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Now in its improbable fourth week, the main pro-democracy protest camp in Hong Kong's Admiralty district is a sort of Woodstock on the South China Sea.

A sea of tents, the camp teems with street art and propaganda posters. They range from sculptures and cartoons to protest banners and the "Lennon Wall" — a reference to John Lennon and a similar wall in Prague — where people have written thousands of messages on colored Post-it notes.

Unpopular Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung is portrayed variously as a zombie and a wolf in this makeshift open-air museum.

In the past week, thousands have come to snap photos of the camp, which sprawls across a major highway, and the homemade artwork to document a remarkable moment in the city's political history. Most believe the police will eventually sweep it all off to a landfill. I've been covering the protest for the past two weeks, and joined the photographers down in Admiralty. Here are a few of my shots.

A pedestrian bridge over the main protest camp in Hong Kong's Admiralty district. The orange banner at the far left says "Do You Hear The People Sing?" — the title of a song from Les Miserables, the musical set in 19th-century, revolution-era France.

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Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

A scrap-wood sculpture of a man holding an umbrella is the contemporary equivalent of the "Goddess of Democracy," the statue created by the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989. Umbrellas became symbols of the democracy demonstrations after protesters used them to block police pepper spray and tear gas attacks late last month.

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Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

A twist on the Hong Kong flag in which petals of the city's emblem, the bauhinia flower, have been replaced by yellow umbrellas. The five petals on the Hong Kong flag echo the five yellow stars on the Chinese national flag.

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Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

A yellow umbrella made of tiny yellow umbrellas with messages of hope written in Chinese.

i i

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Hong Kong protests

Now in its improbable fourth week, the main pro-democracy protest camp in Hong Kong's Admiralty district is a sort of Woodstock on the South China Sea.

A sea of tents, the camp teems with street art and propaganda posters. They range from sculptures and cartoons to protest banners and the "Lennon Wall" — a reference to John Lennon and a similar wall in Prague — where people have written thousands of messages on colored Post-it notes.

Unpopular Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung is portrayed variously as a zombie and a wolf in this makeshift open-air museum.

In the past week, thousands have come to snap photos of the camp, which sprawls across a major highway, and the homemade artwork to document a remarkable moment in the city's political history. Most believe the police will eventually sweep it all off to a landfill. I've been covering the protest for the past two weeks, and joined the photographers down in Admiralty. Here are a few of my shots.

A pedestrian bridge over the main protest camp in Hong Kong's Admiralty district. The orange banner at the far left says "Do You Hear The People Sing?" — the title of a song from Les Miserables, the musical set in 19th-century, revolution-era France.

i i

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

A scrap-wood sculpture of a man holding an umbrella is the contemporary equivalent of the "Goddess of Democracy," the statue created by the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989. Umbrellas became symbols of the democracy demonstrations after protesters used them to block police pepper spray and tear gas attacks late last month.

i i

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

A twist on the Hong Kong flag in which petals of the city's emblem, the bauhinia flower, have been replaced by yellow umbrellas. The five petals on the Hong Kong flag echo the five yellow stars on the Chinese national flag.

i i

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

A yellow umbrella made of tiny yellow umbrellas with messages of hope written in Chinese.

i i

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Frank Langfitt/NPR

Hong Kong protests

The dustiest portion of my home library includes the 1980s books — about how Japan's economy would dominate the world.

And then there are the 1990s books — about how the Y2K computer glitch would end the modern era.

Go up one more shelf for the late 2000s books — about oil "peaking." The authors claimed global oil production was reaching a peak and would soon decline, causing economic chaos.

The titles include Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, Peak Oil Survival and When Oil Peaked.

When those books were written, worldwide oil drillers were producing about 85 million barrels a day. Now they are pumping about 93 million barrels.

NPR/U.S. Energy Information Adminstration

Despite growing violence in the Middle East, oil supplies just keep rising.

At the same time, the growth rate for demand has been shrinking. This week, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast for oil-demand growth for this year and next. Turns out, oil demand growth — not production — is what appears to have peaked.

Now prices are plunging, down around 25 percent since June.

What did the forecasters get so wrong? In large measure, their mistake was in failing to appreciate the impact of a relatively new technology, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Because of fracking, oil is being extracted from shale formations in Texas and North Dakota. Production has shot up so quickly in those areas that the United States is now the world's largest source of oil and natural gas liquids, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia.

This new competition has shocked OPEC. Members say they want to maintain their current market share, so they are keeping up production and even boosting it.

Bottom line: The peak of production is nowhere on the horizon.

So are the authors of "peaking" books now slapping themselves in the head and admitting they had it all wrong?

Some are, at least a bit.

Energy analyst Chris Nelder wrote a book in 2008 titled Profit from the Peak. The cover's inside flap said: "There is no doubt that oil production will peak, if it hasn't already, and that all other fossil fuels will peak soon after."

In a phone discussion about his prediction, Nelder said "my expectation has not materialized."

The surge in oil production in Texas and North Dakota "has really surprised everyone," he said. "If you had told me five years ago we'd be producing more oil today, I would have said, 'No way.' I did not believe at all that this would happen."

But while he acknowledges that oil has not peaked yet, he says it might soon because "oil is trapped on a narrow ledge" where it must stand on stable prices. Holding the price of a barrel steady around $110 for years allows energy companies to invest in fracking operations.

