[Leanan]

Someone posted a Torrent:

We Were Warned (Torrent)

[Sunspot]

First off, I didn't hear the term "Peak Oil" at all, or certainly any discussion of that. Simmons did sneak in the word "peak" when he was talking about individual wells, I think that discussion was actually about natural gas wells. So no mention of the term "Peak Oil" is disappointing...
But there were some significant moments, particularly of course Simmon's "dumenglum". Maybe a few people out there will google him and find out he's a conservative. But where was Bartlett, jeez, he's a Congressman!
The whole little "future scenario" bit was cute, and of course it was blamed on a hurricane and, surprise surprise, Al Queda! Of course this whole deal has been getting set up for years so that when it hits the spinning blades everyone's knee-jerk reaction will be to blame the Ay-Rabs. And It's easy to make it look that way. As we've seen repeatedly...
But here's my perspective - I found out about Peak Oil in Dec '03. The only news I got for about a year was the ASPO newsletter, couldn't wait for that to come out. I'd google the news tab for "peak oil" and the latest thing I'd get was two weeks old! So seeing this open a discussion of these issues, with credible people saying how serious the problem is, this is an amazing thing in this short a period of time. Woolsey has a lot of credibility, and he says we have to "declare war" on our energy problems!
Not that I expect any "miracles". I'm just watching the show...

One more thing...Who keeps saying that Peak Oil isn't an energy problem, just a liquid fuels problem? Liquid fuel is an energy source, for one. Food is my personal energy source, and it gets delivered by a truck that uses liquid fuels as an energy source. And this is also a natural gas crisis, which creates a lot of our electricity. Denver had rolling blackouts one day in late Feb. because of natural gas shortages. Ignored by the media, by the way.
It's not just an oil crisis, it's a fossil fuel crisis, and definitely an energy crisis! Duh!

[Leanan]

They did use the term "peak oil" in the preview shown Wednesday. Curious that they chose to cut that out.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

delete

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Thankyou Leanan, it is a very fast torrent as well.

[Brownie]

I am probably one of the worlds worst gardeners. Nevertheless I have noticed that if keep on growing crops year after year and don't add any fertilizer natural or otherwise two things happen: the soil becomes very clayish and the yields go down. As I watched the Brazil bit I wondered how you can keep on taking all the plant material and using it to create ethanol without depleting the soil. Do they use human and animal waste to replenish the soil there? It seems to me that part of the destruction of the Amazon forest has been the pattern of clearing some land to grow crops and then moving on and repeating the same process as each cleared area has its soil exhausted. I would like to hear some perspective on this from someone knowlegable on this area of experise.

[donshan]

I recorded the program and have watched it twice now.

I want to compliment CNN on this first "baby step" in raising public awareness of the coming oil shortage. I understand that those who who understand peak oil were disappointed this aspect was not mentioned specifically. However in the main stream there is still a wide band of uncertainty in when the "plateau" will end and a unambiguous down trend in oil production begins. CNN specifically identified the idea that oil supply will not keep up with demand. The public needs to get that idea first before they can get away from their current world view of limitless exponential growth. If CNN changed that mind set it would be a GREAT accomplishment in a one hour program.

With the current inventories of crude at record levels supply is still ample right at this moment. The majority still think we are in a temporary supply problem and it will be fixed since all the past oil shortages "were fixed" too. So CNN took the realistic tack that their poll data showed that 77% of Americans think we will have an oil problem in the next 20 years. With THAT audience the weather/terrorist caused oil shortage is more believable, and anyone that thinks about their scenario should realize that with Katrina/Rita and the attack in Saudi Arabia we just had a near miss!

I think they did an outstanding job for a first introduction. There will be plenty of time later as the peak oil shortage becomes more and more undeniable to have a CNN Presents with a new title dropping the word "coming" and discussing peak oil:

"We Were Warned: The Cause of the Oil Shortage"

It reminds me of the movie "Contact" for another civilization changing event like meeting extraterrestrial life where Jodi Foster's Dad coached her to go slow: " slow steps, slow baby steps". Her first contact left a lot unsaid!

People take time to get used to big ideas. And CNN still has to keep the car ads coming to pay their bills.

