Hacker Cinema
A Crude Awakening
2006 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Basil Gelpke, Ray McCormack
Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's nonfiction treatise Crude Awakening joins Maxed Out, An Inconvenient Truth, and other recent documentaries devoted to unearthing and exploring forces that are untying the connective threads of contemporary society. The subject at hand is crude oil - specifically, the depletion of petroleum from the Earth, in an era when consumption threatens to exceed supply.
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I don't have enough datapoints but its quite possible.
One big problem is the EROEI of food varies so much. Kobe beef flown in by air from Japan as a bicyclist fuel is likely to be vastly worse than driving a typical car, yet eating home grown vegetables is likely to be better than driving a V8 crew cab pickup truck. No debate there. Are you better off eating a little more factory farmed chicken on factory farmed rice fried in chemical plant produced psuedo-oil, or burning gasoline, well there's a debatable area.
You'd do best to google for EROEI and related terms. Warning that all reports in the field are highly politicized, so you need to average the archived stuff on theoildrum showing a 0.1 with some multinational megacorp astroturfed greenwashing campaign claiming a 10.0 EROEI.
There are no unbiased academic textbooks I'm aware of. Its all "The Peak Oil Myth Debunked" or the "Partys over" book and "Crude awakening" movie and there is nothing in between.
Generally the pessimistic treatments do a good job of science and engineering and math and do a bad job of politics, economics, PR and emotional response. And the optimistic treatments do the obvious swapped topics. So if you critically read both and pay attention appropriately, you'll come out with the best of both (try not to mess up and end up with the worst of both sides LOL)
For just one book, you could do worse than read Kunstler's emergency book. Not because its perfect or even because I agree with all of it, but because it is extremely content dense WRT listing the many inter-related systemic problems. It makes at least passing mention of almost all issues, and at least one sides thoughts about it, regardless if you agree or not. I don't think the "other" side has anything near as information dense, that I know of.