Case Study - Efficiently Consuming Too Much Energy

Have advances in technology let us not recognize bad energy habits?

"When we talk about peak oil nobody's talking about running out of oil, it's really about entering the end of the age of cheap oil. And if you imagine that classic sort of Hubbert Bell curve, actually the half that we have been on for the last 150 years is very, very different from the other half. There is still physically the same amount of oil on both halves but all the oil on the way up has been cheap, easy to get at, a high energy return on investment. On the downward side what we've got left is things like the Alberta Tar Sands, fracking for gas, drilling in the Arctic, drilling in deep, deep water. And all of those things that take a huge amount more energy in order to get the energy out again, and cost a huge amount more, so actually although there is a certain amount of recoverable oil in the second half we may well not get that much of it because it will just become prohibitively expensive to produce." Rob Hopkins, in Efficiently Consuming Too Much Energy (7:25).


About the Filmmaker: FreedomLab Future Studies is a research lab and European think tank. They do continuous research on social change based on future studies using a proprietary method: Scenario Based Reasoning (SBR). They use the results of research to help various organizations by developing an alternative vision and creative strategies. Film used with permission.


(Photo credit: FreedomLab)