[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 2167-2177]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Georgia). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. 
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thought that there was only 
one speech given in the last century that would become very famous in 
the few years just ahead of us, and that was the speech given on the 
8th day of March in San Antonio, Texas, by M. King Hubbert in 1956, but 
I just discovered a few days ago a speech which I think may become just 
about as famous.
  This was a speech that was given by the father of the nuclear 
submarine, Hyman Rickover, and he gave this speech in May 1957. So soon 
we will reach the 50th anniversary of this very famous speech by the 
father of the nuclear submarine.
  I just wanted to start by reading a couple of things from this speech 
that he gave. He gave the speech, by the way, to a group of physicians 
at a banquet of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State 
Medical Association in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 14, 1957.
  The title of the speech had nothing to do with medicine. The title of 
the speech is ``Energy Resources and Our Future.'' He says early on in 
the speech that, ``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of 
living. Thus the enormous fossil fuel energy which we in this country 
control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of 
mechanical slaves.'' Now, this was 50 years ago and can you imagine 
what has happened since then?
  ``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts continuously,'' that is, 
24/7. Of course, you need to sleep and eat and so forth, and so when 
you are working, you are working at more than 35 watts, but 35 watts 
continuously, which is one-twentieth of horsepower.
  ``Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with 
energy equivalent to that of 244 men.'' So

[[Page 2168]]

all of those things that we enjoy in our life, the automobile, the 
refrigerator, the microwave, all of these represent the equivalent of 
244 men in place of just the one that can turn these things out with 
the aid of this fossil fuel energy.
  Then he goes on to say, ``While at least 2,000 men push his 
automobile along the road,'' probably more than that for an SUV, ``and 
his family is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each 
locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men; 
each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly,'' he says, ``the humblest 
American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the 
richest nobles, and lives better than most ancient kings. In 
retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred 
years just gone by,'' that was the 100 years up to 1957, it is now 150 
years, ``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.''
  Others have commented on this incredible energy density in these 
fossil fuels by noting that just one barrel of oil contains the energy 
equivalent of 12 men working all year. If you look at the cost of that 
at the pump, that is roughly $10 a year. For $10 a year, you can have a 
servant work for you all year long. You may have some trouble getting 
your mind around that, but imagine how far that gallon of gasoline or 
diesel fuel, still cheaper, by the way, than water in the grocery 
store, how far that takes your SUV or your car or your truck and how 
long it would take you to pull your SUV or truck or car the distance 
that that gallon of diesel fuel or gasoline takes it. I drive a Prius. 
We get about 50 miles per gallon. How long would it take me to pull my 
Prius 50 miles?
  Let me give another little example to help you understand the 
incredible energy density in these fossil fuels and how much they have 
improved our life and how totally dependent we are on them.
  If a big man goes outside and is working really hard all day long 
doing physical work, I can get more work out of an electric motor for 
less than 25 cents' worth of electricity. That may be humbling to 
recognize that in terms of fossil fuel energy, our muscle power is 
worth less than 25 cents a day, but understanding that helps us to 
understand how totally dependent we have come to be on these fossil 
fuels.
  A little later in his speech, Hyman Rickover said, ``I think no 
further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy 
resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a 
technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. 
What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to 
be supplied by fossil fuels?'' And then this answer, 50 years ago, when 
we were king of oil, biggest producers, biggest consumers in the world, 
I think biggest exporters in the world, ``The answer is,'' he says, 
``in the long run, none.''
  There is no assurance that we can have these fossil fuels for the 
long term. ``The earth is finite,'' he says. ``Fossil fuels are not 
renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all 
earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply 
by careful cultivation,'' when we got our energy from the soil. ``We 
cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more 
evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are nonrenewable resources 
threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from 
scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild 
exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy,'' he 
says, ``500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present 
volume.''
  Another quote from his talk. ``In the 8,000 years from the beginning 
of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population will have grown from 
10 million to 4 billion.'' Actually, he missed it a little. It is now 7 
billion, as you will see in a moment, ``with 90 percent of that growth 
taking place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years. It 
took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to accomplish the first 
doubling of population, 100 years for the last doubling, but the next 
doubling will require only 50 years.'' As a matter of fact, it required 
less than that, because today we have about nearly 7 billion people in 
the world rather than just 4 billion.
  Another quote from his talk. ``High-energy consumption has always 
been a prerequisite of political power . . . Ultimately,'' he says, 
``the Nation which controls the largest energy resources will become 
dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we 
act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for 
necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for 
our own country.''
  Have we done that? In no way have we done that.
  Another quote from his talk. ``I suggest that this is a good time to 
think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants, those who 
will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age . . . We might even, if we wanted, 
give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal 
consumption,'' this was 50 years ago, ``by cutting fuel and metal 
consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for 
the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world 
without fossil fuels.''
  I just came back about 3 weeks ago from a trip to China. Nine Members 
of Congress went. We met with a number of the top officials in China, 
and I was pleased and surprised. We went to talk about energy 
primarily, and they began every discussion of energy by talking about 
post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago understood that one day we would 
be talking about post-oil. The Chinese now are talking about post-oil. 
By the way, they do not mean that there is not going to be any more oil 
in the world. Nobody is telling you that.
  What they mean by post-oil is that it will be post the peak 
production of oil, where we can no longer produce additional oil so we 
are going to have to make do with what we have. As a matter of fact, 
each year after that there would be less and less oil available for us 
to use.
  The next chart. There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted 
fossil fuel reserves, and this is part of the quote I just made. They 
were created by solar energy a very long time ago and took eons to grow 
into their present volume. In the face of the basic factor, fossil fuel 
reserves are finite. The exact length of time these reserves will last 
is important in only one respect. The longer they last, the more time 
do we have to invent ways of living off renewable substitute energy 
sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can 
expect from such a shift. This is 50 years ago.

                              {time}  1700

  He is saying the same thing that our President said last night in the 
State of the Union message, that we should get busy with preparing for 
a transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
  Then I really love this quote. I am a father of 10, a grandfather of 
15 and a great-grandfather of two. ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in 
the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital 
sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of 
his inheritance.''
  Do you think, Mr. Speaker, that we have been using fossil fuel energy 
sparingly? I doubt that you would find very much concurrence for this 
anywhere in this country, and certainly worldwide. When you look from 
other places to this country and see this one person out of 22 using 25 
percent of all of the world's energy, you will have nobody over there 
saying we have used our energy sparingly. ``A selfish and irresponsible 
parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his 
offspring will fair.''
  I have characterized our relationship with energy as the equivalent 
of the pig who found the feed room door open and just went in and 
pigged out. That is what we have been doing. When our children and our 
grandchildren and great grandchildren look back in a world with 
diminishing fossil fuel availability, and, by the way, saddled with a 
huge debt that we are passing on to them, they may well ask themselves 
the question, how could they have done it?

[[Page 2169]]

