I saw a film tonight called A Crude Awakening, an effort about the looming phenomenon of the end of cheap oil (here's the Globe and Mail review; here's the home page of a 2005 Globe and Mail series on peak oil* , also called Crude Awakening. Unfortunately, the stories are archived now).

* BTW, peak oil is the concept that oil is a finite resource and that we've essentially burned through half of our supply while demand continues to grow.

And after 90 minutes of apocalyptic visions about what might happen to civilization when the oil tap starts running dry, there was no room for the words "global warming." Oops, sorry, there was -- an expert mentions that oil was formed as a result of severe global warming 90 to 150 million years ago.

But in terms of the climate change crisis the world is currently trying to deal with? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

A related, earlier effort, The End of Suburbia, didn't seriously touch on the global warming thing either.

To show that fair is fair, George Monbiot's book Heat: How to stop the planet from burning -- a polemic on how GHG emissions can be reduced in Britain by 90 per cent by 2030 -- essentially blows off  peak oil.

I have lost count of the number of people who have explained to me that we don't have to worry about climate change, because before it advances too far, global oil supplies will go into decline, the price will rise exponentially and the motorist and airline passengers will be forced to stay at home.

Monbiot said if peak oil does bring the global industrial economy screaming to a halt, the disruption is not something he'd welcome. He then puts on his skeptic's cap:

When I first came across predictions that oil supplies could peak very soon -- one geophysicist announced in 2003 that he was "99 per cent confident" that it would happen in 2004 -- I found them persuasive. But the more I read, the less certain I become. As in other such cases, you can find people and data on both sides of the debate with an equal claime to be taken seriously. It could well be true that petroleum will peak with in the next 10 years; it could also be true it will take 30. If this is the case and we have placed our faith in the decline of oil supplies while simultaneously failing to do anything to prevent it (not, I am afraid to say, an unlikely proposition), we could find ourselves facing catastrophic climate change and an unprecedented global depression.

From my perspective, and maybe I'm missing something, the way to help both stabilize the climate and delay the nasty effects of a peak oil doomsday scenario are to use less petroleum.

We learn in the film that the United States accounts for 25 per cent of the oil that the world consumes on a daily basis (the U.S. has five per cent of the Earth's population).

What we aren't told is that it also produces 25 per cent of the world's annual GHG emissions.

Left hand, meet right hand.

We need to start planning for a future where energy is not a cheap, abundant good and where carbon-burning is something to be minimized. To ensure a future for subsequent generations, we need to start spewing far fewer GHG emissions into the atmosphere.

Europe has started that process, something driven by energy security concerns as much as the environment, some argue.

Others must follow where the EU is leading.

Finally, there's the overarching question of what's sustainable. We've got more than six billion people on the planet now, with projections that the global population will hit nine billion during the 21st century. Countries like the U.S. and Canada already consume a disproportionate amount of resources (Canada has 0.4 per cent of the world's population and produces two per cent of its GHGs).

The mantra is that economic growth will lift all boats. However, can we afford to have everyone consuming and polluting at our level? In the coming decades, we may come to the disquieting conclusion that we can't.