050504 　「石油ピーク」について語る　〜米国のRoscoe Barlett下院議員〜　石井吉徳氏のコメント


石井吉徳氏から次のようなメールをいただきました。米国のRoscoe Barlett下院議員の
「石油ピーク」に関するインタビュー（４月２７日放送）ですが、”Ｏｉｌ　Ｐｅａｋ説”は米国でも
中々理解されないようで、それは何故かと問いかけているのが印象的です。　

同じ日にブッシュ大統領が行なったエネルギー政策演説(4/28付けのEEEメール３本参照)でも、
現在の石油危機について国民に十分啓蒙する努力を行なっていないと厳しく批判しています。　
とくに、中国、インド等の需要急増により石油価格が高騰しつつあるこの時期に世界的な石油
ピークが重なっていることがまさに問題である、という指摘は大変重要だと思われます。

原子力の役割についても少し触れています。

少々長文ですが、是非精読されることをお勧めします。　以下のサイトで音声でも聞くことが
出来ますので便利です。最初の画面でDownload (.mp3)をクリックして下さい。
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/397

以上、ご参考まで。
--KK

*******************************************************


----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Darley" <julian@postcarbon.org>
To: <y_ishii@qa2.so-net.ne.jp>
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 2:18 PM
Subject: U.S. Congress Representative Roscoe Bartlett speaks
about his Special Order "Peak Oil" speeches

Hi Yoshinori

I think you might be interested in a new interview on Global Public
Media: Maryland Representative Roscoe Bartlett speaks with David Room
about his special order speeches on peak oil.

Mr. Bartlett discusses the response to his speeches and his plans for
educating the public. He also discusses ramifications of oil peak, the
responsibilities of leadership, and the need for a change in how we
define success.

Streaming audio, MP3, and transcript available at:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/397

-------------------------------------------------------


Interview:
U.S. Congress Representative Roscoe Bartlett speaks
about his Special Order "Peak Oil" speeches

------

This is David Room for Global Public Media
speaking with Representative Roscoe Bartlett
on April 27, 2005. Tonight you're going to
deliver your third special order speech, how
did this come about?

Roscoe Bartlett: I have been concerned for a
number of years that there will be an end to
high-quality readily-available oil; that the
United States in particular and the world in
general ought to be posturing themselves for
a transition. This, of course, has been
largely totally ignored. It's not like we
shouldn't have seen it coming because, as you
know, M. King Hubbert predicted in '56 that
we would peak in about 1970 in the United
States. We did, right on target. So by 1980
we were ten years down that slope, producing
less oil than we had produced in 1970. By
1985 we absolutely knew that M. King Hubbert
was right about the United States. He
predicted that the world would peak in about
2000-that slipped a little because of the
Arab oil embargo, oil price spike hikes and a
worldwide recession (which he, of course,
couldn't have foreseen). So it's very
probable that the world is peaking in oil
about now. If the first time that you
recognize that we have peak oil is when it's
peaking, then it's too late for many things
that you should've been doing long before you've
reached peak oil. The world in general, and
the U.S in particular, has pretty much blown
25 years of time that we had, but no longer
have, for preparation for the necessary
transition.

DR: To what extent do you think oil peak
should be a driving force in U.S. policy?

RB: I think it needs to drive, essentially,
all of our policy. When you recognize the
reality, and that is that the demand for oil
is going to keep going up even more than it
has in the last few years. It's really quite
tragic that the peak oil occurs at about the
time that the third world and sleeping giants
like China and India are now awakening and
using more oil. Last year, China used perhaps
as much as 25% more oil. Of course, they won't
continue that forever. Their economy grew 10%
and who knows how long they will continue
that. It's reasonable to assume that if your
economy is growing 10% you're probably going
to need about a 10% boost in energy. A 10%
exponential growth doubles in seven years, it's
four times bigger in 14 years; it is eight
times bigger in 21 years. Very few people
understand exponential growth. Our growth has
been small-down around 2%--but that doubles
in 35 years and it's 4 times bigger in 70
years. Even that is meaningful. But 10%
growth is just incredible. Last year the
world grew 5%.

DR: You mentioned M. King Hubbert-many people
don't know that later in his life he said
that the science of energy and matter was
incompatible with our exponential growth
culture and, in particular, on debt-based
monetary system. Any comments on that?