  When we found this incredible wealth under the ground, that provides 
the equivalent of 33 servants, 100,000 people pushing your train, 244 
people pushing your automobile down the road, when we found this 
incredible fuel fossil fuel energy under the ground, why didn't 
somebody stop and ask the question, what should we do with this to 
provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That 
clearly is not what we did.
  What we did was to extract this oil from the ground as quickly as 
possible; to use it as prolifically as possible; to develop a lifestyle 
ever more and more dependent on fossil fuel; to develop an agriculture 
where one person out of 50 feeds the rest and much of the world; where 
the man sits on top of a 150 horsepower tractor and uses fertilizers 
produced from natural gas to grow his crops.
  The next chart here is a really interesting one. Suppose the size of 
the countries in the world was determined by how much oil they have. 
This is the world according to oil. If you look at our military might, 
if you look at our economic might, we are really big. But when you look 
at the oil we have, here we are, itty-bitty United States. Notice 
Alaska is pretty big here, a fair amount of oil up there.
  But look at Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait. Little Kuwait. Look at a map 
and see how little Kuwait is. But look at the oil they have. This is 
what the world would like look like if the countries were sized 
relative to the amount of oil they have.
  Look at Russia there. People talk about the huge reserves in Russia. 
It is dwarfed by Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and even little Kuwait has more 
oil than Russia. Look at Venezuela down here. It is probably twice the 
size of the United States in terms of what they have in oil. Look at 
some of the African countries here. Nigeria, what, way bigger than the 
United States. Libya, bigger than the United States in terms of the 
amount of oil that they have.
  The next chart, this was predicted by that second famous speech that 
I mentioned that was given in the last century, and that is the talk 
given by M. King Hubbard on the 8th day of March, 1956, to a group of 
petroleum engineers in San Antonio, Texas, and a lot of other oilmen 
there. This was the time, you remember, when the United States was the 
biggest oil producer in the world, the biggest consumer of oil in the 
world, and I think maybe the biggest exporter of oil in the world.
  What M. King Hubbard told hose assembled people was that in just 
about 14 years, the United States would reach its maximum oil 
production and then, no matter what we did, the oil production would 
drop off after that.
  How did he know that that was going to happen? He had watched the 
exploitation and exhaustion of individual oil fields, and each one of 
them followed what we call a bell curve. That is a curve that goes ever 
up and up and reaches a peak and comes down the other side. You get a 
bell curve if you weigh people and see how much they weigh. There will 
be a few very light people, a few very heavy people. Most of them are 
in the middle. How tall people are, how many mice are in a litter of 
mice and so forth, most of the things in a natural world follow a bell 
curve. He predicted that we would follow a bell curve.
  When he noticed each one of these little fields, he saw when they 
reached a peak, they had pumped about half of all the oil they would 
ever pump. So he theorized if he knew how many little fields we had, 
little bell curves, and how many more we were likely to find, and if 
you added all those up, you could predict when we would reach the peak. 
So he did that, and he said that was going to be about 1970.
  And the Shell Oil Company, for whom he worked, said, please don't do 
that and embarrass us. You make a fool of yourself and embarrass 
yourself. He gave the talk and for a while he was kind of a humorous 
person. But then he became an icon in his own time, because right on 
schedule in 1970, we peaked in oil production.
  Now, this curve that I have here is one that is taken from the 
Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and I use this especially because 
you may hear from these people, they are called CERA, and they are 
predicting that there is lots more oil out there, we are going to find 
a whole lot more oil, not to worry. They use this to make the point 
that M. King Hubbard really didn't know what he was talking about and 
he really was wrong.
  They are saying that because the total U.S. production, and this, by 
the way, is with Prudhoe Bay and the Gulf of Mexico in, if you put only 
the lower 48 in, which is what M. King Hubbard was predicting, this was 
the actual on the green, and his prediction was the yellow here, and 
they said, gee, he was off. That doesn't look like it is very far off 
to me.
  Let's look at another chart which shows the same data. This shows two 
peaks here. The smooth green symbols here are the prediction of M. King 
Hubbard. The more ragged ones are the actual data points.
  You see right on schedule we peaked in 1970. We have been going down 
ever since. The red one is the former Soviet Union, FSU, and they kind 
of fell apart and didn't reach their potential. They are having a 
second little peak now and are going down.
  Do you remember from that chart of the world according to oil, they 
were maybe twice the United States? They aren't using anywhere near as 
much oil as we are, so now they are a major exporter. But they don't 
have all that much oil. As you can see here, the area under this curve 
represents how much oil they have, the area under this curve represents 
how much oil we have, and you can see the general relationships there.
  The next chart shows where our oil has come from. M. King Hubbard 
predicted only Texas and the rest of the United States, and that was 
his prediction and that was the actual data points. Then we found oil 
in Alaska and we learned to make oil from gas, non-gas liquids, natural 
gas liquids.
  This is the oil that we found in the Gulf of Mexico. You remember 
those fabled discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico? I remember them. We 
were home free. They were going to solve our oil problem for the 
foreseeable future. You can hardly see their contributions as we slid 
down the other side of Hubbard's peak.
  The next chart shows another depiction of peak oil, and this is one 
again from Energy Information Area, the EIA, quoted in the Hirsch 
Report. Let me spend a moment on what the Hirsch Report is.
  Our government has paid for two big studies of the fossil fuel energy 
situation. One of those was financed by the Department of Energy, done 
by SAIC, a very prestigious, large scientific organization, and Dr. 
Hirsch was the principal investigator there, so it is frequently 
referred to as the Hirsch Report. He here is reporting this information 
that came from our Energy Information Agency, which is a part of our 
Department of Energy.
  Here they are using some very interesting statistical terms, but they 
aren't true statistical term. I have had the EIA people come in and 
talk with them at the office about this, because I had some trouble 
understanding it.
  A couple of Congresses ago, I was the Chair of the Energy 
Subcommittee on Science and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the 
problem. So we had experts come in from around the world to tell us how 
much oil they thought remained in the world and how much more oil they 
thought we would find.
  I was quite surprised at the relative unanimity. They all were pretty 
close to 1,000 gigabarrels, maybe 970 to 1,040. Now, I use gigabarrels 
instead of million barrels and that is because the British billion is 
not our billion. The British billion is a million million. Our billion 
is a thousand million. But everybody understands a giga. So when you 
hear ``giga'' used, you know that is an international term. A thousand 
gigabarrels, which is 1 trillion barrels of oil, that is what remains.
  You remember at the peak of that curve, M. King Hubbard said about 
half of the oil would be used, so that means we have used about 1,000 
gigabarrels, and here they have the total of 2,248 gigabarrels. So 
about half of that has been used and about half of that remains.

[[Page 2170]]

  Now, they are using some very interesting techniques here, and they 
did some simulations, and I have no idea what the inputs were into the 
simulations, but they have convinced themselves that there is a high 
probability that we will find twice as much more oil as all the oil 
that now exists out there unpumped. So they said gee, halfway between 
what they say is the low probability and the high probability is the 
mean, which is the expected yield. So they believe we are going to get, 
this is a total of 3,000, so we are going to get another 2,000 
gigabarrels of oil. That is this red curve here.
  What they show is that even if that is true, Mr. Speaker, even if 
that is true, and I think the odds that that is true are very small, 
but even if that is true, that pushes the peak out only to 2016.
  What the dotted curve here shows is what you might be able to do with 
enhanced oil recovery, pump live steam down there and a bunch of 
solvents and push water in there, and maybe you can get it quicker. But 
if you get it quicker look what happens to the other side. Just a 
demonstration that you can't pump what is not there, and the total 
volume you will pump is the area under this curve. If you get it 
sooner, you won't have it later. Notice how quickly that curve drops 
down.
  If they don't find the additional enormous quantities of oil that 
they believe they will find, then we are about here and the peak will 
occur at about 2005 or so, which is where M. King Hubbard said that the 
peak would occur. By the way, he predicted it in 1969, a year before 
the United States peak. He was confident enough of his analytical 
techniques that he predicted the world would be peaking about now.
  The next chart is another chart from CERA, and it depicts some of the 
same information on that chart a little differently.
  This is the curve, the peaking curve, if there is a roughly 2 
trillion, 2000 gigabarrels. You will notice slightly different figures 
between these, because there is not unanimity on how much is there, but 
it is roughly 1.9 to 2.2. This is in the same ballpark. If that is the 
case, then peaking according to them is going to occur fairly soon 
according to them.
  But if you find another 1 trillion barrels of oil, that pushes 
peaking out only to what, 2035, something like that. That is not all 
that far off. And the probability we are going to find that oil is 
very, very small, as we will see in a few moments.
  Now he has piled on top of that, CERA has piled on top of that, an 
enormous amount of oil that they think we are going to get from 
unconventional oil sources. This is like the Canadian tar sands and 
like our oil shales out in the West.
  We may or may not get enormous quantities of oil from that. There are 
potentially huge quantities there. There is more potential oil in the 
tar sands of Canada than all of the known reserves in the world. That 
big map we saw, there is more potential oil there.
  But there is also an incredible amount of potential energy in the 
tides, but we have not been very successful in harnessing that energy 
from the tides. Canada is now getting about 1 million barrels of oil 
with a shovel that lifts 100 tons and dumps it into a truck that hauls 
400 tons. They then haul it and cook it with enormous amounts of energy 
from natural gas, which is stranded. By ``stranded'' we mean there are 
not very many people there to use it.

