#68, 7/21 – A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (2006) (dvd)

I got deeply interested in oil and energy a few years ago while I was half-watching a movie.

One morning in 2004, my TiVo found and recorded a fairly underwhelming Stanley Kramer film with Faye Dunaway, Jack Palance, and George C. Scott called Oklahoma Crude. And while I was, as I said above, half-watching this 1973 thing—which was obviously set many years before that—about people rallying and fighting over oil, I wondered to myself “wait, just how long has this been going on, anyway?”. That is, just how long has crude oil had this kind of value? When did it become so strategically important that violence was used to secure it? You’d think I’d know for sure, having been a history major and all. And I did have a ballpark idea. (I was off by a decade. All things considered, that’s not bad.) But I wanted to know more about the ins and outs of oil history and I didn’t know where to look.

A few months later, with my questions and the interest never far from the surface, I spotted a book on display in Barnes & Noble which I snatched right up. And it definitely helped stoke the interest. I actually never finished reading it because I got too depressed by the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa to keep going, but it gave me a clear enough picture, anyway. And I kept on looking and watching and following and discovering.

Eventually I ran into the idea of Hubbert’s peak and the possible end of cheap energy and that became the central and most interesting piece of my energy education. By the time I saw The End of Suburbia—which feels so long ago now—I wasn’t quite at the point where I felt confident enough to talk about everything. I’m confident enough now (really, just ask the poor person who heard me go on and on about Cantarell the other day), but this blog isn’t the proper space for me to go on and on about it. Like I could, believe me.

A Crude Awakening is about as one-sided as The End of Suburbia, but somehow I prefer it all the same. It’s all old hat to me at this point, because there wasn’t a single point or argument in this film I haven’t heard before (and although the counter-arguments were largely unaired, I know them, too), but it’s pretty well done. I think I watched it because I’m hoping to find a balanced documentary which presents what I’ve come to know soberly without too much doomer rhetoric or breezy optimism.

Alas, I’m beginning to think such a thing probably doesn’t exist. Although it doesn’t get too doomy, really, I think A Crude Awakening’s more likely to incite despair than interest and activity, which is a shame. I’d still recommend it for anyone who wants to understand the basic ideas behind the energy issues we may be facing in the future, but I’d definitely suggest following it up with some more reading and discussion.