Those whom the documentary "A Crude Awakening" fails to awaken now, to the fast approaching consequences of peaked oil depletion, at a time of unprecedented, and ever growing demand, just may not be awakeable, or won't likely wake up before it's too late.<br /><br />Unlike that other much hyped Hollywood liberal misappropriation of the catastrophic global warming issue, to serve the personal needs of one disingenuous politician, "A Crude Awakening" is a Swiss production, that employs a broad range of viewpoints, from 27 scientists and energy experts, who's collective opinions all provide greater credibility to the message.<br /><br />There's enough information concisely crammed into this one and half hour film for it to be the basis of a full semester's self-directed course of study... perhaps several semesters. In the special features, included on the DVD version, there is an extra chapter on the problems of petrostates, and four extended interviews with the following experts:<br /><br />Colin Campbell: Oil geologist; consultant to numerous oil companies; and founder of ASPO www.peakoil.net<br /><br />Matt Simmons: Energy investment analyst; author of "Twilight in the Desert"<br /><br />Fadhil Chalabi: Former Acting Secretary-General of OPEC; and former Iraqi Oil Minister<br /><br />David L. Goodstein: Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology<br /><br />While many viewing this documentary might perceive its realistic appraisal of the demise of cheap and abundant energy as pessimistic, I consider it to be objectively quite optimistic, considering that it did not linger long on the very inconvenient truth that there are over six billion people wanting to have a petroleum based high standard of living, that can't possibly be sustained for much longer, even if there were only two billion people wanting it. "Civilization" has only ever had one answer for that kind of problem. The thin thread that "A Crude Awakening" seems to hang its optimism on is the assumption that if enough people become fully aware of this totally unavoidable event sooner, rather than later, then human ingenuity, combined with a level of human cooperation the world has never before seen, might possibly attenuate the consequences for at least some of those who awaken.