                              {time}  1715

  Since it is expensive to ship, why, it is cheaper there, and so they 
are producing that oil at about 18 to 25 dollars a barrel. I understand 
they are getting 55, today, dollars a barrel for it. That is a pretty 
good dollar profit ratio. But they know this is not sustainable for 
several reasons. One is they are using water faster than they can 
supply it. The energy from the gas will run out. They are thinking of 
building a nuclear power plant, and they have a huge, relatively huge, 
lake there of tailing water they call it. It is really very toxic 
water, so there are huge environmental impacts of it. And furthermore, 
this vein of the tar sands will shortly duck under an overlay so that 
they will no longer be able to deadlift it or surface mine it, whatever 
you want to call it. They will now have to develop it in situ, and they 
have not even experimented with how they are going to do that.
  The next chart has a little simple schematic. And by the way, you can 
make this peak look very hard and sharp or spread it out by the scale 
you use on the abscissa and the ordinate. Here we have spread it out 
because we have an expanded scale on the abscissa and a restricted one 
on the ordinate here. But that yellow area represents the additional 
oil we would like to have, because growth is exponential at about 2 
percent. And if we reach the peak, I think we are about here. We are 
now having some problems with meeting the demand, which is why oil is 
going from 50 to 60 to 78 at the highest a few months ago.
  And by the way, they showed undulating plateau in that last big chart 
I showed, and I agree with them. May I put that chart up for just 
another moment? That is a very interesting one. I want to focus on 
this. They are saying that there is no such thing as peak oil. And this 
is what they show. Tell me that is not a peak. This is from their 
publication. And it is an article where they are kind of pooh-poohing 
the idea of peak oil, and they are showing peak oil. For every 
potential level of oil that they think will be there, they are showing 
a peak. They are just showing it, and I agree with them that it is 
going to be undulating plateau. It is not going to be a smooth thing. 
The curve just under it shows it very smooth because we have simplified 
it. And what it shows is, and, by the way, the 2 percent growth, it 
doubles in 35 years. This point is doubled this point, so that is a 35-
year period there. So you see it takes a while to get through that 
peak.
  The next chart is one that if you had only one chart to look at and 
talk about relative to oil, this would be the chart. And you could 
spend a very long time looking at this chart and talking about it. The 
big bars here show the discoveries. And you notice that there was a 
rash of discoveries way back in the 1940s, 16 years before M. King 
Hubbert made his prediction. By the way, he made that prediction here 
in 1956, about here. Wow. Look how much more we discovered after that. 
And he was able to predict how much more we would discover and 
correctly predict when we would reach peak oil production.
  The solid line here shows the consumption. And obviously up until 
about 1980 we were always finding more than we were consuming. Now, 
remember, underneath this curve represents all that we have used. So we 
have used this much of what we found. But this much of what we found 
was left over that we could use in the future. So ever since 1980, now, 
we have been finding less and less oil and using more and more oil. 
Notice a little stuttering here in the 1970s. The Arab oil embargo. The 
oil price spike hikes, the big push for efficiency in our country. Your 
air conditioner now uses about half the energy that it used in 1970.
  Well, what will the future look like? The folks who put this chart 
together believe that peaking will occur at about 2010. Who knows? We 
really won't know until after it has peaked and you look back and see 
the data. It could be peaking now. It could be 5 years from now, it 
could be 10 years from now. But both of these are very, very short term 
in terms of what we need to do to address this.
  What will the future look like? They have predicted that future oil 
discoveries will follow, and of course they won't be smooth like that, 
but on the average they will follow the curve like that. And you can't 
pump what you haven't found. And if you were to put a smooth curve over 
this discovery curve, and you have an area under that which will equal 
the amount which will be the total amount of oil you have found, that 
is adding up all these little bars here, and the area under that 
discovery curve cannot be different than the area ultimately under the 
consumption curve. So you can make this curve go, within limits, any 
way you want, within reason. You can use vigorous enhanced oil recovery 
techniques

[[Page 2171]]

and get it out quicker, and you can maybe delay the peak a little bit. 
But you can't pump what is not there. And so it ultimately is going to 
fall off much, much faster. This is a very interesting chart. We could 
spend a lot of time looking at this. But what you cannot do is pump oil 
that you have not found.
  Now, what CERA is predicting is that you are going to find as much 
more oil as all of the reserves that now exist. The reserves that 
exist, and I calculated this, I think that this area pretty much fills 
in this. So the reserve that exists is this. They think we are going to 
find that much more oil? What do you think when you look at this chart? 
Do you think it is reasonable that they are going to find that much 
more oil?
  Mr. Speaker, this is a chart which kind of smooths out those big 
different bar graphs that we saw before. Now, as early finds in the 19, 
here, they have a little spike here and a big spike here. You can 
smooth that whole thing out, of course. But this is roughly a graph 
drawn through the bar graphs on that previous chart. And now we are 
down here at this point in time. And the Energy Information Agency, 
using those three numbers that we used before, the 95 percent, which 
they say is low, the 50 percent, which they say is the mean, and the 5 
percent, which they say is high, and they think that because the 50 
percentile is halfway between the 95 and the 5, that that is the most 
likely thing. Well, anybody in statistics knows that if it is 95 
percent more probable, it is more probable than 50 percent probable. 
That is pretty simple to understand, I think.
  Well, the red dots here indicate what the actual data have been. Now, 
their projection was that this discovery line would follow the green. 
Clearly it has been following what you would expect it to follow, the 
95 percent probability.
  The next chart is an interesting one, and Hyman Rickover referred to 
this. He referred to 8,000 years of recorded history. And he, at that 
time, noted that they were about 100 years into the age of oil. Today 
we are about 150 years into the age of oil. And ultimately, out of 
8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a blip in 
the history of man. It will occupy maybe 300 years from when we first 
found it and started to really exploit it until it becomes so difficult 
to get and so expensive that we won't be getting much of it again.
  This is a little chart that shows the development of the industrial 
revolution. It started with wood. Brown, here. The hills of New England 
were denuded carrying charcoal to England to make steel there. Come up 
to Frederick County where I live, and we have a little historic site up 
there, Catoctin Furnace. We denuded the hills up there where Camp David 
is now to make charcoal to make steel at Catoctin Furnace.
  Then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here, it is a 
quadrillion Btus, how much energy we were producing. Look how much more 
energy we were able to produce with coal. The coal locomotive. Lots 
more energy in coal than there is in wood, so we could do a lot more 
things with.
  The industrial revolution was kind of stuttering when we discovered 
gas and oil, and then look what happened. And if you could superimpose 
on this a chart of the population growth in the world, it would look 
just about like this. Remember Hyman Rickover said that it was going to 
grow from that half billion back here to 4 billion? It really grew to 
almost 7 billion, which is where we are today. So that population curve 
with appropriate dimensions would just about follow exactly the energy 
use curve. This is an incredible amount of energy we are using that 
obviously could not continue.
  A really interesting statistic. Up until the Carter years, every 
decade, the world used as much oil as it had used in all of previous 
history. That is this curve. Now, in the 1970s you see what happened. 
We really had a shock, and we stopped and took some sense of where we 
were. And we drove smaller cars, and we developed more efficient 
refrigerators and air conditioners, and we reduced energy. We had a big 
recession, a big worldwide recession as a result of that. So energy use 
went down.
  But now look. It is climbing back up again. Three hundred years, the 
age of oil, it will be but a blip in the history of man.
  Again, I ask, what will future people think when they look back at 
this and say, why didn't we stop when we found this incredible wealth 
under the ground to ask what could we do with this to get the most good 
for the most people for the longer time? That is obviously the question 
that almost nobody asked. What we asked was, how can we use more and 
more of this to improve more and more our quality of life, as if it 
were forever. Obviously, as Hyman Rickover said 50 years ago, it can't 
be forever.
  The next chart is a really interesting one. As I mentioned, we are 1 
person out of 22, and we use a fourth of the world's energy. Energy use 
is on the abscissa here, and how good you feel about life is on the 
ordinate. And notice that we are way out there. We feel pretty good 
about life, but not as good as many others. We are just here. There are 
all of those who feel better about life. And we clearly are using the 
most energy. Only little Switzerland comes close to us in using energy.
  Interesting chart here. If you could draw a line through this, you 
would see that with little energy it is really tough to feel good about 
life. But when you come up here to what, a fifth of the amount of 
energy we use, a lot of people, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, China, they 
feel about as good about life as we do. If you look at the countries in 
Europe here, you will find that many of those use about half the energy 
we use, and they feel just as good about life as we feel.
  What this points out is that it is possible to live a quality life 
using much less energy than we use, and all you have to do is to look 
at these countries that use very much less energy than we do and feel 
just about as good, and some of them better. All of these above my arm 
here feel better about life than we feel about life. And they are using 
less energy than we are using.
  Well, what now? Well, obviously, we must transition. Geology will 
assure it, as anticipated by Hyman Rickover in that very fascinating 
speech to the physicians 50 years ago. We will transition ultimately as 
we go through the age of oil from the fossil fuels to renewables. We 
have available to us some finite sources, and I mentioned the tar 
sands, and we have about as large a potential supply of energy in our 
West called the oil shales, a little bit different. They aren't really 
oil. You put a solvent in, they won't flow out. But if you cook them, 
they will turn to oil, and you can then refine it. And there is 
potentially a huge amount of energy there. But can we get it?
  The Shell Oil Company has gone there doing some experimentation. And 
a year or so ago I was a speaker out in Denver, Colorado, at the 
American chapter of the Peak Oil Association. And the investigator for 
the Shell Oil Company that conducted this little experiment was there 
and reported on it. And what he said in his report there was very 
different than the stories you read in the papers. The stories in the 
papers said, you know, don't worry about energy. We have this huge 
potential amount there, and we have found a way to get it. That is not 
what he said.
  Let me tell you what they did. What they did was, and I am not sure 
of the reasoning because I hear two reasons for it. One was that there 
was an aquifer there they didn't want to contaminate. And the other had 
something to do with the mechanics of sequestering the oil. But they 
drilled a series of holes around the periphery, and then they froze the 
ground, and they froze it for a year so that now they had, in effect, a 
frozen vessel.
  The second argument was that they did that to contain the heat. That 
is a little hard for me to understand how a frozen vessel contains 
heat, but that is the argument that I was given. Then at the end of the 
year they went in and drilled a second set of holes, and then they 
pumped heat down there, and they cooked it for a year. And then they 
drilled a third set of holes, and then when they got to the bottom of 
those holes, they turned it sideways, which

