Collapse
****
BY ROGER EBERT / December 9, 2009
If this man is correct, then you may be reading the most important story in today's paper.
I have no way of assuring you that the bleak version of the future outlined by Michael Ruppert in Chris Smith's Collapse is accurate. I can only tell you I have a pretty good built-in B.S. detector, and its needle never bounced off zero while I watched this film. There is controversy over Ruppert, and he has many critics. But one simple fact at the center of his argument is obviously true, and it terrifies me.
That fact: We have passed the peak of global oil resources. There are only so many known oil reserves. We have used up more than half of them. Remaining reserves are growing smaller, and the demand is growing larger. It took about a century to use up the first half. That usage was much accelerated in the most recent 50 years. Now the oil demands of giant economies like India and China are exploding. They represent more than half the global population, and until recent decades had small energy consumption.
If the supply is finite, and usage is potentially doubling, you do the math. We will face a global oil crisis, not in the distant future, but within the lives of many now alive. They may well see a world without significant oil.
Oh, I grow so impatient with those who prattle about our untapped resources in Alaska, yada yada yada. There seems to be only enough oil in Alaska to power the United States for a matter of months. The world's great oil reserves have been discovered.
Saudi Arabia sits atop the largest oil reservoir ever found. For years, the Saudis have refused to disclose any figures at all about their reserves. If those reserves are vast and easy to tap by drilling straight down through the desert, then ask yourself this question: Why are the Saudis spending billions of dollars to develop offshore drilling platforms?
Ruppert is a man ordinary in appearance, on the downhill slope of middle age, a chain smoker with a mustache. He is not all worked up. He speaks reasonably and very clearly. Collapse involves what he has to say, illustrated with news footage and a few charts, the most striking of which is a bell-shaped curve. It takes a lot of effort to climb a bell-shaped curve, but the descent is steep and dangerous.
He recites facts I knew, vaguely. Many things are made from oil. Everything plastic. Paint. There are eight gallons of oil in every auto tire. Oil supplies the energy to convert itself into those byproducts. No oil, no plastic, no tires, no gas to run cars, no machines to build them. No coal mines, except those operated by men and horses.
Alternative energies and conservation? The problem is the cost of obtaining and using it. Ethanol requires more energy than it produces. Hybrid and battery cars need engines, tires and batteries. Nuclear power plants need to be built with oil. Electricity from wind power is most useful near its source. It is transmitted by grids built and maintained by oil. Wave power is expensive to collect. Solar power is cheap and limitless, but we need a whole hell of a lot more solar panels and other collecting devices.
Like I say, you do the math. Ruppert has done his math, and he concludes that our goose is cooked. He doesn't have any answers. We're passing the point of diminishing returns on the way to our rendezvous with the point of no return. It was nice while it lasted. People lived happily enough in the centuries before oil, electricity and steam, I guess. Of course, there were fewer than 6 billion of us. In this century, Ruppert says, there will be a lot fewer than 6 billion again. It won't be a pretty sight.
I'm not going to mention his theories about global warming, because that's a subject that inflames too many zealots. About peak oil, his reasoning is clear, simple and hard to refute.
So you can stop reading now. That's the heart of Ruppert's message, delivered by a calm guy who could be Wilford Brimley's kid brother, lives alone with his dog and is behind on his rent.
I was fascinated by some of the directions peak oil takes him into. For him, he says, it was the key to understanding many seemingly unconnected geopolitical events. The facts he outlines are known to world leaders, who don't talk a lot about them in alarmist terms, but they explain why Bush/Cheney were happy to have an excuse to invade Iraq. And why our embassy compound in Baghdad is the largest we've ever built, larger than Vatican City. And why we're so much more worried by Iran than North Korea. They may also explain Obama's perplexing decision to increase troops in Afghanistan. An undeclared world war for oil is already under way.
I don't know when I've seen a thriller more frightening. I couldn't tear my eyes from the screen. Collapse is even entertaining, in a macabre sense. I think you owe it to yourself to see it.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Doom's Dude
published at NOW Toronto
by Susan G. Cole
December 9, 2009
Editorial Rating: NNNN
Collapse, a new documentary by Chris Smith (The Pool, Home Movie) is more than it seems.
On its face, it gives radical thinker Michael Ruppert the Errol Morris treatment – feature-length interview punctuated by archival footage – to argue that the world is going to eco hell and economies all over the world are circling the drain.
It’s effective if you like your arguments one-sided. Ruppert, who turned to investigative journalism in the 70s after he blew the whistle on CIA drug dealing in the US and was thrown out of the LAPD, is very convincing. He chain-smokes and blabs about the evils of oil dependence and finagling financial institutions. But a few words from the dumbly diabolical polluters and climate change naysayers would have made the case even stronger.