RB: I just spent about a half an hour today,
maybe more than a half hour, talking with
Colin Campbell from England. He was
mentioning the banking economic implications
of peak oil. We have been really growing the
cash fund. Very much faster than it should
grow, and that's okay because it will be
covered by growth tomorrow. What the banks
do, of course, is loan out that money six or
seven times. You can't continue to do that if
you don't have continued growth. In a real
way, our financial system is pegged on
obligatory growth. If we don't have
obligatory growth, who knows what will happen
to this financial system. Last year, China
(as you probably know) was the second largest
importer of oil in the world. They have
surpassed Japan now, and they are gaining on
us. They have a billion-three hundred million
people. I just heard something that really
stunned me-in at least parts of Beijing, they
have banned bicycles. That used to be the
only way to get around in Beijing, but now
they have so many cars that bicycles are in
the way. You can use your own judgment as to
how rapidly you think oil demand is going to
increase in China.

DR: It's astounding. I had heard that they
have a new subdivision in China that's
actually named Orange County. Could you
explain, for our audience, how these special
order speeches work?

RB: After the close of business, there are
two kinds of opportunities for special order
speeches: one is five minutes and you can get
up and, as long as you're not obscene or
betraying your country or something, you can
talk about anything that you wish to talk
about. Following those, there are hours; you
can claim sixty minutes. Leadership on each
side has the first sixty minute hour, and
sometimes we get the leadership hour,
sometimes we don't. Following that anybody
can claim sixty minutes of special order.
This is very important particularly to the
minority. I'm fortunate, now I'm not in the
minority. It's very important for the
minority because they don't have any other
way of getting their message out. This was
really used by Republicans in all those many
years that the Democrats were in control. Now
it's very important to Democrats because it
gives them an opportunity to their message
out.they don't have the Presidency now and
they don't have the Committee Chairs. This
gives them an opportunity to get your message
out. So this is a unique way of communicating
with the public. On average, probably about a
million and a half people listen to this at
any one time. That audience varies, depending
on the time of day and so forth. When we do
this several times we're talking to, not the
same audience, but to somewhat different
audiences. In a former life, I was a teacher
and I understand that repetition is the soul
of learning. I don't mind repeating it. I try
to do it in a somewhat different way so that
it will be new and still stimulating to the
people that are hearing it. Even if the basic
message is the same message, you use
different charts and different facts and a
different approach.

DR: Right. What is the importance of putting
peak oil on the Congressional record?

RB: We're just trying to get the message out
that we probably have reached peak oil and if
we don't respond to that very quickly, the
transition to alternative energy sources is
going to be a very bumpy road, it's going to
be very painful. Who knows what kind of
geo-political dislocations as a result of
[peak oil]. When the world recognizes that
the oil supply is going to be slowly
diminishing year by year, and then in a few
years it will start falling down the other
side of Hubbert's peak and the decline in
production will be greater. But, all the
while, we have this exponential growth. If it's
only 2%, when you plot that curve, you see
how rapidly that gets going up. When we have
this increased demand and no supply to meet
it, what will the world do? What threat is
this to the monetary system? What threat is
this to international stability? How
aggressive are countries going to try to be
to make sure that they have adequate supplies
of oil? For instance, China is now scouring
the world for oil. They have contracts in
Canada, in Venezuela, in Columbia, in Brazil,
in Argentina, of course in the Middle East,
and in Russia. They're now negotiating a
major contract with Russia. In the far east
in Russia, they have a lot of oil and nobody
over there to use it. It's very hard to get
it out in ships because it is so cold. One of
the ways to get that oil out, like we get it
out of Prudhoe Bay, and that is through a
pipeline. They are now contemplating a
pipeline that would come to China, perhaps
down to the Korean peninsula. China
recognizes the dependency, the growing
dependency, that they are going to have on
oil. They are now not just securing contracts
for oil they are securing assets to help them
assure that that oil supply is going to be
available to them. And because they recognize
that we, with the only blue-water navy in the
world, have the ability, if we wish, to cut
off their oil supply, they are now
aggressively building (with our money, by the
way, because our trade deficit last year with
China was $162 billion), they are
aggressively building a blue-water navy so
that they can be more assured that oil is
going to be there for their growth.

DR: When you say 'blue-water navy' what
exactly do you mean?