[[Page 2172]]

they can do now, and drilled it horizontally. So the oil that was 
loosened by cooking it in the second set of wells they drilled now 
flowed down through the shale and was picked up by those horizontal 
channels from the third set of wells they drilled. And they pumped for 
several years a really meaningful amount of oil from that. So there is 
potentially a lot of oil there.

                              {time}  1730

  But what the investigator told us was that it would be, I think he 
said, something like 2013 before they could even decide whether it was 
economically feasible to develop those fields.
  So there is huge potential there. There are also huge challenges 
there. But it is energy. We will develop some of it. But it is finite. 
It will not last forever either. And there is going to be enormous cost 
in developing it, both economic cost and environmental costs.
  Now, you can trade the environmental cost for economic cost. If you 
do not mind polluting the environment you can develop it for less 
money. At the moment, most of us believe we should not be polluting our 
environment so we spend the money necessary that we do not, although 
they are not really doing that in Alberta, Canada. They are using up 
precious water, and they have a relatively huge lake of tailing water 
as they call it, which is really pretty toxic stuff.
  Coal. We and China have a lot of coal. China was suffocating 
themselves with coal smoke. They closed down some of their coal-fired 
power plants. People will tell you that we have 500 years of coal. That 
is just not true. It is true that we have 250 years of coal at current 
use rates. We will put the next chart up in front of this one.
  Be very careful when people tell you we have so much of something at 
current use rates. When Albert Einstein was asked what the next big 
force in the universe was going to be after nuclear energy, which had 
such a dramatic increase over any kind of energy we had before that, 
his answer was, compound interest, he said was the most powerful force 
in the universe.
  And there is a really interesting talk given, he is not my relative, 
I wish he were so I had some of his genes, but Dr. Albert Bartlett, 
Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado has given a talk on 
energy I think some 1,600 times. Just do Albert Bartlett and energy and 
you will pull it up. It was the most fascinating 1-hour talk I ever 
listened to, and I am sure you will agree.
  But he says that the biggest failure of our industrialized society is 
our inability to understand the exponential function. You see this coal 
that will last us 250 years at current use rates if we increase its use 
only 2 percent, and we will have to do better than that. By the way, 
coal has been in the past a big source of gas and oil.
  Hitler ran his whole country and his whole military on it. And when 
we were limiting the opportunities for trade in South Africa, they were 
making gas and oil from coal. When I was a little boy, it was coal oil. 
And I thought it was all one word, coal oil that replaced whale oil in 
the lamps. I kept calling it coal oil a long time after they were 
getting it from kerosene rather than coal.
  But if you increase it just 2 percent, that shrinks its usable 
duration to about 85 years. But obviously for many of our uses you 
cannot use coal, you have got to use it as a gas or liquid. If you use 
some of the energy from the coal to make it into a gas or liquid you 
have now shrunk it to 50 years.
  But the reality is that it does not matter who owns the resource 
today, it is all traded in a global marketplace. And the guy who has 
the dollars buys the oil or the gas. And so whether we like it or not, 
there is no alternative that we are going to share our oil with the 
world. Because, you see if we use oil from our coal, that just frees up 
some oil from pumping it out of the ground that somebody else can use.
  So the effect is as if we were sharing our oil with the world so that 
50 years from now, we use a fourth, you remember the rest of the world 
uses the other three-fourths, that means that now shrinks to 12\1/2\ 
years. So that marvelous 200 years of coal at no growth for us now 
shrinks to 50 years when we increase its growth to only 2 percent, and 
use some of it, the energy, to convert it to gas and oil. And then we 
realize that we are going to have to share this, no alternative, unless 
we have a big enough Navy to say, it is ours and we can keep you from 
coming and getting it. We are going to have to share it with the world 
so now it lasts 12\1/2\ years.
  Let's go back to this chart. Going just for a few moments about 
nuclear. If you were in France, you would get about 80, 85 percent of 
all of your electricity from nuclear. We get in our country 20 percent 
of our electricity from nuclear, that is a lot. When you go home 
tonight look out your window, and every fifth business and every fifth 
house would be dark if it were not for nuclear energy.
  We have never had an accident. We have never had a fatality. Three 
Mile Island, it behaved just as it was supposed to behave. I lived 
within the radiation zone of that. And we contained that. That was not 
a disaster. It was just a demonstration that we were building them 
right, because when we had the meltdown at Three Mile Island we 
contained that. There was little effect from it.
  There are three different ways you can get nuclear energy. One is the 
way we get it from lightwater reactors. That uses fissionable uranium. 
There is a finite supply of fissionable uranium in the world.
  And I get wildly divergent estimates of how long it will last, 15 
years, 100 years. Again, this is at that current use rate. So you have 
to ask the person, what rate of use are you assuming when you make this 
projection? This reminds me, by the way, that we need an honest broker 
to help us agree on the facts.
  It is hard to have a rational discussion when you cannot agree on the 
facts. And I think the right candidate to do this is the National 
Academy of Sciences. Enormously respected, very competent. And I have 
talked with them, and they would be interested in doing this. We just 
need to fund them so they can do it.
  We need to have a rational discussion of this. And we cannot have 
that when there is big differences of opinion as to what the facts are.
  Well, ultimately one day sooner or later, there will not be enough 
fissionable uranium to go to lightwater reactors. So then we are going 
to have to go to the second type of fission reactors, that is the 
breeder reactor. France already uses those. The only ones we had we 
used for making weapons. We now do not do that anymore. They have 
problems.
  The big advantage, of course, is they are what the name implies, they 
are breeder reactors, they make more fuel that they use. The problems 
are that they have a byproduct that we must store away for a quarter of 
a million years. I cannot even imagine that. A quarter of a million 
years.
  I think there is a challenge here. Anything that is so hot that has 
no much energy in it that I cannot get near it for a quarter of a 
million years, don't you think ought to have enough energy there that 
we can do something meaningful with it?
  Now we have been profligate in our use of energy, all energy 
including nuclear energy. And we use only a tiny fraction of the 
nuclear energy in the isotope when we say it is no longer good for our 
reactors, so we put some more in. But I think there is a big challenge 
there. I think there is a potential source of energy from these 
byproducts. If it is so hot, such high radiation that I cannot get near 
it for a quarter of a million years, it ought to have some usable 
energy in it. We have very creative, innovative people. I think that we 
can find that if we realize that we need to.
  The third type of nuclear energy is the type that is represented in 
the sun and every other star out there in the Milky Way. The sun is a 
nuclear reactor. And it is fusion reaction, it is like our hydrogen 
bomb. By the way, it will one day run down too. But that will be in 
millions of years in the future, so in our context we do not need to 
think about that.
  We have been spending money on fusion, about $250 million a year. We 
are

