Earth Day 2007

Sundance Channel aired the documentary, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. A wider audience may have thus been introduced to this frightening subject, but as one narrator commented, I'm paraphrasing, we are somehow unable to come to terms with it. It's available on Netflix (and as of July 08, on Netflix Instant & Roku).

Update: The film was released theatrically in the UK on November 9, 2007; BBC referred to that release in its coverage of record oil prices. Also from the UK, in Masterpiece Theater's, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, one theme is global warming and the Kyoto Protocol.

Leading up to Earth Day, Newsweek covered the environment in this April issue but, as usual for the general media, conflates peak oil with global warming, and skirts the implications for both.

Even simpler and less convenient

From this British site:

Everyday in the news, we hear of the threat of climate change. There are international conferences, television documentaries, books galore.

(and an Academy Award and a possible Nobel Peace Prize)

But there is a danger whose consequences will be far more destructive and which will hit us much sooner. It is a danger that will effect everybody, rich or poor, wherever they live in the world. It will require enormous financial and scientific strides to defeat, strides which the world’s governments show few signs of taking. It is a danger which, quite feasibly, could lead to the end of our industrial civilisation. It is the danger of peak oil.

From another British site, here's an overview of the subject.

media

Tv
CBS: Greener Horizons
BBC: Fueling the Future, Education
PBS: EXTREME OIL

Press
NY Times: The Energy Challenge
Chicago Tribune: Oil:A Travelogue of Addiction

Radio
NPR: Paying at the Pump

Videos, etc
See my earlier post, Materials on energy

to a watchdog

The PBS series, NOW with David Brancaccio, aired a piece on global warming this week; in it, one climatologist, Dr. Alley, says:

It’s not the end of humanity; it's not the end of civilization.

My feedback to NOW:

There are some of us who believe that oil depletion could quickly lead to the end of humanity and the end of civilization. Please go beyond your look at influence-peddling by the oil industry to the subject of Peak Oil. One person who has been trying to get the public's attention on this is Congressman Barlett (R-Maryland): http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/531 .

One compelling analysis is the too-real Olduvai Theory by Richard Duncan.

For a view from abroad, see this BBC piece, a Crisis for Humanity?