The Oil Drum

Maybe they will. After seeing Oliver Stone's "Salvador" in the mid-80's, I researched the situation to find out how much of the movie was true. I ended up visiting El Salvador and a neighbouring refugee camp (during the civil war). My political views changed almost beyond recognition. Cinema can be powerful.

There's not much we can do about this situation as individuals, but we donated money to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is trying to provide legal aid to the prisoners. I wish everyone could see this play so the whole country would all know what this administration is doing in Guantanamo.

I would wish that a similar piece of art could have the same effect for peak oil, although I'm with Super G—unfortunately, I don't think Syriana is going to be it.

Well, they think we're at peak production this year and next year, something like that, for global energy production, the most that we can ever can really get out; that we've hit the crest and oddly, I think everybody had this feeling - although not a one-to-one relationship -  I think that what we were seeing, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it felt like the trailer of coming attractions, it felt like a preview. Like, holy cow - we are looking into Mad Max. Like, God, that is what it's going to look like. It's going to be racial; 'Us fat White people, we got all the shit we need; fuck you, poor people who happen to be Black or Mexican'; it really felt like you were looking at this Hobbsean future; it was just like he laid out. I don't know; people have been making predictions; oddly, everybody I talked to in 2001, 2002, would have said for sure that Saudi Arabia was going to topple by now, that it was going to go down in flames to the Wahhabists. And weirdly, us going into Iraq, energy prices tripled; it tripled the price of a barrel of crude, which has poured so much money into the coffers of these regimes that they've been able to sustain themselves a little bit longer. They were going down; they were running out of money. And now, they're like so loaded. Imagine if you could triple your Gross National Product overnight. They're like `Go Bush! Go baby! Go Iraq, go Syria, go Iran! Keep it rollin! Let's see if we can quintuple it, sextuple it!'

It's astonishing how good war is for oil companies and oil traders. Anyone in the energy business (will tell you): Chaos is good for the energy business. And that's the first thing they'll tell you. They don't feel good about it; but it's true. I think we will hit a tipping point ... but I also think we're so industrious, so creative ... that there really will be a Manhattan Project-style ... I mean, we're very close to having the writing on the wall for global warming, I believe; we've passed a tipping point and shit is going to start going haywire, and I think we'll start talking in terms of carbon wedges and changing our lifestyles is going to happen very quickly. I don't know if it's going to be five years, 10 years 15 years ... It's definitely in our lifetime; our children are going to have very different lives. The carbon economy is going to shift; I don't know if it's a hydrogen economy, a sunlight economy; you're not going to be flying around on jet planes the way you are now, probably; there are going to be changes. ... I don't know; I'm not a futurist. But I did enough research into human nature, figuring out this one, that I'm absolutely certain that until it's really dire, nothing's going to change.

(The energy crisis of the '70s comes up; specifically, how we didn't seem to learn anything from that.)

It's the same fuckers, man! It's all the same Nixon guys; they got tossed out of office for a while with Carter. They came back with Reagan; they had a bad couple years under Poppy (George H. W. Bush), who wasn't really hip to these guys, and then Clinton ... and they're all back! Just look at them! They're all like a hundred and ten years old, they cut their teeth under the first Nixon administration ... they hang upside down like vampire bats when they're out of power and they wait around. It's the same guys: `Hey, don't conserve energy! There's no problem! Party on!'

And now we have Syriana, but i don't hear any chatter amongst the TV mainstream media or talk shows about peak oil. Clooney and Damon are the 2 big stars in Syriana, but they are not out talking about it. Not that i will ever ever need their persuasion, but many people still pay attn to them. The  financial channels like Bloomberg and CNBC will address oil and gas prices all day long. Complete with energy reports on reserves status, up or down. etc. But it's boring if your always broke and living from one payday to the next, unless you have money to invest or are a stock trader. Most people ignore it, i watch people at work, they can't be interested. But they can tell you who just scored a touchdown, which teams are ahead, etc.

So i experimented today a little and i happen to print a 4 page article about peak oil today, layed it down in plain view for passerby's (co workers) to review. It barely moved, by the end of the 8 hr shift not one person mentioned it at any time of the day.

If i had layed a People Magazine or a Sports illustrated down in the same place it would have been stolen!  

When they can't eat or keep warm, they might start paying attn. But by then they just want the problem to go away, so they can resume their lifestyle. I think the mayhem seen on TV during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans will play out again to an even bigger scale. I don't mean to be gloom and doom, but i think it's the cold hard truth. Thats the way i see it.

As someone mentioned earlier somewhere: Problem? what problem? spin, spin, spin. There is no problem.

Still, nice to see that Alexander Siddig, formerly Siddig El-Fadil, is working again.  He was also in a Poirot episode I saw last weekend.  

my wife who is smart and aware of Peak Oil, but ... She fell asleep through part of it,

let's face it, "oil" is not one of those topics for which you can cast Brad Pitt and ask him to bare his chest for the women in the audience

I think they tried to engage the female mind with those fight scenes between Damon & his wife, but that ended up sending mixed messages. My wife did not see Damon as a victim but rather as a villian: it's his fault the first child died, he shouldn't have gone to an unsafe place to begin with, and when Damon's wife said she was leaving, he should have gone with her, he chose the prince over his own family, he got what he deserved, he didn't deserve to have her take him back!

and the message about oil? Doh!