If you can possibly make it to this documentary, I would definitely do so. It goes along nicely with The Corporation, a film I mentioned in another post. The reason is that so much of what the modern corporation has done to transform the world in the past century has been enabled by the availability of cheap energy in the form of light sweet crude. The End of Suburbia very clearly lays out the case that the past 50 years in particular have been a one-time “party” fueled by the bubble of cheap petrolium. This “party” is coming to an end in the near future, not because oil itself will run out, but because its production will peak while demand continues to grow unabated. For example, the whole current system of production of consumer goods in mass quantities in China, followed by their transport across the ocean in petrolium-powered container ships and distribution by gas-guzzling big rigs, on roads built by gas-powered heavy equipment, is predicated upon this supply. Not to mention the system of production of food for billions of people (a bloated, unsustainably large population) in which petrolium-based fertilizers and pesticides take the place of human labor. The film is also good at rebutting the polyanna-ish assurances that the free market will compensate and take care of our energy problems. In the case of power generation in North America, the free market’s response to growing demand and decreasing output from coal and nuclear has been to build more natural gas fueled plants. The problem is natural gas almost has to be produced on the same continent on which it is used, because of the difficulties of transport. And North America is certainly going to run out of Nat. gas way before the rest of the world. I can’t summarize everything here, just advise you to check it out if you can (see the web page linked above for where it’s playing). Then start preparing yourself for life in the post Hubbert’s Peak age.