Don’t Worry, There’s Plenty of Oil is a thought-provoking documentary that explores the complexities of global oil dependence and its far-reaching consequences.

In recent months, many articles, reports, and op-eds claim that peak oil is a worry of the past thanks to so-called “new technologies” that can tap massive amounts of previously inaccessible stores of “unconventional” oil. “Don’t worry, drive on,” we’re told.

But as Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg asks in this short video, what’s new here? “What’s new is high oil prices and … the economy hates high oil prices.”

WE NEED YOUR HELP SHARING THIS VIDEO

• Email the video to everyone you think needs to watch it
• Share it through your social networks
• Send it to your elected officials

We can fall for the oil industry hype and keep ourselves chained to a depleting resource that comes with ever-increasing economic and environmental costs, or we can recognize that the days of cheap and abundant oil (not to mention coal and natural gas) are over.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media and politicians on both sides of the aisle are parroting the hype, claiming — in Obama’s case — that unconventional oil can play a key role in an “all of the above” energy strategy and — in Romney’s — that increased production of tight oil and tar sands can make North America energy independent by the end of his second term.

We need your help: Please share this video and help bring a dose of reality to the energy conversation.

Our civilization runs on oil.

It’s the cheapest, most energy-dense, and portable fuel ever. Nature required tens of millions of years to make petroleum, and we’ve used up the best of it in less than two hundred years.

A little over a decade ago, eminent petroleum geologists calculated that global oil production would soon hit a “peak” and begin to decline, no longer meeting ever-rising demand. But oil industry spokesmen countered with the message, “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of oil!” and assured us everything would be fine.

Do you know what happened? World crude oil production flat-lined in 2005, and oil prices went crazy. Wars erupted in the oil-rich parts of the world, and the global economy went into a tailspin. The term “Peak Oil” entered the lexicon.

The oil industry is now staging another PR counteroffensive. They’re telling us that applying “new” technologies like hydrofracking to low-porosity rocks makes lots of lower-quality, unconventional oil available. They argue that we just need to drill more to produce more—problem solved!

But wait. What’s new here? Most of this technology has been around since the 1980s, and the unconventional resources have been known to geologists for decades. What’s new is high oil prices.

High oil prices make unconventional oil worth producing in the first place. Fracking low-porosity rocks requires a lot of money, energy, and water, and the environmental risks are staggering.

How does the economy handle high oil prices? The economy hates high oil prices and responds by going into recession. This makes energy prices volatile, subjecting the industry to booms and busts.

So, what’s the bottom line here?

Yes, there’s still oil in the ground. We can’t afford it. In broad terms, the peak oil analysts were right. But the fossil fuel industry is winning the PR battle.

What really matters, though, is not who wins the debate but how we prepare for the inevitable. We have to wean ourselves off our high-energy lifestyle.

We’d be foolish to wait for events to settle the debate once and for all. Let’s say goodbye to oil. It’s saying goodbye to us.

WE NEED YOUR HELP SHARING THIS VIDEO

• Email the video to everyone you think needs to watch it
• Share it through your social networks
• Send it to your elected officials