A Crude Awakening

I haven't blogged for a bit, so today turns out to be a good day to blog. We had a great time this weekend with our friends, Steve, Liz, and Nash (and Lexi too of course), that finally joined us up in Salt Lake. Cornia even showed up at their house! He's got a great reggae band, "Carlos Cornia" that I actually have yet to see in person, but want to really bad. We went to eat at Settebello, mmmm, that's all that needs to be said about that :-)

But the main thing that spurred me to post was the movie that Gina and I just got done watching, A Crude Awakening. My favorite part was hearing about Hubbert's Peak because I have learned about it in school already and could relate to it. I highly recommend the movie if you have not seen it

The movie is very well researched and follows along very well with what scientists like Hubbert have been telling us since the 60's and 70's. So far, they've been very close to perfect with their estimations about oil reserves and our obscene exploitation of those reserves. For those of you that remember the 70's gas crunch, that was only a drop in production of crude oil by about 5%. Royal Dutch/Shell announced in 2004 that it really knew of 20 percent fewer oil reserves than they had been reporting up to that point. At the time, 20 percent of just their reserves equated to 3.9 billion barrels of oil valued at $136 Billion at that time. Today that same amount of oil equates to nearly $254 billion at current ~$65/barrel prices. Evidence that our oil reserves are limited is all around us. Many countries are now importing more oil than they are producing and it's not far off for the U.S. either. At the rate we're using it, even all of our "untapped" reserves would not sustain us for very long in a crisis. It's an interesting movie and shows how dependent we are on oil. A change is needed, and there is no silver bullet. No matter the mechanisms that you use (even my beloved biodiesel) we will all have to use less of it and promote sustainability and conservation. Go out and rent this movie, if nothing else, to simply be aware of what is to come in our future.