A Crude Awakening - Waiheke

The New Zealand Herald and other popular media have made the link between the rising prices of food and the price of oil, but they have failed to highlight the link between the rising price of oil and the current geological realities of this valuable but finite resource. Transition Waiheke is offering a screening of this Crude Awakening, that came out in late 2006, when the oil price was spiking at the shockingly high price of $70/barrel! (it has been over $140/barrel in recent months). The film points out that new oil is not being made, discovery peaked a long time ago, and we are now using six barrels of oil for every new one that we discover. Times are a changing.

Chris Barsanti of TheFilmCritic.com offered these words. “A Crude Awakening is the kind of film that, if it doesn’t give you at least a nightmare or two, then it’s hard to imagine what exactly would frighten you. A scarifying work that’s less a documentary than an extended debate or lecture (like An Inconvenient Truth without the slideshow and studio audience), the film tries to answer a question that seems to have mostly fallen by the wayside in much of the recent discussion about the environment and energy policy. It’s a two-part question, actually: When is the oil going to run out, and what’s going to happen when it does?

Tag-team directors Basil Gelpke, Ray McCormack, and Reto Caduff don’t try to pretend that they know exactly what the answer is to that question, but they assemble a commendably well-credentialed ring of experts to take a stab at it. To the first part of the question, one expert seems to sum up the consensus: “Demand is on the march, and supply is flattening out.” Given the billions that have been spent on oil exploration in the last few decades, and that new oil-field discoveries peaked in the late 1960s, the film’s take is that it’s all downhill from here, with the peak of production just around the corner.”

So that you are not left in a state of shock after this film, we will show a short and lively video of Rob Hopkins speaking about Transition Towns. And James Samuel will give an update on Transition Waiheke and the extraordinary growth and uptake of this model all across Aotearoa. Come along and be prepared for some lively dialogue over a cup of tea afterwards.