[Leanan]

You can already buy the DVD at their store.

Got a little bit doomerish at the end, though they skimmed over the implications pretty quickly.

[HEADER_RACK]

Last 10 min was ok.
My main beef about it was they would spend alot of time talking about hybrids, hydrogen , oil shale and what not and only give one sentence to why this won't work.
What would one normally remember from the program all the talk about ethanol and coal to liquid or the one sentence why they won't work.
If they would have reversed it and gave one sentence to the oil shale and hydrogen and spent the majority of the time explaining the problems of why they won't work. I think more people would have gotten the message about peak oil.

[Eli]

You must have missed the part about coal then or you believed the add about clean coal.

Overall I give it a meh.

They left out the time frame that we are dealing with, I mean a quick synopsis of the declining oil fields around the globe would have been nice.

I didn't feel any sense of urgency from the thing, it was all in the distant future.

[Polemic]

It featured Heinberg, Simmons, Deffeyes, Bartlett, and other doomers prominently. It even talked about Mad Max, motorcycle gangs ruling the roads fueled by homemade ethanol from rooftop stills. It raised the specter of nuclear war over the remaining oil.

I definitely recommend seeing this and passing it along to sleepwalking friends and family.

[Leanan]

All in all, I liked it. It couldn't go into too much detail, because it's only an hour long. (Probably 45 minutes without the ads.) But that's also its strength.

The problem I've run into with the peak oil documentaries is that they're too long and boring. At least for anyone not already interested in peak oil. The End of Suburbia started out so slowly that few stick around for the more interesting second half. And other peak oil documentaries I've seen have similar problems. People have short attention spans these days. A 45-minute introduction to peak oil is, IMO, about right.

[TheDude]

Good for total newbs, but notice they aired it at 12AM PST? Nobody but night owls caught that. Loved the commercials for big cars, clean coal, Viagra. Can you say disconnect?

They mentioned Jack2's 15 billion barrels and left that hanging, without explaining why it's a drop in the bucket. No mention of why the gov believes peak is decades off, either, even though they interviewed Roscoe Bartlett.

Have your friends listen to some podcasts from Global Public Media, or make them CDs of same if they're not high speed internet. An hour or two listening to Kunstler will make their knees quake - can't believe I heard him on NPR two years ago.

I found some torrents of Savinar from C2C pretty easy, you just need to know the dates of his appearances.

[Chuckmak]

I was pleasantly surprised by the show. I'm glad they at least touched on the negatives of all these "alternative energy sources" except clean coal...even then they say for clean coal it's going to be extremely costly. Funny thing is...I only saw a Honda commercial trumpeting themselves as "the most fuel efficient car company." I wanted to see GM and all those guys cop pleas but they didn't...and that's alright with me.

[h20]

You can torrent the other old Mega Disasters shows from History Channel, so eventually the Oil Apocalypse will be added at this link
http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=mega+disasters

[JRP3]

I'm not sure how much more doomerish some of you wanted it to be. They flat out said there is no chance of a soft landing and if drastic measures are not taken now, by 2012 there is a real possibility of global depression, oil wars, nuclear attacks, and the end of civilization.
They also shot down almost every proposed technology to stop this from happening. I thought it was quick, hard hitting, and well done. They covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time, just what the general population needs.

[Eli]

Well, I would have just liked them to show the IEA graphs that show where we are at right now. I think just a cursory look at the evidence and it is apparent that we are hosed right now.

[wxman]

I think the show can be broken down into parts.

First 15-20 minutes: Background of the problem. I thought this was well done, and they pretty much stated that the Peak is here or imminent. No waffling at all.

Next 25-30 minutes: Going through the alternatives. I agree with a few other posters that they spent far too little time on the negatives of each. It was like a one sentence "this is bad for the environment and expensive" statement after they spent 5 minutes going through the technology. They touched somewhat on EROEI, but I think that they should have covered this more. It ended up being pretty cornucopian.

Last 10 minutes: Basically the doomer porn that many were looking for. A bleak what-if scenario of things that would lead to a breakdown of society.

[erb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', '
')Have your friends listen to some podcasts from Global Public Media, or make them CDs of same if they're not high speed internet. An hour or two listening to Kunstler will make their knees quake - can't believe I heard him on NPR two years ago.

I found some torrents of Savinar from C2C pretty easy, you just need to know the dates of his appearances.

[TheDude]

I have a couple MP3 files I made called "Savinarc2c-6-23" and "Savinarc2c111." From this year, June 23rd and November 1st.

