Crude Impact

So in my in Sociology class on Friday, we watched a movie/documentary/film called Crude Impact. The movie included a lot of information that I thought was interesting and the film was definitely an eye opener for me. I wrote down some information from the film:

• 40% of our energy comes from oil
• in 1 year, the worldwide consumption for oil is 1.3 trillion barrels, compared with 1.3 trillion barrels of natural gas and coal combined.
• Within 150 years of finding and drilling oil, we(the world) have extracted more than half the oil in the ground
• Oil production peaked in 1970-71, and at least half of the 30 largest oil producing countries have peaked in oil production meaning that those 15 countries are producing less and less oil
• Before agriculture there was virtually no population growth
• Countries with no oil reserves have less poverty -Whoa
• The US has 4.5% of the world's population, but uses 25% of the world's fuel

Those are just a few of the examples I wrote down. Part of the movie also talked about oil, agriculture and population and how they were all related. Before agriculture, there was virtually no population growth, probably because sources of food were unpredictable. After the birth of agriculture, humans changed the landscape around them so that they could plant food. The human population also exploded reaching its first billion people by 1800, 2 billion in 1930 3 billion by 1960, and so on. Agriculture made a huge difference, but with the help of fossil fueled farming equipment that didn't require as much manual labor, agriculture made a huge impact on population again. It's overwhelming how intertwined things are in the world. If you change one thing, it influences all the other parts. Like an organ system or something. It's going to take A LOT of work to change things in the world.