[[Page 2173]]

always about 30 years away from a solution. I gladly would vote for the 
money that we spend there. I think that we have got to do that. If we 
can conquer the enormous engineering challenges then we are home free. 
That is the only energy source out there that can take the place of 
fossil fuels. But I think the odds of doing that are about the same as 
the odds of winning the lottery. And if you are satisfied that you are 
going to meet your financial obligations by playing the lottery, then 
you are probably satisfied that we are going to meet our energy needs 
with nuclear fusion. Please do not bet the ranch on it.
  Well, once we have gone through these finite sources and we have done 
what we can with nuclear, I have friends that have been devoutly 
antinuclear, but they are very bright people. And when they are looking 
at a very probable alternative, that is, shivering in the dark, not 
enough energy to keep warm, not enough energy to run the lights, 
nuclear does not look all that bad to many people who before were not 
enthusiastic about it when the alternative might be shivering in the 
dark.
  Well, then we have renewable resources. And as Dr. Rickover said, by 
and by, we will have transitioned to these renewable resources. There 
will come a day when the fossil fuels are so scarce, so hard to get, so 
expensive, that we are getting little or none of them. And we will 
have, by that time, have transitioned, like it or not, we will have 
transitioned to these renewables. What are they? There is the sun. As I 
look at what the sun does, I am not surprised that the ancients 
worshiped the sun.
  Almost all of the energy that we have been talking about here came 
from the sun. It was the sun that permitted the organic materials to 
grow in those subtropical seas that existed. The Earth, a long time 
ago, was much warmer than the Earth today. They were up there in the 
North Shore of Alaska, and in the North Sea off England producing these 
organic materials that settled to the bottom, infiltrated by runoff 
from the adjacent hills, probably. This is all theory. As good an 
explanation as I have heard as to how it got there. Tectonic moved. It 
opened up. It sank down. Near enough, proper pressure, proper heat, 
enough time, and by and by it becomes gas and oil, with a dome over so 
the gas cannot escape.
  Then you have a good field. You get gas from it. You get oil from it. 
And if you drill into the oil and seal off the gas, the gas pressure 
above is putting pressure on the oil, so you have a gusher, it just 
pushes it up the pipe. So you see that this is the way it was formed. 
We have an explanation for what we find when we drill out there.
  So all of the gas and oil came from the sun. When I was a little boy, 
we had a coal furnace. And we had run a mined coal from dust to big 
lumps, and some lumps so big that you could not put them in the 
furnace. And there was a sledgehammer by the wall, and we would break 
the lumps so we could get them in the furnace.
  I remember as a little kid the feelings that I had, and I still get a 
chill when I think of this. I would break open the lump of that coal 
and there would be a fern leaf. You did not have to tell me where the 
coal came from. I knew where the coal came from. It came from ancient 
vegetation that grew and fell over and was covered up and ultimately 
became coal. We can see this process in the making in England, of the 
bogs there, it is not coal yet but you can take it out and burn it.
  Wind. The wind blows because the sun shines. It is differential 
heating of the Earth that makes the wind blow.
  Here is one that is not due to the sun. This is geothermal. True 
geothermal, not tying your heat pump to groundwater or earth, which 
makes a whole lot more sense than trying to coal the winter air and 
heat the summer air, which is what your radiational air conditioner and 
heat system, heat pump does.
  But this is tapping into the heat from the molten core of the Earth. 
You go to Iceland, there is not a single chimney because they have a 
lot of geothermal, that is where they get their energy.
  Ocean energy. Except for the tides, all of ocean energy is really a 
second-hand sun energy. It is the sun which differentially heats the 
waters. It is the sun which produces ultimately the Gulf Stream and the 
Japanese current, which carries so much warmth to northern Europe. Look 
at England on a globe. You will see that England is about mid-Canada, 
that is certainly not their climate, that is because of what the sun 
does in heating that water and setting up this conveyor belt.
  The tides, of course, are produced by the Moon. There a lot of 
potential energy there. And then a very popular potential source of 
energy today, the President talked about it last night in his State of 
the Union, energy sources from agriculture.
  Hyman Rickover in his speech here talked about that. And he said that 
ultimately, if you are getting energy from agriculture, you are going 
to be competing with one of two things, either you compete with food, 
and today corn is over $4 a barrel, it is ordinarily about $2 a barrel 
so that our dairy farmers and chicken farmers and hog farmers are now 
having a hard time making ends meet, because corn has about doubled in 
price, and that is because using corn for ethanol is competing with 
corn for food.
  If we all became vegetarians, by the way, we would all have a whole 
lot more corn to use for energy. Soy diesel, biodiesel, these are all 
attractive sources. The second potential source of energy from 
agriculture was biomass. And the President talked a lot about that last 
night.
  But Hyman Rickover very astutely noted that today's crops grow 
because last year's crops died and are fertilizing them. He noted that 
you will need to return the biomass to the soils if you are going to 
keep productivity going.

                              {time}  1745

  Now, we can get some energy from ethanol, and we can get some energy 
from biomass by burning it or fermenting it, but there are limits as to 
how much we can get there. And the incredible amount of energy that we 
use from fossil fuels presents a huge challenge to try to find enough 
disparate sources of energy to add up to equal the energy that we get 
there.
  Waste energy, that is an interesting one, and we ought to be doing 
more of that. It is a very good idea. But remember, that big pile of 
waste that you see at the city dump is the result of profligate use of 
energy. In an energy-deficient world, we are not going to have those 
huge piles of waste. That is really secondhand use of fossil fuels 
because that is how the waste got there.
  Hydrogen. Hydrogen is not an energy source. We must make hydrogen. 
The second law of thermodynamics says you will always get less energy 
out of hydrogen than it took to make it. So why are we talking about 
hydrogen? For two reasons. One, when you burn it, it is really clean. 
You get water.
  Secondly, if we ever get an economically feasible fuel cell, hydrogen 
is a great candidate for the fuel cell. But minus a good fuel cell, 
there will not be a viable hydrogen economy because you will always get 
less energy out of hydrogen than it took to make it. If you are simply 
burning the hydrogen, you could have gotten more energy by burning the 
gas from which you got the electricity which you used to split the 
water to get hydrogen.
  So that is why there is such a focus on fuel cells, because it opens 
up the promise of a really clean fuel with at least twice the 
efficiency of the reciprocating engine.
  The next chart, and I would like to talk about this one in terms of a 
young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big 
inheritance, and they have now established a life-style. Hyman Rickover 
described that life-style with 33 servants, or the equivalent. They 
have established a life-style where 85 percent of the money they spend 
comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent comes 
from their income. It is not going to last long enough for them to 
retire. They have to do something. They have

[[Page 2174]]

to spend less money or make more money.
  That is exactly where we are energywise. Eighty-five percent of our 
energy comes from fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, natural gas. Only 15 
percent comes from other sources, and a bit more than half of that 
comes from nuclear. That could grow, and probably should grow. And that 
leaves 7 percent, and this is in 2000. We are a little better today 
than we were in 2000, but the challenges are huge. Even with 30 percent 
growth, when you are going from 0.07 percent, in 2000 that is the 
contribution that solar made to our energy supply. It is minuscule. And 
the noise level.
  We are doing much better today, and it is growing rapidly, but it is 
still a tiny fraction of the energy we use.
  Notice wood here, more than a third of all of the renewables. That is 
the timber industry and the paper industry wisely using a by-product.
  Waste to energy we talked about.
  Wind is just another way to use sun energy.
  Conventional hydro, we have maxed out on that. We can maybe get some 
microhydro. We have about maxed out on that.
  The next chart, briefly, what do we need to do. We need a program, if 
we are going to have a relatively smooth ride, and we have waited too 
long to address this problem, but we need a program that has the total 
commitment of World War II, that has the technology focus of putting a 
man on the moon, and has the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
  We need a vigorous conservation time to buy time, free up some 
energy, buy some time, use it wisely, invest it in those things that 
will do the most good for the most people. We could become a major 
exporter. We have a very innovative society. We have a farm bill that 
is challenging our farmers. And if a farm can't be energy independent, 
we have big problems because that is where a lot of energy could be 
produced.
  This is challenging our farm people to develop a farm where they 
produce twice as much energy as they use so there is some for the city 
person.
  Mr. Speaker, www.bartlett.house.gov will get you access to all of 
this material.
  Mr. Speaker, I submit into the Congressional Record the entire speech 
``Energy Resources and Our Future,'' by Admiral Hyman Rickover, Chief, 
Naval Reactors Branch, Division of Reactor Development, U.S. Atomic 
Energy Commission and Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Ships for 
Nuclear Propulsion, Navy Department, prepared for delivery at a Banquet 
of the Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical 
Association, St. Paul, Minnesota on May 14, 1957.

