A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash narrates the story of how our civilization’s oil addiction puts it on a collision path with geology. A highly entertaining, compelling, and intelligent documentary explains how our industrial society, built on readily available and cheap oil must be completely overhauled and re-imagined. The perception that the oil supplies of the world have peaked, or soon will, is starting to gain traction. New York Times editorial board’s associate editor, Robert Semple, in 2006 wrote that the age of oil — over a hundred years of unprecedented economic growth made possible by abundant, cheap oil — could be coming to an end without our awareness. Just like most resources, oil is limited. Even Saudi Arabia’s richest reservoirs will eventually run dry. However before the world’s oil reserves are depleted, there will come a time of shortage where oil demand exceeds supply causing oil prices to skyrocket making today’s price seem like a chump change. This is inevitable unless we start to live more abstemiously, or come up with better substitutes for oil. Not many people have written about the concept of peak oil. However, more people are starting to talk about it. We need to pay more attention to this concept because it is mostly correct. These are not doomsday predictions by conspiracy theorists, they are hard scientific facts that come backed up by thorough research. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to establish the link between the current obsession of the United States with the Middle East, the world’s looming oil crisis, and national security. The increasing quest for alternative energy sources presently being pursued by leading multinational corporations (like Paragon) is further proof that the crisis is on the horizon. Every day’s headline, whether the subject is South America or Iraq, highlights the seriousness of the issue.
The experts featured on A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash really know their stuff. Some of them are familiar faces including Savinar, Simmons, and Campbell, while others are not. They all have insightful things to say from the peak oil debate to perspectives new. Unlike the history of the world’s greatest resource misallocation described by EoS’s’ suburbian focus, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash ventures beyond the American experience, and is more of a global film focusing on the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as the United States. Although similar films such as Crude Impact focus are dissipated on many issues and end up being exhaustingly sprawl and confusing, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash centers its focus on peak oil, and provides a well-paced, well-edited, and well-argued summary of peak oil and its significance to the human population.
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash starts by explaining what a crucial resource oil is, the amount of energy it contains, and how it was formed. The message of this documentary is simple and clearly put; Oil is one of the most extraordinary legacy histories has left us, a resource that is so extraordinarily dense in energy that it is no surprise that our civilization has sucked it from beneath the earth’s surface and used it to develop an entire society in just about one hundred and fifty years. As A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash points out later in the film, this absurd level of dependence is unsustainable due to the inevitable oil peak in the world. This is the first documentary to feature Dr. Hubbert, which makes it even more fascinating.