Roscoe Bartlett: “on March 24 of this year, 30 of the prominent leading individuals in our country wrote a letter to the President about…”

“on March 24 of this year, 30 of the prominent leading individuals in our country wrote a letter to the President about what they considered a very critical national security issue. The letter was signed by Robert McFarlane, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Boyden Gray, Timothy Wirth, and 30 other people, including 12 retired generals and admirals, five Secretaries of Defense Departments, and several retired Senators and Representatives. {time} 2340 To understand their concern, we need to go back about 6 decades to a sequence of events that brought us to a situation that very much concerned them. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we use 25 percent of all of the oil used in the world, and we import two- thirds of that. We have less than 5 percent of the world's population. How did we get here? The next chart shows us that, and this goes back the 6 decades that I mentioned to a Shell oil scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert who, in the 1940s and 1950s watched the exploration, the pumping, and the exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each of the fields followed a bell curve. It rose to a maximum, and then it fell off as they pumped out the remaining oil. He noticed that at the peak of that curve, that about half of the oil had been consumed from the average field. It is logical that the second half of the oil would be harder to get and take more time, and it would not flow as quickly.…”