                    Energy Resources and Our Future

       I am honored to be here tonight, though it is no easy 
     thing, I assure you, for a layman to face up to an audience 
     of physicians. A single one of you, sitting behind his desk, 
     can be quite formidable.
       My speech has no medical connotations. This may be a relief 
     to you after the solid professional fare you have been 
     absorbing. I should like to discuss a matter which will, I 
     hope, be of interest to you as responsible citizens: the 
     significance of energy resources in the shaping of our 
     future.
       We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil 
     Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the 
     world's energy; water power accounts for only 1%; and the 
     labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6%. This is a 
     startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850--only a 
     century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world's 
     energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal, 
     oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel 
     Age has been burned up in the last 55 years.
       These fuels have been known to man for more than 3,000 
     years. In parts of China, coal was used for domestic heating 
     and cooking, and natural gas for lighting as early as 1000 
     B.C. The Babylonians burned asphalt a thousand years earlier. 
     But these early uses were sporadic and of no economic 
     significance. Fossil fuels did not become a major source of 
     energy until machines running on coal, gas, or oil were 
     invented. Wood, for example, was the most important fuel 
     until 1880 when it was replaced by coal; coal, in turn, has 
     only recently been surpassed by oil in this country.
       Once in full swing, fossil fuel consumption has accelerated 
     at phenomenal rates. All the fossil fuels used before 1900 
     would not last five years at today's rates of consumption.
       Nowhere are these rates higher and growing faster than in 
     the United States. Our country, with only 6% of the world's 
     population, uses one third of the world's total energy input; 
     this proportion would be even greater except that we use 
     energy more efficiently than other countries. Each American 
     has at his disposal, each year, energy equivalent to that 
     obtainable from eight tons of coal. This is six times the 
     world's per capita energy consumption. Though not quite so 
     spectacular, corresponding figures for other highly 
     industrialized countries also show above average consumption 
     figures. The United Kingdom, for example, uses more than 
     three times as much energy as the world average.
       With high energy consumption goes a high standard of 
     living. Thus the enormous fossil energy which we in this 
     country control feeds machines which make each of us master 
     of an army of mechanical slaves. Man's muscle power is rated 
     at 35 watts continuously, or one-twentieth horsepower. 
     Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker 
     with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 
     2,000 men push his automobile along the road, and his family 
     is supplied with 33 faithful household helpers. Each 
     locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent to that of 
     100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the 
     humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than 
     were once owned by the richest nobles, and lives better than 
     most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, 
     revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by 
     may well seem like a Golden Age.
       Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon 
     our ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs 
     of our growing population. Before I go into this question, 
     let me review briefly the role of energy resources in the 
     rise and fall of civilizations.
       Possession of surplus energy is, of course, a requisite for 
     any kind of civilization, for if man possesses merely the 
     energy of his own muscles, he must expend all his strength--
     mental and physical--to obtain the bare necessities of life.
       Surplus energy provides the material foundation for 
     civilized living--a comfortable and tasteful home instead of 
     a bare shelter; attractive clothing instead of mere covering 
     to keep warm; appetizing food instead of anything that 
     suffices to appease hunger. It provides the freedom from toil 
     without which there can be no art, music, literature, or 
     learning. There is no need to belabor the point. What lifted 
     man--one of the weaker mammals--above the animal world was 
     that he could devise, with his brain, ways to increase the 
     energy at his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to 
     cultivate his mind and spirit. Where man must rely solely on 
     the energy of his own body, he can sustain only the most 
     meager existence.
       Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from 
     his discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With 
     these energy resources he was able to build a pastoral 
     culture. To move upward to an agricultural civilization he 
     needed more energy. In the past this was found in the labor 
     of dependent members of large patriarchal families, augmented 
     by slaves obtained through purchase or as war booty. There 
     are some backward communities which to this day depend on 
     this type of energy.
       Slave labor was necessary for the city-states and the 
     empires of antiquity; they frequently had slave populations 
     larger than their free citizenry. As long as slaves were 
     abundant and no moral censure attached to their ownership, 
     incentives to search for alternative sources of energy were 
     lacking; this may well have been the single most important 
     reason why engineering advanced very little in ancient times.
       A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in 
     the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to 
     a more primitive way of life. For example, exhaustion of wood 
     fuel is believed to have been the primary reason for the fall 
     of the Mayan Civilization on this continent and of the 
     decline of once flourishing civilizations in Asia. India and 
     China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle East. 
     Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a 
     further disastrous effect: lacking plant cover, soil washed 
     away, and with soil erosion the nutritional base was reduced 
     as well.
       Another cause of declining civilization comes with pressure 
     of population on available land. A point is reached where the 
     land can no longer support both the people and their domestic 
     animals. Horses and mules disappear first. Finally even the 
     versatile water buffalo is displaced by man who is two and 
     one half times as efficient an energy converter as are draft 
     animals. It must always be remembered that while domestic 
     animals and agricultural machines increase productivity per 
     man, maximum productivity per acre is achieved only by 
     intensive manual cultivation.
       It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of 
     Asia, who today seldom go to sleep with their hunger 
     completely satisfied, were once far more civilized and lived 
     much better than the people of the West. And not so very long 
     ago, either. It was the stories brought back by Marco Polo of 
     the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's 
     eyes to the riches of the East, and induced adventurous 
     sailors to brave the high seas in their small vessels 
     searching for a direct route to the fabulous Orient. The

[[Page 2175]]