What’s fascinating about Collapse is not the argument – in-the-know environmentalists and economic analysts won’t see much new here – but the person. Hunkered down in what looks like a darkened bunker, Ruppert’s a totally fascinating character, passionate, driven and desperate.
Like Naomi Klein, he’s been called a conspiracy theorist, a term I loathe when it’s applied to people who do their research and shed light on capitalism’s patterns and imperialism’s trends – or anything systemic, for that matter.
Ruppert’s really a modern-day Cassandra trying to get people to face up to the obvious.
by Susan G. Cole
December 9, 2009
Editorial Rating: NNNN
Collapse, a new documentary by Chris Smith (The Pool, Home Movie) is more than it seems.
On its face, it gives radical thinker Michael Ruppert the Errol Morris treatment – feature-length interview punctuated by archival footage – to argue that the world is going to eco hell and economies all over the world are circling the drain.
It’s effective if you like your arguments one-sided. Ruppert, who turned to investigative journalism in the 70s after he blew the whistle on CIA drug dealing in the US and was thrown out of the LAPD, is very convincing. He chain-smokes and blabs about the evils of oil dependence and finagling financial institutions. But a few words from the dumbly diabolical polluters and climate change naysayers would have made the case even stronger.
What’s fascinating about Collapse is not the argument – in-the-know environmentalists and economic analysts won’t see much new here – but the person. Hunkered down in what looks like a darkened bunker, Ruppert’s a totally fascinating character, passionate, driven and desperate.
Like Naomi Klein, he’s been called a conspiracy theorist, a term I loathe when it’s applied to people who do their research and shed light on capitalism’s patterns and imperialism’s trends – or anything systemic, for that matter.
Ruppert’s really a modern-day Cassandra trying to get people to face up to the obvious.
Collapse: 4 Stars from Eye Weekly
published at Eye Weekly
by Jason Anderson
December 9, 2009
Editorial Rating: ****
Just because Michael Ruppert sometimes comes off as a paranoid crank doesn’t mean he’s not right about where our civilization is heading. That’s why Collapse is a far more terrifying piece of disaster porn than Roland Emmerich could ever concoct.
The director of American Movie and The Yes Men, Chris Smith encountered Ruppert while researching a documentary about the CIA’s involvement with drug smuggling in the ’80s. Ruppert had been a decorated LA cop whose own efforts to expose the CIA’s nefarious doings prompted his further investigations into “how the world really works.” According to the facts, theories and opinions that Ruppert lays out before the camera in Collapse, the repercussions of the globe’s dwindling oil supplies have already begun to manifest. Moreover, things are bound to get a whole lot worse as our belief in infinite growth collides with the fact of finite resources.
The film’s dispassionate, Errol Morris–like presentation of Ruppert’s ideas about energy, economics and the end times makes them all the more disturbing. Suggestions of the personal cost of Ruppert’s quest for knowledge add a haunting quality to Smith’s compelling portrait of an angry, chain-smoking Cassandra whose curse is to see what so many of us prefer to ignore.
COLLAPSE
by Jason Anderson
December 9, 2009
Editorial Rating: ****
Just because Michael Ruppert sometimes comes off as a paranoid crank doesn’t mean he’s not right about where our civilization is heading. That’s why Collapse is a far more terrifying piece of disaster porn than Roland Emmerich could ever concoct.
The director of American Movie and The Yes Men, Chris Smith encountered Ruppert while researching a documentary about the CIA’s involvement with drug smuggling in the ’80s. Ruppert had been a decorated LA cop whose own efforts to expose the CIA’s nefarious doings prompted his further investigations into “how the world really works.” According to the facts, theories and opinions that Ruppert lays out before the camera in Collapse, the repercussions of the globe’s dwindling oil supplies have already begun to manifest. Moreover, things are bound to get a whole lot worse as our belief in infinite growth collides with the fact of finite resources.
The film’s dispassionate, Errol Morris–like presentation of Ruppert’s ideas about energy, economics and the end times makes them all the more disturbing. Suggestions of the personal cost of Ruppert’s quest for knowledge add a haunting quality to Smith’s compelling portrait of an angry, chain-smoking Cassandra whose curse is to see what so many of us prefer to ignore.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
"Really, really scary"
published at the Globe and Mail
JENNIE PUNTER
Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated on Saturday, Dec. 05, 2009 03:10AM EST
Directed by Chris Smith
Featuring Michael Ruppert
Classification: NA
****
Former L.A. narcotics detective turned whistle-blower turned radical critical thinker Michael Ruppert is probably not the kind of guy you would want to meet face-to-face in the basement of an abandoned meat-packing plant in Los Angeles. But that's just where we encounter him in Collapse, an urgent and riveting new documentary from Chris Smith, one of America's most intuitive and gifted young filmmakers.
