Roscoe Bartlett: “last evening we were here just about this time talking about this same subject, the subject we have been talking about…”

“last evening we were here just about this time talking about this same subject, the subject we have been talking about for the last hour. We had been discussing the phenomenon known as peak oil. That is the term given to a prediction that a geologist made, M. King Hubbert, working for the Shell Oil Company in 1956. He gave a speech in San Antonio, Texas, which I believe within a decade will be recognized as the most significant, most important speech given in the last century. What he predicted was that the United States, which at that time was king of oil, we were producing more oil than any other country. We were using more oil than any other country, and we were exporting more oil than any other country. M. King Hubbert had the audacity in San Antonio, Texas, in 1956 to predict that in just a bit less than a decade-and-a-half, by about 1970, he said that the United States would reach its maximum oil production, and after that, inevitably, no matter what we did, oil production would tail off. That prediction came true.”