     ``wealth of the Indies'' is a phrase still used, but whatever 
     wealth may be there it certainly is not evident in the life 
     of the people today.
       Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of 
     her growing populations and sank into such poverty that in 
     many places man has become again the primary source of 
     energy, since other energy converters have become too 
     expensive. This must be obvious to the most casual observer. 
     What this means is quite simply a reversion to a more 
     primitive stage of civilization with all that it implies for 
     human dignity and happiness.
       Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker 
     strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a 
     cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an 
     endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market 
     in Java--the slender women bent under mountainous loads 
     heaped on their heads--anyone who has seen statistics 
     translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of 
     man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy 
     source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human 
     beings are so degraded.
       Where slavery represented a major source of energy, its 
     abolition had the immediate effect of reducing energy 
     consumption. Thus when this time-honored institution came 
     under moral censure by Christianity, civilization declined 
     until other sources of energy could be found. Slavery is 
     incompatible with Christian belief in the worth of the 
     humblest individual as a child of God. As Christianity spread 
     through the Roman Empire and masters freed their slaves--in 
     obedience to the teaching of the Church--the energy base of 
     Roman civilization crumbled. This, some historians believe, 
     may have been a major factor in the decline of Rome and the 
     temporary reversion to a more primitive way of life during 
     the Dark Ages. Slavery gradually disappeared throughout the 
     Western world, except in its milder form of serfdom. That it 
     was revived a thousand years later merely shows man's ability 
     to stifle his conscience-- at least for a while--when his 
     economic needs are great. Eventually, even the needs of 
     overseas plantation economies did not suffice to keep alive a 
     practice so deeply repugnant to Western man's deepest 
     convictions.
       It may well be that it was unwillingness to depend on slave 
     labor for their energy needs which turned the minds of 
     medieval Europeans to search for alternate sources of energy, 
     thus sparking the Power Revolution of the Middle Ages which, 
     in turn, paved the way for the Industrial Revolution of the 
     19th Century. When slavery disappeared in the West 
     engineering advanced. Men began to harness the power of 
     nature by utilizing water and wind as energy sources. The 
     sailing ship, in particular, which replaced the slave-driven 
     galley of antiquity, was vastly improved by medieval 
     shipbuilders and became the first machine enabling man to 
     control large amounts of inanimate energy.
       The next important high-energy converter used by Europeans 
     was gunpowder--an energy source far superior to the muscular 
     strength of the strongest bowman or lancer. With ships that 
     could navigate the high seas and arms that could outfire any 
     hand weapon, Europe was now powerful enough to preempt for 
     herself the vast empty areas of the Western Hemisphere into 
     which she poured her surplus populations to build new nations 
     of European stock. With these ships and arms she also gained 
     political control over populous areas in Africa and Asia from 
     which she drew the raw materials needed to speed her 
     industrialization, thus complementing her naval and military 
     dominance with economic and commercial supremacy.
       When a low-energy society comes in contact with a high-
     energy society, the advantage always lies with the latter. 
     The Europeans not only achieved standards of living vastly 
     higher than those of the rest of the world, but they did this 
     while their population was growing at rates far surpassing 
     those of other peoples. In fact, they doubled their share of 
     total world population in the short span of three centuries. 
     From one sixth in 1650, the people of European stock 
     increased to almost one third of total world population by 
     1950.
       Meanwhile much of the rest of the world did not even keep 
     energy sources in balance with population growth. Per capita 
     energy consumption actually diminished in large areas. It is 
     this difference in energy consumption which has resulted in 
     an ever-widening gap between the one-third minority who live 
     in high-energy countries and the two-thirds majority who live 
     in low-energy areas.
       These so-called underdeveloped countries are now finding it 
     far more difficult to catch up with the fortunate minority 
     than it was for Europe to initiate transition from low-energy 
     to high-energy consumption. For one thing, their ratio of 
     land to people is much less favorable; for another, they have 
     no outlet for surplus populations to ease the transition 
     since all the empty spaces have already been taken over by 
     people of European stock.
       Almost all of today's low-energy countries have a 
     population density so great that it perpetuates dependence on 
     intensive manual agriculture which alone can yield barely 
     enough food for their people. They do not have enough 
     acreage, per capita, to justify using domestic animals or 
     farm machinery, although better seeds, better soil 
     management, and better hand tools could bring some 
     improvement. A very large part of their working population 
     must nevertheless remain on the land, and this limits the 
     amount of surplus energy that can be produced. Most of these 
     countries must choose between using this small energy surplus 
     to raise their very low standard of living or postpone 
     present rewards for the sake of future gain by investing the 
     surplus in new industries. The choice is difficult because 
     there is no guarantee that today's denial may not prove to 
     have been in vain. This is so because of the rapidity with 
     which public health measures have reduced mortality rates, 
     resulting in population growth as high or even higher than 
     that of the high-energy nations. Theirs is a bitter choice; 
     it accounts for much of their anti-Western feeling and may 
     well portend a prolonged period of world instability.
       How closely energy consumption is related to standards of 
     living may be illustrated by the example of India. Despite 
     intelligent and sustained efforts made since independence, 
     India's per capita income is still only 20 cents daily; her 
     infant mortality is four times ours; and the life expectance 
     of her people is less than one half that of the 
     industrialized countries of the West. These are ultimate 
     consequences of India's very low energy consumption: one-
     fourteenth of world average; one-eightieth of ours.
       Ominous, too, is the fact that while world food production 
     increased 9% in the six years from 1945-51, world population 
     increased by 12%. Not only is world population increasing 
     faster than world food production, but unfortunately, 
     increases in food production tend to occur in the already 
     well-fed, high-energy countries rather than in the 
     undernourished, low-energy countries where food is most 
     lacking.
       I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the 
     significance of energy resources for our own future. Our 
     civilization rests upon a technological base which requires 
     enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we 
     then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied 
     by fossil fuels: The answer is--in the long run--none.
       The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In 
     this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier 
     civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply 
     by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned 
     is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. 
     Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with 
     ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from 
     scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do 
     to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created 
     by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow 
     to their present volume.
       In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are 
     finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is 
     important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more 
     time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or 
     substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the 
     vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.
       Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and 
     responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to 
     pass on to his children as much as possible of his 
     inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander 
     it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring 
     will fare.
       Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy 
     statistics; far-seeing industrialists who know that energy is 
     the principal factor which must enter into all planning for 
     the future; responsible governments who realize that the 
     well-being of their citizens and the political power of their 
     countries depend on adequate energy supplies--all these have 
     begun to be concerned about energy resources. In this 
     country, especially, many studies have been made in the last 
     few years, seeking to discover accurate information on 
     fossil-fuel reserves and foreseeable fuel needs.
       Statistics involving the human factor are, of course, never 
     exact. The size of usable reserves depends on the ability of 
     engineers to improve the efficiency of fuel extraction and 
     use. It also depends on discovery of new methods to obtain 
     energy from inferior resources at costs which can be borne 
     without unduly depressing the standard of living. Estimates 
     of future needs, in turn, rely heavily on population figures 
     which must always allow for a large element of uncertainty, 
     particularly as man reaches a point where he is more and more 
     able to control his own way of life.
       Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an 
     astonishing degree. In part this is because the results 
     differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded or if in 
     calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is 
     not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not 
     enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required 
     to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly 
     approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals 
     will force us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most 
     cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal.
       But the most significant distinction between optimistic and 
     pessimistic fuel reserve

[[Page 2176]]