Some would label Ruppert a conspiracy theorist. In Collapse, he says he deals in "conspiracy fact." Whether you agree, disagree or fence-sit, there is no denying it: His notions about the impact of declining oil reserves and looming global catastrophe no longer sound like ideas from the fringe.
Ruppert's work is widely consumed by government insiders and academics, as well as by conspiracy theorists. Drawing from newspaper inside pages, academic journals and unclassified documents, he has exposed various forms of government corruption as a freelance investigative journalist, lecturer, and publisher of his print and Web newsletter, From the Wilderness.
In Collapse, Ruppert connects the dots between peak oil, essential human services, alternate energy sources, agricultural production, governments, money interests and strategies for survival. All power points from his recent book, A Presidential Energy Policy, Ruppert delivers them in a plain-spoken vocabulary peppered with imaginative analogies. But this is not merely an activist doc intended to support Ruppert's treatise. Smith gives us something much more: a subtle portrait of a man whose sense of duty has affected his personal life.
Smith's previous docs (American Movie, Home Movie, The Yes Men) and features (American Job, The Pool) present their offbeat, outsider characters in the context of their work or lives. With Collapse, Smith changes his style, delivering a cinematic, first-person, talking-head film.
This kind of documentary needs a perfect storm of elements to engage the viewer. Collapse has it: intriguing subject matter; an articulate, enigmatic speaker prone to fascinating asides; and a stylistic approach that frames him in a unique way. Smith says he chose the basement location to convey the milieu of an interrogation. But it also looks like a space one might run into to escape apocalypse above ground, as portrayed in such end-of-world films as The Road, which opened last week.
From popcorn chompers such as 2012 to more cerebral fare like The Road, movie audiences are being offered multiple visions of the apocalypse these days. Collapse is hands-down the most chilling.
Even in a season of apocalyptic films, these facts are really, really scary
JENNIE PUNTER
Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated on Saturday, Dec. 05, 2009 03:10AM EST
COLLAPSE
Directed by Chris Smith
Featuring Michael Ruppert
Classification: NA
****
Former L.A. narcotics detective turned whistle-blower turned radical critical thinker Michael Ruppert is probably not the kind of guy you would want to meet face-to-face in the basement of an abandoned meat-packing plant in Los Angeles. But that's just where we encounter him in Collapse, an urgent and riveting new documentary from Chris Smith, one of America's most intuitive and gifted young filmmakers.
Some would label Ruppert a conspiracy theorist. In Collapse, he says he deals in "conspiracy fact." Whether you agree, disagree or fence-sit, there is no denying it: His notions about the impact of declining oil reserves and looming global catastrophe no longer sound like ideas from the fringe.
Ruppert's work is widely consumed by government insiders and academics, as well as by conspiracy theorists. Drawing from newspaper inside pages, academic journals and unclassified documents, he has exposed various forms of government corruption as a freelance investigative journalist, lecturer, and publisher of his print and Web newsletter, From the Wilderness.
In Collapse, Ruppert connects the dots between peak oil, essential human services, alternate energy sources, agricultural production, governments, money interests and strategies for survival. All power points from his recent book, A Presidential Energy Policy, Ruppert delivers them in a plain-spoken vocabulary peppered with imaginative analogies. But this is not merely an activist doc intended to support Ruppert's treatise. Smith gives us something much more: a subtle portrait of a man whose sense of duty has affected his personal life.
Smith's previous docs (American Movie, Home Movie, The Yes Men) and features (American Job, The Pool) present their offbeat, outsider characters in the context of their work or lives. With Collapse, Smith changes his style, delivering a cinematic, first-person, talking-head film.
This kind of documentary needs a perfect storm of elements to engage the viewer. Collapse has it: intriguing subject matter; an articulate, enigmatic speaker prone to fascinating asides; and a stylistic approach that frames him in a unique way. Smith says he chose the basement location to convey the milieu of an interrogation. But it also looks like a space one might run into to escape apocalypse above ground, as portrayed in such end-of-world films as The Road, which opened last week.
From popcorn chompers such as 2012 to more cerebral fare like The Road, movie audiences are being offered multiple visions of the apocalypse these days. Collapse is hands-down the most chilling.
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