RB: Blue-water navy is a navy that is capable
of moving around the globe to fight an
adversary anywhere. Many countries have
navies and most of their navies are designed
to protect them and they have no projection
capabilities, they couldn't come over here
and threaten us. We are today, now with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the only
country in the world with a blue-water navy.
We are the only country now that has nuclear
submarines patrolling the oceans. The
Russians still have some of the Soviet
capability, but they don't have the money.
They're getting more money because they
pegged their economy a couple of years ago on
$18 oil, then it was $25 and now it's $50. So
Russia is awash in cash. Of course, they have
very bright people, very good engineers. An
interesting statistic, by the way, we turn
out about 70,000 engineers a year; China
turns out about 200,000 engineers a year; and
India turns out 150,000 engineers a year. So,
in broad terms, India turns out twice as many
as we do and China three times as many as we
do. Of course, their ability to use these
engineers to develop products to sell or
products that will protect them for their
military is dependent on energy.

Since oil is the source of so much of what we
do, it is just incredible. It is not just
driving your car. Almost literally the food
you eat is oil-it made the tractor, it made
the tires, it fueled the tractor. Gas, which
always occurs with oil (it's kind of the
volatiles from oil when it was produced
trapped under a dome of rock), and natural
gas is now the only major source of nitrogen
fertilizer, which was largely responsible for
the 'green revolution' that permitted the
world's population to grow from less than a
million people to now 6.5 billion people. So
we face a real challenge-how will we feed the
world with the exhaustion of oil and gas? Gas
will be exhausted about when oil is
exhausted.

We have an enormous petrochemical industry,
for which oil and gas especially, are very
important feed stocks. We need to conserve
some of that for that petrochemical industry.
As a matter of fact, some people believe that
gas particularly, and oil somewhat, is too
good to burn. We live in a plastic world; the
herbicides for our crops; the fertilizer for
our crops; the herbicides made from oil, the
nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Every calorie of food you eat if you're in
this country, it's not quite that way in
other parts of the world, but every calorie
that you eat represents about 10 calories of
input from fossil fuel, from oil mainly. That
will need to change, by the way, and it doesn't
have to be that much. My father grew up in a
world in which there wasn't one BTU of oil
that went into producing the food that we
ate. Every bit of it came from grass that
grew on the pastures and fed the horses who
plowed the fields. We used very little
fertilizer, very little. We rotated crops so
that the crops put fertilizer into the
ground, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the
nodules on legumes, alfalfa and clover and so
forth put nitrogen in the soil. Then you
planted corn after that, just for one year
because that would pretty much exhaust the
nitrogen and you had to replenish the soil.
So you were back into grass and legumes to
replenish the nitrogen in the soil. There's
going to have to be a revolution in
agriculture as we face a world in which there
will no longer be unlimited supplies of oil
and natural gas.

DR: So you've been making the public and your
colleagues and Congress aware in these
special order speeches. What has been the
response?

RB: Very interesting is that most people have
never thought of it and shame on our
leadership that have not told the American
people. The American people are very
responsible, they are up to challenges. I don't
know why our leadership has never done that.
Well, I guess I do know why. Leadership in
industry has great difficulty seeing beyond
the next quarterly report-that's got to look
good or their stocks fall and they get funds
and the Board of Directors are very unhappy
with them. Politicians have great trouble
looking beyond the next election. The longest
cycle we have in our country is six years, so
I guess the people that had an opportunity to
sound the alarm were Senators because they
run for about the last two years and so they
can coast for the first four years. In the
House, we run every two years. The President
runs every four years. Telling the American
people that we've got to have some
belt-tightening in the future, life is not
going to go on quite like it's gone on now
because oil is not forever. This is not a
happy thing to tell people. I understand why
politicians don't like telling people this.
But leadership has a responsibility. When I
ran for office I promised my constituents, it's
now been 14 years ago when I started running,
that I would try to conduct myself so they
wouldn't come and spit on my grave because of
what I had done to their country. I think
that leadership has a responsibility to be
honest with people, and we try to do that.

I've had very interesting responses from
people. People who had never heard of this,
they tell me, one of the members told me,
"Gee, I had CSPAN on I couldn't tell you
anything anybody said about any of the
special orders but when you came on I really
tuned in and I remember everything you said."
One of the leaders of the conservatives here
told me that he tuned in to one on at 11:30
at night, don't know what he's doing up that
late, tuned in at 11:30 at night and was
spellbound by what I said. And he's one of
the conservative leaders. A three-star
General the other day out here in the hallway
here had never heard of peak oil. One of the
things that we're trying to do is just get
the word out-that there is such a thing as
peak oil; we probably are there now; if not
now then shortly.

