A couple of nights ago I took advantage of Seattle’s art-house film scene to see Collapse, the movie featuring peak-oil doomsday-theorist Michael Ruppert. The film itself is pretty cheesy, constantly cutting away from the interview to use somewhat inappropriate stock footage to illustrate Ruppert’s points. For instance, Ruppert suggests that people all over the world have already started to riot in response to the recent economic difficulties (the film was made in March 2009), but it’s pretty clear that the riot footage is pulled from a wide variety of sources, many having nothing to do with those difficulties. There’s also a rather huge leap of logic connecting the real estate and derivatives bubble with peak oil concerns. While there may be evidence somewhere of such a connection, it is not presented in the film. Finally, Ruppert’s fundamental view of the economy-as-pyramid-scheme seems to overlook the obvious fact that the economy is not a closed system, but rather allows for new inputs from improved technology and – perhaps most importantly – social innovation. (As a side note, it also never fails to amaze me that folks who downgrade paper money as ultimately worthless nevertheless upgrade gold to the status of God Almighty, as if a relatively rare metal were somehow inherently valuable… my point being that all economic value is either directly related to satisfying biological needs, or else is a matter of mere convention).
But while it is easy to write Ruppert off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, partly because he focuses so selectively on data that support the worst case scenarios for the near future, and partly because he self-servingly refuses to debate those at least as well-informed as he is, it’s hard to simply dismiss his impassioned insistence that we should work much more urgently to develop plausible alternatives to oil for energy production. The correlation between the onset of the petroleum economy and the 20th-century population explosion is enough to make you think quite seriously about the consequences of an inevitable future decline in oil production, with its apparently unavoidable effects on agriculture and transportation.
Here’s the trailer for Collapse-
Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas.