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CNN: We were warned: Out of oil
CNN
ericy writes on today’s Drumbeat at The Oil Drum:
CNN is running a promo for a program “We were warned: Out of oil”. At first when I saw this, I thought it a rerun of “We were warned: Tomorrow’s oil crisis”, but the little snippets I have seen so far would lead me to believe that it is different program entirely. The promo I saw had Richard Branson talking about how this crisis is going to dwarf global warming, and I don’t recall seeing Branson in the previous program..
The showtimes that they give are Saturday and Sunday at 8PM Eastern. Typically other showtimes are given through the day as well.
They haven’t updated the CNN Presents website yet, but it is here:
www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/presents/
and will eventually (probably today sometime) be updated.
Don’t know anything about the program other than this. It might be great, it might be a flop. Based upon how the media has treated peak oil in the past, a flop would be more likely, but you never know. Or they could have altered the title of last year’s program – should know more in a day or so. If this starts to look promising, I can look up the full list of showtimes.
(30 May 2007)
Can’t find much about this documentary on the Web yet. Here is a page on last year’s oil documentary from CNN: We Were Warned
Tomorrow’s Oil Crisis.
UPDATE May 31. Apparently this is just a re-run of last year’s documentary… so says ericy at The Oil Drum.
-BA
ODAC News – 30 May
Doug Low, Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC)
Excerpts and commentary on peak oil issues. About 20 items today.
(30 May 2007)
Feels Like I’m Dying…From that Old Used-to-Be
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
I tend to be an optimist, at least by the standards of peak oil activists (which isn’t very hard). By that I mean that I believe in individual action and I believe that we could overturn the system that we live within and make better choices. But I also think this is less likely than that we’ll do the wrong thing, and part of it is that our brains are trying to kill us (or at least our kids). That is, we’ve gotten into habits of thought so destructive and so automatic that we don’t even recognize their basic failures. And if we don’t recognize the failures in our own heads and overturn them, we’re in big trouble. One of those problems is that we can’t stop looking for a quick fix.
I liked this essay by James Kunstler quite a bit, and I recommend it to you, because he has a useful grasp of essentials. [“We Want Solutions!” by Kunstler (May 28k 2007)]
…I, like Kunstler, think that the phrasing of the call for “solutions” as “ways to keep things mostly the way they are” is completely mistaken. Trying to keep the cars going and growth capitalism up and running is a. futile and b. destructive. Not only will we be doing the wrong thing, but we don’t seem to grasp that none of these represents a real solution in any meaningful sense.
Ethanol, biodiesel, solar panels – all of these are tremendously fossil fuel intensive. We can’t make a solar panel without using a whole lot of silicone and metals that are mined, smelted, crafted, assembled, sold and transported using…fossil fuels. The day that we can create a solar panel made from cradle to grave with renewable energies, I’ll buy the notion that we’re all going to be running around in electric cars fed by solar panels.
(29 May 2007)
peak oil in 600 words or less
Barry Stoll, Blog
…i’ll start with money, since that’s something most people care about: let’s say i have a coin-operated atm. instead of inserting a bank card, you insert a dollar. in return the atm spits out 20 dollars. feed it another dollar and it gives you 20 more. holy crap, you’d think, this is the greatest atm ever! if you keep feeding it ones and getting twenties back round the clock, you’d be pretty rich by the end of the week. the next week you discover the payoff has declined – you feed it 1 dollar and only get 10 back – but hey, that’s still a good deal so you keep at it. the next week you feed it 1 and only get 5 back, then 2, then 1.50… once the payoff hits 1 to 1 you’d be wasting your time, and unless you are reality-challenged you’d definitely stop before the atm turns your dollar into 50 cents. it doesn’t matter how much money is left sitting in the atm, you’d have to abandon it while you’re still ahead.
replace dollars with oil barrels in the example above and i’ve just described EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). oil is cheap, but it isn’t free – it takes energy to get energy. all over the world there are abandoned oil wells rusting in the sun that are sitting on top of lots of oil – sometimes half the oil that could be produced from them – because it would take more energy to get the oil out than the oil would provide.
the oil problem arrives not when we’ve harvested the very last drop of oil (which none of us will ever see), but when we’ve harvested all we can from an oil field without losing energy.
…oil is the closest thing to magic that humans have ever seen. each drop contains millions of years worth of solar energy. no other energy source is close to being so powerful, so portable or so profitable for those who use it. it’s also a finite, non-renewable resource…
(30 May 2007)
Barry Stoll writes:
i’m not an oil man or scientist or phd or anything like that. i’m merely a humble musician, a computer geek and father of young kids. i’ve spent much of my free time in the last year reading everything i can about resource depletion, the effects of our modern lifestyle on our planet, and related issues.