The President the today said that the demand
for oil was exceeding the ability to supply
oil. That is kind of a layman's definition of
peak oil, that's where we are. The President
gave a pretty good speech today on oil. It
would be hard to reconcile his speech with
our energy bill we just passed because it
didn't come close to addressing the problems
that we face. The original bill had 72% of
the R&D money for renewables; the bill that
we voted on had 6%. I, of course, voted
against the bill. It didn't come close to
what the President wanted and it was a
million miles of what we need to address this
problem.

If we're going to get through this crisis
period without an awful lot of pain, we're
going to have to have the equivalent of a
Manhattan-like Project. We're going to have
to challenge, not just the American people,
but the people of the world because the first
thing we have to do is to have an enormously
conservation effort so that we buy time. As
the President said today, there's not enough
oil out there to meet the demands we have.
Honestly, we have got to reduce our demands
so that there's a bit more oil than we need
to meet our demands. Not only do we need to
meet the demands of our economies, we need to
have a surplus of energy to invest in the
renewables, an investment we have got to
make. If we just let the clock run down we
are going to face a very uncertain future
with very traumatic dislocations. We should've
started 25 years ago when we absolutely knew
that Hubbert was right. He was right about
the United States, why wouldn't he be right
about the world. So we have, in a very real
sense, blown 25 years. Now, we kind of have
to play catch up. It's going to be a lot more
difficult now than it would have been 25
years ago but it's going to be easier now
than it will be next year. Putting it off is
going to make it just more and more painful
and more expensive.

DR: Let me ask you this - what has been the
response from your colleagues in Congress?

RB: Those who listened are intrigued by it.
They'd like to know more about it. It's not
something that they even thought about
before. Most people have assumed, I have no
idea why you would assume that, that oil is
forever. It obviously is finite-it was put
there by little critters that grew a very
long time ago and the waters inundated and
carried sediments over them and with the
movement of the tectonic plates and so forth
why these areas sank and under pressure and
time and temperature, sometimes, this
material was converted into oil and gas. That's
not happening today. The closest we have to
that are the peat bogs of England, which if
we left them there for a long while they were
harvesting and then burning them.that's how
we got coal. But these processes occurred
over a very long time and we are obviously
exploiting them enormously faster than they
occurred and these fossil fuels are not being
replaced at anything like the rate we're
using them.

By the way, not everybody believes that oil
is a fossil fuel. There are some people, and
I know some people who would relegate them to
the Flat Earth Society, but there are some
people that believe that oil is a-biogenic in
origin. This is theoretically conceivable, I
understand. That it is produced down deep in
the bowels of the earth where there are the
appropriate elements there, the appropriate
temperature from the molten core of our earth
and reactions take place there that produce
oil. This is very popular in Russia and
Ukraine and there are people in this country
who believe in that. They say that since that's
the way that oil was produced, it exists in
places that we never thought to look and when
we look in those places we'll find more oil.
I hope that's correct, but any oil that we
find today is not going to do us any good for
at least five years, probably ten years.

We're at peak oil, and if there are any
discoveries it's simply going to stretch out
this peak. We'll have a little bit longer
with a pretty austere kind of existence to
prepare for an eventual downturn. By the way,
any technology which increases our abilities
to extract oil from these reserves simply
means that the peak will occur sooner (if it
hadn't occurred, I think it is here now).
What it means is that the down slope is going
to be even faster. So we had better hope we
don't find any new technology so that the oil
will last a little longer because the more
confident we get in extracting oil the sooner
it will be gone.

DR: What, in general, can people in the
United States do to get their Congressperson
to pay more attention to this issue?

RB: Just call their Congressman and ask them
if they know about peak oil. If they don't,
please log on to some site that talks about
peak oil. They can log on to our website. The
talks that we have given are there and I
think there are links to some other things.
There is a peak oil website. There are lots
of information out there. Until very
recently, until oil hit $50 a barrel, all the
people who were concerned about this (all,
there weren't all that many in the world) but
the people that were concerned about this
were almost relegated to the lunatic fringe
because we just keep pumping oil. We use 21
million barrels a day. The rest of the world
uses 63 million barrels a day. We're pumping
84 million barrels of oil a day and that rate
is probably not going to go on.

