I just finished watching The End of Suburbia: Middle-aged White Guys Talk About Oil (Actually, the subtitle is Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream, but every single person who speaks in the movie is an old white guy, except for the Iranian Minister of Oil, and he only has one line). I thought the film was a great example of how a mediocre film about a compelling topic can be pretty interesting.

The upshot of the film is that as oil gets more expensive, the current American economy/lifestyle cannot continue. The people in the suburbs will be screwed once gas gets super expensive (the figure one guy used was $4.00, which seems really cute in retrospect). All the guys in the movie think that once that happens, our increasingly globalized society will be forced to return to a more regional infrastructure.

This is probably not news to anyone reading this blog, but other than making me feel really smug about my car-free urban lifestyle, there are a few things that this movie made me think about:

1. Apparently, natural gas is running out much faster than oil. So natural gas prices may shoot up drastically any moment (although probably not until winter). This, of course, means that electricity prices will also shoot up, especially in California, where we’re hugely dependent on natural gas.
2. If we are forced to rely more extensively on local resources, we in the Bay Area are pretty lucky. We already have some beginnings of a public transit system as well as a number of local farms. Not to mention the Central Valley not too far away.
3. If suburbia really does become untenable, where will those people go? Presumably they will come pouring into cities, but we can’t really house the people who are already here.
4. The movie was pretty clear about alternative fuels not being a solution. There’s no way to make us the oil with ethanol or any of the other alternatives. The suburban lifestyle is doomed.
5. They were pretty dismissive of nuclear energy, but if the price of natural gas increases 1000% (which is not out of the question, apparently), I think we’ll see some strong movement toward it.