[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hankyou Leanan, it is a very fast torrent as well.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Just watched it, was ok. Really just another documentry. Peak Oil was never used once in show as "Peak Oil", rather it was said oil production will peak but didn't explain that after peak decline sets in. Decline was mentioned once in afew offshore oil wells. All in all, nothing impressive, it is not a "must watch", Joe sixpack will be uneffected by the show and will not leave any form of lasting impression.

[Hiderow]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', 'S')omeone posted a Torrent:

We Were Warned (Torrent)

[RdSnt]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Alnitaka', 'I') don't know if this is related to CNN's WWW (We Were Warned) show, but at about 2006 March 18 0745 EST, CNN showed a segment showing how Brazil achieved energy independence. According to the segment, Brazil gets 40% of its fuel from ethanol, and Brazilian cars have switches that can change between gasoline and ethanol. The segment showed seemingly infinite stretches of sugar cane fields.

However, ethanol is probably not going to be a fuel of our future, since it has a low energy profit ratio. According to "Beyond Oil" (the 1986 book by Gever et al, not the Deffeyes book), ethanol and its variations have a ratio between 0.7 and 1.8. This means that for every unit of energy put into ethanol, between 0.7 and 1.8 unit comes out - not very profitable. Many experts say that ethanol will not be the solution to peak oil, including the authors of "Beyond Oil". So why is Brazil profiting handsomely from it? Is it because far fewer people drive in Brazil than in other places (although the segment showed traffic jams in Brazil's cities)? They do seem to be operating efficiently; for example, the energy to run an ethanol production plant comes from burning the chaff of sugar cane plants.

So does Brazil have the answer?

[RdSnt]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', '
')
I have not watched the CNN special yet. I really hope it gets people to wake up from the comming crisis.

[Starvid]

Wow. The show sucked total ass.

They talked almost nothing about decline rates or peak production. It was just a couple of short clips thrown together without any internal cohesion.

No clip was more than 5 seconds long. It was just lots of pretty pictures of big trucks, dancing girls, driving cars, interview of some stupid ass chinese couple and commercial breaks all the fucking time.

The best description of the show is that one of my friends could not see any difference between the "documentary" and the commercial breaks.

It sucked total ass.


Is all American television this low quality?

[RdSnt]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TWilliam', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TWilliam', 'C')an't help but wonder if they ran it unannounced a day early to gauge reaction, with a possible eye toward pulling the scheduled airings over the weekend should it prove too "upsetting"...

[ClassicSpiderman]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Starvid', '
')No clip was more than 5 seconds long. It was just lots of pretty pictures of big trucks, dancing girls, driving cars, interview of some stupid ass chinese couple and commercial breaks all the fucking time.

It sucked total ass.

Is all American television this low quality?

[Hans]

Hi there, first post from The Netherlands

I saw the programme this afternoon and to be honest, it was a bit disappointing. A lot of 'soundbites' but no analysis of the long time consequences when this scenario happens. Amother point i would like to make: even without events as a cat 5 storm or terrorattack we have a problem. It's supply and demand that are the paramount triggers for oil prices. I do view it as positive however that the CNN programme makes the peakoil issues more 'mainstream'.

regards,
Hans

[Starvid]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ClassicSpiderman', 'I')f you didn't like it, does Europe produce any peak oil documentaries for their mainstream news?

[Leanan]

I thought it was quite good, for what it was attempting to do. It was only one hour, which means they couldn't go into anything in-depth. But that's okay; I doubt the average American would sit through two hours. They certainly wouldn't stick around if they started showing Bartlett's charts and graphs.

The show was obviously meant to spoon-feed the concept of peak oil to the masses, along with plenty of sugar(cane) to help the medicine go down.

[Laurasia]

I would have liked them to harp on a bit about FOOD shortages. They mentioned (once) that the price of food would go up, and they mentioned that lots of department stores would be closed because the fleet of delivery trucks was standing idle. Trucks deliver food to supermarkets also, and they failed to mention this. That would have grabbed people's attention, IMHO. Still they had Simmons on there and he mentioned his worst case scenario AND he drew The Graph in the air

Regards,

L.

[MyOtherID]

Absolutely horrible program. I wish the BBC would do something on this topic.