Brilliant. The man is brilliant. Everything he said about reality, and the laws governing reality, is spot-on. That only makes his expose all the more terrifying. However--and I'm sure he'd call this "denial"--I think his downfall is in his rigid analysis. His predictions are based on the assumption that oil is a magical source of energy and materials which cannot be replaced. He is all too consumed with how much oil is in everything we use, as if it were completely impossible to make goods out of anything else, or with anything else. It's a matter of scale, and yes, our total dependence on the goopy stuff amounts to an enormous scale. But don't tell me we can't figure out some other way to produce a liquid that burns in the existing machines that now run on the stuff, let alone create new machines that don't. Don't tell me I can't put cheetos inside of anything but a hydrocarbon-derivative bag.
As long as that big ball of fire burns overhead at noon, there is no energy crisis. There may be a crisis caused by reliance on a dwindling source of energy, but there is no shortage of energy. He is correct about thermodynamics, on both of the counts he mentioned. The sun is indeed decaying, from the usable to the unusable. So I guess humanity should set an alarm clock to go off in a few billion years, with perhaps a million or so years to spare before the sun inevitably exhausts itself.
Solar energy doesn't just mean heat to move engines. It means photosynthesis as well. And photosynthesis doesn't just apply to greens growing on arable land, but to any plant-based life, natural or engineered. There is so much to discover, so many paradigms (to use a favorite word of his) yet to shift. The more we're pressed, the more we'll rise to the challenge.
His view is completely defeatist. His application of the 5 stages of grief to the current human problems convinces me of that. He sees the end result as predetermined. Either humanity goes back to the land, or we all die. Bullshit. First of all, most of humanity would die if it all went back to the land. Old agrarian economies cannot sustain the population, or anywhere near it. Second, nothing is predetermined. The best prediction models always go sour given enough time. There are too many variables, and too much the model maker simply doesn't know, regardless of his brilliance.
I'm very glad I watched this. I now know who Michael Rupert is, and I respect him. I wish I had known and respected him 5-6 years ago, but I didn't. Such is life. But I do not for a moment believe that industrialized civilization is inevitably doomed. We were looking to better ourselves when we found oil, and we'll still be doing the same when we seek out the next step in powering our lives.
