket. You drive the kids to school. Nothing is within a walkable distance in the suburbs. But none of this mattered because oil was cheap and plentiful.
Now, as it turns out, oil is neither cheap ($100 barrel is perhaps not far off (update: the $100 barrel of oil is here to stay and the minister for oil in Saudi Arabia recently admitted that they are reaching peak production)) nor plentiful - some, like energy investment banker Matt Simmons, argue that we have already hit our peak of production and that we are probably on the top of a bell curve of production. Peak production of oil is followed by a plateau of production, where everybody breathes out because we are now producing more oil than we ever had. What was the concern again? The end of a plateau, however, is an abyss. As Mike Ruppert says in an interview in The End of Suburbia, "For a man like Matt Simmons to talk about Peak Oil as having already occurred, is like the Pope saying that the world is round before Galileo!"
This documentary is a great introduction to what is, or at least should be, item number one on any political agenda: oil depletion and energy sustainability. Many of the key researchers are interviewed, amongst them David Strahan, Matt Simmons and Michael C. Ruppert. If you use a car, or are a consumer of anything made from plastic and you are unaware of the concept of Peak Oil, then this should be your next purchase bar none. The age of the three thousand mile Caesar salad is indeed over.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The original and best introduction to Peak Oil, 12 May 2009
After 6 years this is still by far the best introductory video to Peak Oil. Kunstler conveys a great narrative, taking the viewer through the story of how society has developed as it became more industrialised and increasingly reliant on fossil fuels. Kind of like a video version of his introduction to Peak Oil in "The Long Emergency". The East Coast blackouts of 2003 are presented as an example of how energy is taken for granted, and how the concern it should have instilled just didn't happen. The story moves from electricity, to natural gas, then to oil, and finally to the coming energy crisis, with some ideas on how it's likely to take shape in the North American context. Hydrogen is dismissed, other solutions are covered, with some focus on community reorganisation, along with Kunstler's declaration that "Suburbia will become the slums of the future" (as in Suburbia which requires the use of a car to get to any "local" amenities).
The story is told in a very coherent manner, and the film keeps the viewer engaged. There are a couple of minor niggles, such as the retro footage at the beginning of the film, which looks like an insane run of 1950s adverts with no context, which could turn people off within the first 10 minutes (those who are already aware would "get it"). There is also some unnecessary repetition of points made from multiple speakers.
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