People with other interests note that we
probably have peaked out. I was at an early
breakfast here a few weeks ago with Peter
Brooks from the Heritage Foundation. He was
talking about economics, wasn't even talking
about oil or energy. He mentioned that all of
the countries pumping oil, with the possible
exception of Saudi Arabia, had peaked out in
their oil production. I was talking today
with the Chairman of our Transportation
Committee, Tom Huan. Tom noted that Saudi
Arabia today did not promise the president
they would produce more oil. Don said that
what they really told the president was 'Gee,
Mr. President, we're sorry. We can't pump
more oil.' He believes that they have peaked
out in oil. Now people note that we have
probably peaked out in oil but very few
people make the connection between that and
the consequences of peaking out-where we have
a somewhat constant but slowly diminishing
supply of oil with a big increase in demand
for oil. What will that do? It's driven oil
prices up to over $50 a barrel. But what will
it do in terms of geopolitical stabilities?
What will China do to assure that they have
oil? What will we do when we recognize? One
person in 22 in the world and we use a fourth
of the world's oil. We're not now loved
around the world, but when the world finally
wakes up to the fact that for all these years
we have been peaking oil like there was no
end to it. This one person in 22 has used 25%
of all the world's oil; denying other
countries the opportunity to do what we've
done and industrialize to improve the quality
of life for their people. Who knows the
geopolitical consequences of that
recognition?

That's one of the reasons that we need to be
a leader in this. We need to lead the way. We
need to have very vigorous conservation
measures. We need to have cafe standards that
produce smaller cars that get better mileage,
not bigger SUVs that get worse and worse
mileage every year. We need to be focusing on
mass transportation. If you're going to drive
in your car, you better have somebody else
with you. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't
mind a little fine for people that didn't
have another person with them, kind of a
patriotic contribution to the energy effort
in your country. But everybody ought to be
looking for somebody to ride in their car
with them. If we had two people in every car,
we'd use about half the oil we now use, which
is 70% of all the oil imported for use for
transportation, a whole bunch of that for
personal transportation.

DR: Tell me what your future plans are, I
understand you're focusing on education at
this point. Where do you go from here?

RB: We're going to primarily focus on
education. I'm on the Energy Subcommittee on
the Science Committee, and we have the
responsibility for R&D. We're the ones, of
course, who ought to be leading the way in
legislation that looks at what we need to be
contributing to this transformation effort in
going to renewables. By the way, there are
some non-renewable sources out there that we
have to exploit. We have got to exploit the
tar sands, if it is economically-feasible,
and the oil shales and the coal. Our fabled
500 years of coal is not that. At best, it's
200 years at current use rate. If we start
using at higher rates, which we must, that
rapidly diminishes to about 50 years. So
there's very little or more coal than there
is oil out there, in reality. It's going to
be used at considerable economic penalty, or
environmental penalty or a combination of
those two.and nuclear.

We now get 20% of our electricity from
nuclear, France gets 80%. But if we're going
to go on nuclear in any big way, we're going
to have to go on breeder reactors because
the world also has a limited supply of
fissionable uranium. I hope we can get to
fusion. If we get to fusion then we're home
free and the world will live happily
ever-after with plenty of energy. But, I
think, the odds of getting there are pretty
small about the same odds as you and me
hoping to solve our economic problems by
winning the lottery. That would be nice but
it's most unlikely to happen. We need to be
addressing all of these things. We need to
involve the American people. People need to
take drive in conserving.

By the way, we need a new yardstick to judge
success by. Right now, success is judged by
how much energy is used. Think about it, the
person who is successful has a really big
car; they take really expensive vacations;
they have a really big house. Now we have got
to have another yardstick by which we measure
success because success can't continue to be
measured by how much energy we use, do you
think?

DR: I think you're absolutely right. It's
sounds like what Hubbert was talking about
when he said the 'exponential growth culture'.

RB: We just think it's forever. We think that
God gave us the right to this quality of
life, to use all of this. I have friends who
really believe that the marketplace is really
going to take care of this, they really
believe this.

DR: I do, too. And a lot of them have gone to
business schools, very interesting.

