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Film Review: A Crude Awakening

by Emma Butterfield

This is not porn. Cherwell might sign its editor up to an escort agency, but it hasn’t yet sunk to reviewing porn. That said, there are lots of shots of men covered in oil. Admittedly, they’re turn-of-the-century Russians, but if that’s your thing, you’ll probably enjoy the film more than I did. That’s not to say that I didn’t like the film – just that it’s unsettling. A Crude Awakening is a documentary about the oil industry: how it has developed over the last century, and why we’re now on the brink of a serious shortfall in supply. And, yes, it does mention Iraq. The film’s basic premise is hardly revelatory: our economy is at odds with geology. We are often told that we’re addicted to oil: A Crude Awakening illustrates the economics which drive that addiction. A barrel of crude oil contains enough energy to do 25,000 man-hours of work. It makes headlines when the price of oil reaches fifty dollars a barrel, but compared to the equivalent cost of labour, oil is incredibly cheap. It’s this cheap energy which has sustained global industrialisation, and the concurrent improvement in our standard of living. It also sustains us in a more visceral sense: for every calorie consumed in the developed world, 10 calories in fuel energy have been expended in production. This is a fascinating and very well-made documentary; come on, I managed to follow it all. I shall now set about proving its hard-hitting nature by my own, newly-informed synopsis. Standard market economics reassure us that as oil becomes scarcer its price will rise, making alternative fuels more attractive. The investment in alternatives will pay off, as improvements in technology make them more efficient and economies of scale render them affordable. What the market demands, the market will supply: ask and it shall be given unto you. Even this optimistic model allows that there will be a troubled transition period, during which oil is effectively unavailable (either exhausted, or unaffordable), and the alternatives unready to meet the pressing demand for energy. In the film, a panel of talking heads describe how abrupt and uncomfortable this transition will be. For years, oil-producing countries’ production quotas were capped according to their stated reserves of oil, and so they overstated their reserves in order to maximise production. Despite our growing thirst for oil those "stated reserves" remain unchanged: each member claims to be finding new oil as fast as they are extracting it. Since the market price is depressed by these fictional reserves, when the oil does run out, there will be no forewarning when the oil price soars. We’re headed for a crash. Like all documentaries, all this is skewed by the directors’ choice of interviewees, and their editing decisions. What’s interesting is the diversity of pundits represented: geologists, the former head of OPEC, Stanford professors. No dissenting voices are heard, because all of the assembled dignitaries agree on the film’s central argument: oil is finite and production has peaked, but our demand is growing. We are taught that we are able to exercise free will because we live in a liberal democracy. A Crude Awakening shows that our freedom depends on the fact that we are unbound from the land and from manual labour: our freedom depends on oil.

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