Over the past three years, those are exactly the conditions drillers have enjoyed. Oil was sitting pretty on a stable plateau of roughly $110 a barrel. But now, as global growth slows, the price is plunging, down to around $83 per barrel.

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"China is cooling off quite a bit. Much of Europe is slipping back towards recession," Nelder said. If oil prices stay low for long, frackers may need to stand down. "There is a lower level [in price] where they just can't make money," he said.

And with OPEC pumping so much oil now to hold down prices, maybe they are using up their supplies more quickly. "Depletion never sleeps," he said.

So perhaps Nelder has been wrong so far, but could be right before too long.

That's what Kenneth Worth thinks. He's the author of Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, a 2010 book. He says the fracking boom has been so frenzied in this decade that drillers may have extracted the cheapest oil already. With fracking, oil supplies "deplete very rapidly. You have to keep drilling really fast," he said.

With prices now so low, the money to keep up the frenzy may not be there.

So maybe the "peaking" predictions weren't wrong, just premature. Then again, at some point, any forecast can turn out to be right, he says. "If you take enough of a timeline, eventually we're all dead," Worth noted.

peak oil

oil

fracking

This story is part of the New Boom series on millennials in America.

Millennials are spending — and giving away their cash — a lot differently than previous generations, and that's changing the game for giving, and for the charities that depend on it.

Scott Harrison's group, Charity: Water, is a prime example. Harrison's story starts in New York's hottest nightclubs, promoting the proverbial "models and bottles."

"At 28 years old, I realized my legacy was going to be just that. Here lies a guy who got people wasted," Harrison says.

So he changed his story. Harrison volunteered to spend the next two years in West Africa. What he found when he first got to Liberia was a drinking water crisis. He watched 7-year-olds drink regularly from chocolate-colored swamps — water, he says, that he wouldn't let his dog drink.

Most childhood diseases in the developing countries he visited could be traced to unsafe drinking water, so everything changed for Harrison. He got inspired to start raising money for clean water when he returned to the states, but his friends were wary.

"They all said, 'I don't trust charities. I don't give. I believe these charities are just these black holes. I don't even know how much money would actually go to the people who I'm trying to help,' " Harrison recalls.

So his one cause became two: He started Charity: Water to dig wells to bring clean drinking water to the nearly 800 million people without access to it around the globe. But he also wanted to set an example with the way the organization did its work.

"We're also really trying to reinvent charity, reinvent the way people think about giving, the way that they give," he says.

“ That sense of 'I need to give out of obligation' — I don't know that it's going to be around 20 years from now.

- Amy Webb

Demographic change is a huge reason for rethinking this. With around 80 million millennials coming of age, knowing how they spend their cash on causes is going to be critical for nonprofits. And their spending patterns aren't the same as their parents.

"Our culture is changing pretty dramatically," says Amy Webb, who forecasts digital trends for nonprofit and for-profit companies. "That sense of 'I need to give out of obligation' — I don't know that it's going to be around 20 years from now."

One piece of advice she gives on appealing to younger donors? Don't even ask them to "donate," because younger donors want to feel more invested in a cause. Choose a different word, with a different connotation: investment.

"It may seem something simple. It's just semantics: donation vs. investment. But I think to a millennial, who's grown up in a very different world, one that's more participatory because of the digital tools that we have, to them they want to feel like they're making an investment. Not just that they're investing their capital, but they're investing emotionally," Webb says.

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The Manhattan-based headquarters of Charity: Water. Elise Hu/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Elise Hu/NPR

The Manhattan-based headquarters of Charity: Water.

Elise Hu/NPR

And there's the tech part. She says any philanthropy without a smart digital platform — not just for donations but for empowering a community of givers — will be left behind.

Which brings us back to Charity: Water. Designers spend most their time finding ways to save their donors time, trimming as much lag time or obstacles to giving online as possible.

"There are a lot of people who are more willing to be generous with 20, 30 and 50 dollars, but their time is actually worth something. And the thought of pulling out their credit card and fighting through a two- and three- and four-page form is just too much," Harrison says.

On its site, giving is as simple as a couple of clicks. And Charity: Water's big tactical success, the approach for which it's earned notoriety, is getting young people to call on their own real-life social networks for help. It's the same approach that made this summer's Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS so unavoidable.

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"We're always taking selfies, we're sharing details about our lives. So why not do a little social narcissism for a good cause," Beth Kanter, author of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, told NPR in August.

Charity: Water stokes that by building campaigns around birthdays.

"One of the big ideas that the millennials embraced," Harrison says, "is this idea that we sorta stumbled into, when we asked people to give up their birthday for clean water. So I went around asking everyone I knew to give $32 for my 32nd birthday."

Soon, tech CEOs were raising tens of thousands of dollars per campaign by giving up their birthdays for water. This spring, NFL safety Kam Chancellor joined in. And the generation that comes after millennials — the children today — are getting into it, too.

"We had 7-year-olds in Austin, Texas, go door to door asking for $7 donations. We had 16-year-olds in Indiana asking for $16 donations," Harrison says.

The group's focus on social networks and simple design means 4 million more people, in 22 countries, now have access to clean drinking water.

But you don't have to take our word for it. Charity: Water's latest tech improvement is putting remote sensors on wells — so donors can see just how much water flows from what they helped build.

"We think this is just going to be game changing," Harrison says.

charity water

scott harrison

giving

Millennials

charity