     statistics is that the optimists generally speak of the 
     immediate future--the next twenty-five years or so--while the 
     pessimists think in terms of a century from now. A century or 
     even two is a short span in the history of a great people. It 
     seems sensible to me to take a long view, even if this 
     involves facing unpleasant facts.
       For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best 
     estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over 
     twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time 
     between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of 
     living and population growth rates are taken into account. 
     Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There 
     will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so 
     difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to 
     economically intolerable heights, so that it would then 
     become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to 
     lower standards of living drastically.
       For more than one hundred years we have stoked ever growing 
     numbers of machines with coal; for fifty years we have pumped 
     gas and oil into our factories, cars, trucks, tractors, 
     ships, planes, and homes without giving a thought to the 
     future. Occasionally the voice of a Cassandra has been raised 
     only to be quickly silenced when a lucky discovery revised 
     estimates of our oil reserves upward, or a new coalfield was 
     found in some remote spot. Fewer such lucky discoveries can 
     be expected in the future, especially in industrialized 
     countries where extensive mapping of resources has been done. 
     Yet the popularizers of scientific news would have us believe 
     that there is no cause for anxiety, that reserves will last 
     thousands of years, and that before they run out science will 
     have produced miracles. Our past history and security have 
     given us the sentimental belief that the things we fear will 
     never really happen--that everything turns out right in the 
     end. But, prudent men will reject these tranquilizers and 
     prefer to face the facts so that they can plan intelligently 
     for the needs of their posterity.
       Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we 
     cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of 
     living will of a certainty continue through the next century 
     and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to 
     rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, 
     and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy 
     from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel 
     synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel 
     certain that when economically recoverable fossil fuels are 
     gone science will have learned how to maintain a high 
     standard of living on renewable energy sources?
       I believe it would be wise to assume that the principal 
     renewable fuel sources which we can expect to tap before 
     fossil reserves run out will supply only 7 to 15% of future 
     energy needs. The five most important of these renewable 
     sources are wood fuel, farm wastes, wind, water power, and 
     solar heat.
       Wood fuel and farm wastes are dubious as substitutes 
     because of growing food requirements to be anticipated. Land 
     is more likely to be used for food production than for tree 
     crops; farm wastes may be more urgently needed to fertilize 
     the soil than to fuel machines.
       Wind and water power can furnish only a very small 
     percentage of our energy needs. Moreover, as with solar 
     energy, expensive structures would be required, making use of 
     land and metals which will also be in short supply. Nor would 
     anything we know today justify putting too much reliance on 
     solar energy though it will probably prove feasible for home 
     heating in favorable localities and for cooking in hot 
     countries which lack wood, such as India.
       More promising is the outlook for nuclear fuels. These are 
     not, properly speaking, renewable energy sources, at least 
     not in the present state of technology, but their capacity to 
     ``breed'' and the very high energy output from small 
     quantities of fissionable material, as well as the fact that 
     such materials are relatively abundant, do seem to put 
     nuclear fuels into a separate category from exhaustible 
     fossil fuels. The disposal of radioactive wastes from nuclear 
     power plants is, however, a problem which must be solved 
     before there can be any widespread use of nuclear power.
       Another limit in the use of nuclear power is that we do not 
     know today how to employ it otherwise than in large units to 
     produce electricity or to supply heating. Because of its 
     inherent characteristics, nuclear fuel cannot be used 
     directly in small machines, such as cars, trucks, or 
     tractors. It is doubtful that it could in the foreseeable 
     future furnish economical fuel for civilian airplanes or 
     ships, except very large ones. Rather than nuclear 
     locomotives, it might prove advantageous to move trains by 
     electricity produced in nuclear central stations. We are only 
     at the beginning of nuclear technology, so it is difficult to 
     predict what we may expect.
       Transportation--the lifeblood of all technically advanced 
     civilizations--seems to be assured, once we have borne the 
     initial high cost of electrifying railroads and replacing 
     buses with streetcars or interurban electric trains. But, 
     unless science can perform the miracle of synthesizing 
     automobile fuel from some energy source as yet unknown or 
     unless trolley wires power electric automobiles on all 
     streets and highways, it will be wise to face up to the 
     possibility of the ultimate disappearance of automobiles, 
     trucks, buses, and tractors. Before all the oil is gone and 
     hydrogenation of coal for synthetic liquid fuels has come to 
     an end, the cost of automotive fuel may have risen to a point 
     where private cars will be too expensive to run and public 
     transportation again becomes a profitable business.
       Today the automobile is the most uneconomical user of 
     energy. Its efficiency is 5 percent compared with 23 percent 
     for the Diesel-electric railway. It is the most ravenous 
     devourer of fossil fuels, accounting for over half of the 
     total oil consumption in this country. And the oil we use in 
     the United States in one year took nature about 14 million 
     years to create. Curiously, the automobile, which is the 
     greatest single cause of the rapid exhaustion of oil 
     reserves, may eventually be the first fuel consumer to 
     suffer. Reduction in automotive use would necessitate an 
     extraordinarily costly reorganization of the pattern of 
     living in industrialized nations, particularly in the United 
     States. It would seem prudent to bear this in mind in future 
     planning of cities and industrial locations.
       Our present known reserves of fissionable materials are 
     many times as large as our net economically recoverable 
     reserves of coal. A point will be reached before this century 
     is over when fossil fuel costs will have risen high enough to 
     make nuclear fuels economically competitive. Before that time 
     comes we shall have to make great efforts to raise our entire 
     body of engineering and scientific knowledge to a higher 
     plateau. We must also induce many more young Americans to 
     become metallurgical and nuclear engineers. Else we shall not 
     have the knowledge or the people to build and run the nuclear 
     power plants which ultimately may have to furnish the major 
     part of our energy needs. If we start to plan now, we may be 
     able to achieve the requisite level of scientific and 
     engineering knowledge before our fossil fuel reserves give 
     out, but the margin of safety is not large. This is also 
     based on the assumption that atomic war can be avoided and 
     that population growth will not exceed that now calculated by 
     demographic experts.
       War, of course, cancels all man's expectations. Even 
     growing world tension just short of war could have far-
     reaching effects. In this country it might, on the one hand, 
     lead to greater conservation of domestic fuels, to increased 
     oil imports, and to an acceleration in scientific research 
     which might turn up unexpected new energy sources. On the 
     other hand, the resulting armaments race would deplete metal 
     reserves more rapidly, hastening the day when inferior metals 
     must be utilized with consequent greater expenditure of 
     energy. Underdeveloped nations with fossil fuel deposits 
     might be coerced into withholding them from the free world or 
     may themselves decide to retain them for their own future 
     use. The effect on Europe, which depends on coal and oil 
     imports, would be disastrous and we would have to share our 
     own supplies or lose our allies.
       Barring atomic war or unexpected changes in the population 
     curve, we can count on an increase in world population from 
     two and one half billion today to four billion in the year 
     2000; six to eight billion by 2050. The United States is 
     expected to quadruple its population during the 20th 
     Century--from 75 million in 1900 to 300 million in 2000--and 
     to reach at least 375 million in 2050. This would almost 
     exactly equal India's present population which she supports 
     on just a little under half of our land area.
       It is an awesome thing to contemplate a graph of world 
     population growth from prehistoric times--tens of thousands 
     of years ago--to the day after tomorrow--let us say the year 
     2000 AD. If we visualize the population curve as a road which 
     starts at sea level and rises in proportion as world 
     population increases, we should see it stretching endlessly, 
     almost level, for 99 percent of the time that man has 
     inhabited the earth. In 6000 B.C., when recorded history 
     begins, the road is running at a height of about 70 feet 
     above sea level, which corresponds to a population of 10 
     million. Seven thousand years later--in 1000 AD.--the road 
     has reached an elevation of 1,600 feet; the gradation now 
     becomes steeper, and 600 years later the road is 2,900 feet 
     high. During the short span of the next 400 years--from 1600 
     to 2000--it suddenly turns sharply upward at an almost 
     perpendicular inclination and goes straight up to an 
     elevation of 29,000 feet--the height of Mt. Everest, the 
     world's tallest mountain.
       In the 8,000 years from the beginning of history to the 
     year 2000 AD. world population will have grown from 10 
     million to 4 billion, with 90 percent of that growth taking 
     place during the last 5 percent of that period, in 400 years. 
     It took the first 3,000 years of recorded history to 
     accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for 
     the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 
     years. Calculations give us the astonishing estimate that one 
     out of every 20 human beings born into this world is alive 
     today.
       The rapidity of population growth has not given us enough 
     time to readjust our thinking. Not much more than a century 
     ago our country--the very spot on which I now stand

[[Page 2177]]

     was a wilderness in which a pioneer could find complete 
     freedom from men and from government. If things became too 
     crowded--if he saw his neighbor's chimney smoke--he could, 
     and often did, pack up and move west. We began life in 1776 
     as a nation of less than four million people--spread over a 
     vast continent--with seemingly inexhaustible riches of nature 
     all about. We conserved what was scarce--human labor--and 
     squandered what seemed abundant--natural resources--and we 
     are still doing the same today.
       Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic 
     in the American character has now been buried under cities, 
     factories and suburban developments where each picture window 
     looks out on nothing more inspiring than the neighbor's back 
     yard with the smoke of his fire in the wire basket clearly 
     visible.
       Life in crowded communities cannot be the same as life on 
     the frontier. We are no longer free, as was the pioneer--to 
     work for our own immediate needs regardless of the future. We 
     are no longer as independent of men and of government as were 
     Americans two or three generations ago. An ever larger share 
     of what we earn must go to solve problems caused by crowded 
     living--bigger governments; bigger city, state, and federal 
     budgets to pay for more public services. Merely to supply us 
     with enough water and to carry away our waste products 
     becomes more difficult and expansive daily. More laws and law 
     enforcement agencies are needed to regulate human relations 
     in urban industrial communities and on crowded highways than 
     in the America of Thomas Jefferson.
       Certainly no one likes taxes, but we must become reconciled 
     to larger taxes in the larger America of tomorrow.
       I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about 
     our responsibilities to our descendents--those who will ring 
     out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as 
     parents and as citizens, is to give America's youngsters the 
     best possible education. We need the best teachers and enough 
     of them to prepare our young people for a future immeasurably 
     more complex than the present, and calling for ever larger 
     numbers of competent and highly trained men and women. This 
     means that we must not delay building more schools, colleges, 
     and playgrounds. It means that we must reconcile ourselves to 
     continuing higher taxes to build up and maintain at decent 
     salaries a greatly enlarged corps of much better trained 
     teachers, even at the cost of denying ourselves such 
     momentary pleasures as buying a bigger new car, or a TV set, 
     or household gadget. We should find--I believe--that these 
     small self-denials would be far more than offset by the 
     benefits they would buy for tomorrow's America. We might 
     even--if we wanted--give a break to these youngsters by 
     cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so 
     as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments 
     which eventually must be made in a world without fossil 
     fuels.
       One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-
     energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of 
     political power. The tendency is for political power to be 
     concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. 
     Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy 
     resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the 
     problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to 
     conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future 
     changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own 
     country.

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