[DOCUMENTARY]Understanding Peak Oil: Suburbia.avi

This documentary lays out its arguments provocatively, noting that since World War II, North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia, with its abundant promise of wide open space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too the suburban way of life has become embedded in the North American consciousness.

Our North American dependence on petroleum makes us utterly slave to it. We heat our homes with fossil fuels, we eat food grown and transported with the assistance of fossil fuels, we watch televisions and use computers powered with electricity generated by fossil fuels.

Finding other solutions won’t be easy because we’ve yet to find an energy source as efficient as oil. Hydrogen and ethanol, touted as potential replacements for oil, take more energy to create than they deliver. Hydrogen, after all, isn’t even a form of energy, but a form of energy storage, created with electricity and water. The electricity has to be generated using some form of energy-typically fossil fuels.