Go to Global Public Media for MP3s and streaming media of Kunstler, Simmons, Heinberg, Bartlett, and all the rest. Great site.

[lexicon]

In many ways I was pleasantly surprised at how much they were able to cover over an hour time slot (or 40-45 minutes figuring in commercials). I was expecting to see a lot of old interviews that I had seen before on End of Suburbia or Crude Awakening. But they were all new interviews of the old faces. Ken Deffeyes sounded pretty much like he usually does in previous docs, but there seemed to be a new urgency in the way Richard Heinberg conveyed his message. I felt like he and David Goodstein and Roscoe Bartlett really did their best not to sugarcoat where they saw our future headed: we have run out of time for a soft landing. The transition to a civilization not run on oil will be PAINFUL.

There was something disturbing about the way Matthew Simmons' research was presented. Not that I think it's a bad thing that his book is getting exposure, but it seemed that within the context of this series, which tends to couch events in ominous terms, the accounting deception that has possibly hidden the Saudi peak of oil production that Simmons laid bare cast the Saudis in a villainous light. I always thought Mike Ruppert was wrong when he said the US would invade Saudi Arabia before it ever invades Iran, now after seeing this program, I'm starting to wonder if a propaganda foundation is being laid oh so subtly. But maybe I'm overreacting.

This wasn't the best Peak Oil documentary, but I think it has the potential with multiple airings to be the most effective documentary in terms of raising public consciousness. I thought they did a great job in the beginning explaining the concept of Peak Oil. What was a little different from other documentaries that I appreciated was how they illustrated just how big an oil powerhouse the United States used to be compared to now. I knew we used to be able to produce 10 mbd, but I didn't know that back in the 50's, the US provided over 50% of the world's oil (20 mbd). Amazing how peaking changes things.

In some ways Oil Apocalypse did a good job conveying the severity and immediacy of Peak Oil, in other ways they were kind of fuzzy. They mentioned 2007 GAO report that we have no federal plan in place to deal with Peak Oil, but that the peak could occur between now and 2040. I was disappointed that they cited this government study but omitted the Hirsch report, which would have made clear to any newbie that if we don't initiate a crash program more than 20 years from the peak, we will be hurtin' for certain. I wish that in covering the alternatives to oil they had clarified the concept of EROEI, though I guess I can excuse them simplifying it into terms of "too expensive", "not a fuel", "uses too much energy to create" to get the message across to John Q. Public that alternatives in the long run will not work. Perhaps they could have spent more time on this point, but I think presenting it this way also reflects the future that we face: the powers that be will throw everything & the kitchen sink at our post-peak society trying to "solve" the problem of Peak Oil.

But the overall point came across clearly in the last 10 minutes: we're too late. The 2012 scenario that they lay out is very chilling. The Greatest Depression is coming and whether the result of that will be oil wars with a nuclear touch or black marketeering with a Mad Max touch remains to be seen. But I give this program credit for illustrating those possibilities. I just hope they air this again at an earlier time. You can't have a wake-up call at an hour when most Americans sleep.

[centralstump]

The torrent can be found at this location:

http://www.midwestnets.com:6969

Browse to it and download the torrent. It requires a password:

Username: download
Password: please

I hope by putting it on a private server, leaving it up for only a short time, and not making the torrent searchable, I can argue it is a "fair use" empowering the free spread of information.

But I probably can't.

Edit: I apologize for the "rawness." I did no editing. It's like sitting down to watch a Tivo'd program.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('centralstump', 'T')he torrent can be found at this location:

http://www.midwestnets.com:6969

Browse to it and download the torrent. It requires a password:

Username: download
Password: please

I hope by putting it on a private server, leaving it up for only a short time, and not making the torrent searchable, I can argue it is a "fair use" empowering the free spread of information.

But I probably can't.

Edit: I apologize for the "rawness." I did no editing. It's like sitting down to watch a Tivo'd program.

[h20]

Thanks for the torrent. Please seed it if you have downloaded it, ta.

Currently not downloading due to no seeds!

[lys3rg0]

The torrent doesn't start for me, I receive a HTTP Error 401 from the tracker... Could someone already in the swarm tell me the IP:port of the seeder, so i can add him manually to the peer list?

[schierding]

Thanks for the torrent. You can't download it in uTorrent, because it dosen't seem to support the password thing, which I suspect is the problem for some. Just get the newest Azureus, and the password box will pop up and the download will start.

[h20]

Thank you schierding, that worked.