Peak Oil

It's hard to watch a video that you know is propaganda and try to take everything that is said at face value. Granted that propaganda doesn't necessarily mean that it's false information, but it certainly does make me analyze what I'm being told to a greater extent, looking for loopholes and possible angles. Peakoil's main angle was to scare the audience with the 'knowledge' that oil production will peak in 2010, and from there on out we're shit for luck. Much like this peakoil website's opening line of "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon."

The whole time I watched the video I just kept thinking to myself, 'Alright, so you're telling me there won't be any oil left. Suggestions?' None came. At least tell me we need more hydroelectric dams or that everyone needs to buy a hybrid car. I'd even settle for no cars, so long as everyone could ride a bike or use public transportation, just tell me that I'm not going to freeze in my house because of lack of heat in the winter of 2007.

Assuming that the information given to us by Peakoil is at least about 75% accurate, then we need to start seriously thinking of a solution to the peakoil problem quickly, lest our economy be thrust into the depths of hell all of a sudden circa 2010. That was my biggest problem with the film, all problems with no solutions, or even attempts at solutions. Just a bunch of short clips of a pen following a declining chart that leaves us all asking 'so what next?'

Pictures of Sustainability

(click to enlarge)

Just walking around the Center for Sustainability and seeing all the windmills and solar panels located within only a few feet of eachother made me wonder why they aren't consistently used as such all over the place. Understandably solar panels and windmills are not yet advanced enough to compete with gas, coal and oil, but if there was a government grant (say for $2 trillion dollars), maybe we could, if nothing else, slow down the loss of those unrenewable fuels by using windmills and solar panels to contribute. Maybe some of that $2 trillion could go to improving our current technology for the two as well.

Al Gore Has No Friends

I agree with Xmilitary that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a lot easier to watch than the screen flashes of Peak Oil, but it would have done a lot more for it's intended purpose if the main focus of the movie was the threats posed by global warming instead of how much of a hero Al Gore is for taking up this cause.

Granted, my opinion of the movie might very well be biased after seeing a South Park episode that made fun of Al Gore for making up a threat to the world so that he could be the world's savior... but it's not global warming, it's Manbearpig. Al Gore on South Park

Otherwise I think the tactics used were pretty solid. He used data from credible sources to predict what might happen in the future, and then made it real by using videos that showed, basically, the world as we know it coming to an end. Scare tactics, if well done, can be pretty convincing. If the movie was just one of his presentations, the whole way through, on tape, I think it would have worked a lot better. Learning about Gore's childhood and how he felt after he lost the election wasn't really on the top of my list of things to do, and it doesn't seem like that information could help us much in our battle against melting icecaps.

CNN Eco-Overdraft Article

October 16... I guess it's October 17th, 2006

I found this article on CNN.com. It says that since 1987 people have been predicting what day of the year the world will surpass it's alotted use of resources for the year, from that point on using more than will be able to be replenished in the next year. In 1987 the day was predicted to be December 19, this year it was predicted to be October 9. Over a period of less than 20 years we lost more than 2 months of using our alotted resources. The article states "For the last quarter of this year the world's population will thus be consuming resources that the earth simply does not have the capacity to replenish." If the trend continues, or worse, if the trend is exponential, it could mean that in 100 years or less we will be using unreplenishable resources the whole year round.

I googled Ecological Debt and found a page that had a few years and their corresponding Eco-Debt dates and thought it would be interesting to have a graph to be able to see the trends better. Here's what I came up with.

Maybe we could use a fact like this in one of our podcasts as kind of a scare technique (hey, if Al Gore and Peak Oil can do it...) Just to sort of make people think in different ways about our current situation, maybe startle them into actually caring.

Hmm, anybody want to hack the above chart so that it extrapoloates until 2012?

mobius

Xerox Commercial

December 5th, 2006

Here's a link to the commercial Mobius brought up in class today during the technologies of the community discussion, just in case anybody wanted to check it out. Xerox Commercial