Online Film: Blind Spot

Near the beginning of Blind Spot, Richard Heinberg asks viewers to imagine what it would take to push your car roughly 20 miles. Then he states, "that's what we get for a single gallon of gasoline that we get for maybe two or three dollars." Heinberg's point that we take cheap oil for granted is a reality that was reinforced a couple years ago when a huge amount of complaining went on about how the price of gasoline was over $3 a gallon.

One commenter posted to Snagfilms his belief that Heinberg's scenario was silly because if he didn't have any gasoline he would "just walk." It seemed like a strange and uninformed rebuttal to me.  He completely missed Heinberg's point.






One of the larger points that Blind Spot makes is that in recent decades, we Americans have created an industrial civilization that runs on fossil fuels. That is our infrastructure. And the film also makes it clear that we depend on cheap oil not only for transportation, but also for growing and distributing our food and water. When we produced a lot of our own oil we also used it to manufacture goods. Now, instead, we use oil to import the things we buy from China and other countries

Juxtasposed amongst the footage of interviews with various experts, are American scenes, some rural, some urban, some suburban. Together they serve to reinforce the idea that we've built some enormous structures and enormous vehicles. How well do you think the United States will do when the price of oil goes back up over $100 per barrel?




Above: Even with oil at $70-$80 per barrel, our airlines are struggling.

Below: It is a fact of geology that world oil discovery and production will play out along lines similar to those graphed below for United States oilfields.



The dramatic increase in population over the past 100 or so years could not have happened if not for agricultural and medical practices that require fossil fuels. Although the numbers appear to be rounded off, this graph speaks for itself.


Roscoe Bartlett is not only a Congressman from Maryland, but also an award-winning scientist. He is one Republican who was embarrassed by the "drill, baby, drill" slogan that was promoted by some of the less-insightful members of his party during the 2008 convention. In Blind Spot, Representative Bartlett says that "we will transition [away from fossil fuels]; the question is whether we do it on our timetable or on geology's timetable." I wish that more politicians would speak the truth like that.

Watch Blind Spot now!


Blindspot has a website.