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Crude - The Incredible Journey of Oil by Dr Richard Smith, is an exploration of the extraordinary story of oil. It is a superbly crafted, 90 minute documentary spanning 160 million years of the Earth's history to reveal the story of oil. From the food on our tables to the fuel in our cars, crude oil seeps invisibly into almost every part of our modern lives. It is the energy source and raw material that drives transport and the economy. Yet many of us have little idea of the incredible journey it has made to reach our petrol tanks and plastic bags. Coming in the wake of rising global concerns about the continued supply of oil, and increasingly weird weather patterns, award-winning Australian filmmaker, Dr Richard Smith takes us through time: from the birth of oil deep in the dinosaur-inhabited past, to its ascendancy as the indispensable ingredient of modern life. Filmed on location in 11 countries across five continents, Smith consults the leading international scientific experts to join the dots between geology and economy and provide the big-picture view of oil. Smith says: "When I first started getting interested in oil, I was amazed to find that not only did most people not really have a good idea what this stuff was, but it was hard to find a really definitive explanation from the experts on how it formed. Clearly, the science of oil was lagging behind the exploitation. The deeper I dug into the latest research on the subject, the more incredible links in the story began to drop into place." Crude takes a step back from the day to day news to illuminate the Earth's extraordinary carbon cycle and the role of oil in our impending climate crisis. Nearly seven billion people have come to depend on this resource, yet the Oil Age, that began less than a century and a half ago, could be over in our lifetimes. You can view the entire
documentary, watch extended interviews which were not included in the program,
and discuss how the world will cope as we approach the end of the Age of Oil. Purchase the DVD Crude: http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=744520 Excerpt of an interview with Dr Richard Smith Robyn Williams: What you had to do was show something that was quite different from all those 'end of oil' and global warming films. How did you approach it to make it so different? Richard Smith: I guess it came from my first reasons for making the program which was that oil had started to become really quite prominent. Basically the price was going up every time we tried to fill our cars up. I was feeling the pinch as much as everybody, and I started asking myself what was this stuff, and I realised I had a hazy idea of where it came from, and the more I asked other people I found pretty much everybody had a hazy idea of what this stuff was or no idea at all. It seemed to me that here was something that we all should really know about if it was so important to world economies, world politics, how we go about our daily lives, how we get to work, how we eat our food, where our food comes from. Maybe getting to the bottom of the oil story was the best starting point. As soon as I started thinking like that, little glimpses of a story that I thought were there, a kind of complicated, interesting story that touched on all the things that are important to us as we go ahead in terms of climate change and economies and all the rest of it, all started coming together and coalescing into this quite epic yarn. And as soon as I saw this unfolding it was just too exciting to let go. Robyn Williams: Well, it's not an educational movie in the old fashioned sense, it's very much like a Jurassic Park version of this amazing story of oil. But having done it and having looked at...you go right from the beginning to modern times, what kind of conclusion did you reach about the end of oil and what we're in for? Richard Smith: We've known for a long time that this is a finite resource. The rate we're using it is far, far greater than the rate at which it forms. If we could wait tens and hundreds of millions of years there'd be plenty of oil to keep on tapping because it does keep on forming, but we're using it at such a rate that we're clearly around about halfway through the supplies that we know existed 100 years ago underground, and our demand is still rising every year. So whether we like it or not we're facing a situation where oil is going to become scarcer and more expensive to pull out of the ground. That's going to have very, very significant consequences. We're going to have to try and manage a changing economy with a declining oil supply. And you might think, well, it's only oil, there are lots of other commodities that we use, but oil is an energy source unlike any other; it is so cheap for the amount of energy it produces and we've been able to pull it out of the ground at prodigious rates for a long time. It's not only used for transport, it's not only used for heating but it's used as a basic feedstock for almost all our industrial processes in some way. Pretty much everything that you find in a shop is touched with oil in some way...at a minimum, just how it's moved around, but generally the basic substances have oil compounds in them....all of this stuff can have an oil content to it, and so if this stuff actually declines very quickly and the prices go up a lot, it's going to be a really hard thing to deal with economically. As soon as economic questions come up then political questions come up, so there's a lot of human civilisation management stuff that has to be dealt with. But the other future that we're facing is a future where we've been liberating this stuff at such a prodigious rate that we're now putting masses and masses of carbon that's been locked away underground for a long period of time back into the atmosphere at a faster rate than probably ever before in history. So that is, by all the best science available, going to send us into a warmer, more unstable climate, and it's possibly going to do it at a speed that we're still not actually really expecting. Somehow we've got to manage these two problems at the same time. From talking to all the people who are looking at this at the moment, there's a great sense of urgency, that we can actually deal with this and we can work our way around this problem but only if we actually start really tackling it and tackling it fast because it's a big problem and we don't have the lead time anymore. We've been hearing the warnings about both these scenarios-the end of oil and global climate change-for decades. It only seems to be now that we're starting to really mobilise ourselves in any way to actually deal with them, and a lot of people think we're running out of the lead time we need.
‘Water, Not Down the
Drain’ is published by the Alternative Technology Association 2008. The
Alternative Technology Association has strongly supported the Victorian Women’s
Trust’s Watermark
They have recently
published Water – Not Down the Drain with the assistance of the Smart Water
Fund. Stuart McQuire, the author of this beautiful book, who lives on an inner
suburban block, has reduced his family's mains water by 96%, and still has a
thriving garden full of fresh produce.
The book contains
over 150 pages of comprehensive information and diagrams on how you can
sustainably use water around the home.
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