The End of Suburbia

My friend Robert Semeniuk told me to watch this film, a documentary that predicts the demise of Suburbia. Around one half of North Americans live in suburbs, a place that simulates the so called country life, usually named after the country life they destroyed in order to build the suburb. The key thing about the suburb is that it removes one from the “city”. I can hear Leonard Nimoy quoting, E.B. White, “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in car." The film argues that if the car dies, suburbia immediately follows.

The documentary is really about oil dependency, specifically dependency on the cheap, easily available oil and natural gas which has allowed our society to flourish (or has it merely bloated?) over the last five decades. The film presents a one sided argument that world oil production has likely peaked or will in the next few years. It discredits recent claims that huge, untapped reserves exist by arguing that “the books have been cooked” to overcome a new regulation limiting productivity to a percentage of declared reserves. Fact is, no one knows how much is left, and surprisingly, it actually doesn’t matter how much is left. It only matters that production has peaked.

Why? Well, oil and petroleum based products will become far too expensive to remain useful long before the reserves actually run out. For example, the energy crisis in the 1970’s happened not because oil ran out, but merely because it peaked. If oil becomes too expensive to process and use then that’s it. Peaking means that there is now less affordable oil available than people want to use, thus it becomes too expensive to be consumed in the manner we’ve become dependent on.

They also discredit alternative energy sources such as hydrogen and bio-fuels, dismissing both as smokescreens which require as much, or almost as much energy to create as they deliver when used. Their bottom line is that there is no replacement that will allow us to continue to live the way we have lived and, since petroleum and/or petroleum products are ubiquitous in almost every aspect of our culture, the crash will be extraordinary. Yes, indeed there's no flying Mary Poppins in this film.

It’s action points: Behaviour must change and become more self-sufficient. Communities must be redesigned so people can access necessities on foot. Plant a garden. Work from home.

The film only presents one perspective but it is both logical and compelling. And considering that their perspective is shared by Matthew Simmons, CEO of Simmons and Co. International, the world’s largest energy investment bank (Haliburton and the World Bank are clients) their claims seem credible.