Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Crude - The Incredible Journey of Oil

The audio is pretty bad on this documentary up to 3:30 minutes, but fine after that...

From the food on our tables to the fuel in our cars, crude oil seeps invisibly into almost every part of our modern lives. It is the energy source and raw material that drives transport and the economy. Yet many of us have little idea of the incredible journey it has made to reach our petrol tanks and plastic bags.



Coming in the wake of rising global concerns about the continued supply of oil, and increasingly weird weather patterns, Crude spans 160 million years of the Earth's history to reveal the story of oil; from its birth deep in the dinosaur-inhabited past, to its ascendancy as the indispensable ingredient of modern life.



Filmed on location in 11 countries across five continents, the program's award-winning Australian filmmaker Richard Smith consults the leading international scientific experts to join the dots between geology and economy and provide the big-picture view of oil.



Crude takes a step back from the day to day news to illuminate the Earth's extraordinary carbon cycle and the role of oil in our impending climate crisis. Nearly seven billion people have come to depend on this resource, yet the Oil Age that began less than a century and a half ago, could be over in our lifetimes.



Click here to visit the official website.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That was awesome! Thanks for posting. I hope we wake up and take ourselves in a completely different direction before its too late. Renewable energy will bring a boost to the economies of the world. While drilling for oil is tantamount to the suffocation of life. If people could just see past the short term.

cinndave said...

Forget Gore. Forget DiCaprio. Forget the lying oil lobby. This is the best environment video yet! Wow. Learned so much about oil that the other doomsayers never talk about, like the mesozoic weather patterns, and the biochemical process that create oil. Neat how there's a life cycle on earth that takes 250 million years to come full circle. Definitely makes me a little less afraid of global warming to know that Jurassic air had 2.5x more CO2 than our air today. I like how it confirms global warming for the natural process that it is. We might not have to go carbon neutral, but we definitely need to pace ourselves with what's left.