RB: If there were another energy source that
was inexhaustible, or at least large, to
replace oil with.but there isn't any. We went
from wood to coal and coal to oil and every
time we went to a higher-quality
higher-density fuel. What is there now? The
only conceivable thing is nuclear, with lots
of problems that come with it. We may decide
that we have got to deal with some of those
problems because we really need the energy.
Once you've got electricity, you can do a lot
of things with electricity. You can make
hydrogen with it; you can split water to make
hydrogen. You can put that in your car. You
can't put the nuclear reactor in your car but
you can certainly put water in there that you
can produce with nuclear. And the nuclear is
non-polluting if you are able to handle the
by-products of it. Certainly the hydrogen you
make to run your car is non-polluting, and so
I think we need to look at nuclear. I have
friends, by the way, who have been very
opposed to nuclear, and with this uncertain
energy future they are now taking a new look
at these nuclear reactors. And I think we
need to do that. As I mentioned, France gets
80% of their electricity from nuclear; we get
20%. By the way, we are commissioning no new
plants and by and by we will hit zero. When
you drive tonight, every fifth house and
every fifth business will be dark if we don't
have nuclear electric generation.

DR: Let me ask you this, because I know we're
getting towards the end of the interview,
what recommendations do you have for
municipal leaders with respect to peak oil
and perhaps developing a contingency plan?

RB: I think the information that one writer
gives to individuals is also good for
communities. Get off the grid. Make
yourselves as energy independent as possible.
They can do with wind machines and solar and
so forth, with distributed power production,
lots of opportunities to do that. Then he
says, get out of debt. If we come to some
financial crisis, our municipalities as well
as people will fare a whole lot better if
they aren't carrying a big debt. Make the
investments.conservation, efficiency.We're
really good at efficiency. Your refrigerator
today uses about half it did 20 to 30 years
ago. We can make cars.I drive a little Toyota
Prius. I get an honest 45 miles per gallon,
with good performance. My wife enjoys being
at a traffic light with a big muscle car
because she can almost always she jump out
ahead of the muscle car (that's because of
the very large torque that an electric motor
has compared to a gasoline engine). It gets
very good performance and really good mileage
with one-tenth the pollution of many of the
other cars in their class.

DR: Now that you mention transportation.it
seems as though transportation will get quite
a bit more expensive, particularly for air
and road. What I'm wondering is-what do you
think about rebuilding local economy so that
we make much more of the things that we need
locally?

RB: The average food on your plate travels
15,000 miles. Everything that you touch, if
you've got it, a truck brought it. Everything
is going to go up when the price of oil goes
up because it's going to cost the trucking
company more to bring it there. Some of those
who really have been looking at the future
see a future in which we're going to be more
self-sufficient, we'll have more
self-sufficient communities. You won't be
buying your food from halfway around the
world, you'll be storing more of it.

Much of the world needs to do what the
Russians have been doing. They just don't
trust the system, so everybody rich or poor
has a dacha. If you're a poor man it's a
little larger than an outhouse but at least
contains your garden tools. Every year they
make a garden. Since they don't trust the
system they have the food there for them.
They store it. They put it in root cellars.
They pickle it. They can it. They don't
freeze it. You may not have electricity, that's
not a good way to store food for the long
haul. We need to start going that in this
country. The old Victory Gardens, remember
the old Victory Gardens? You're too young to
remember that. In World War II, everyone had
a Victory Garden. It was very patriotic and
everybody enjoyed going that. It was a kind
of competition-who could have the most
productive, most attractive victory garden.

DR: We need to change the culture, it sounds
like.

RB: We need to change the culture, that is
absolutely right. We have had a culture which
says 'the more energy you use, the more
successful you are'. We need to have a
culture that says 'the less energy you can
use to be comfortable, the better off you are
and the better you should feel about yourself'.

We need to have a culture which has entirely
new goals. As I said before, we have to have
a culture where success is not measured by
how much energy you consume. Success ought to
measured by how little energy you can consume
and still be very comfortable. I'm thinking
of Thorstein Veblen and his theory of the
leisure class. He talks about conspicuous
consumption-the rich people who wear fur
coats that really do not insulate as well as
the wool coat you might wear. We have a lot
of conspicuous consumption in this country.
We need to have a culture where you take
pride in being happy and living well. By the
way, the people in California use only about
60% of the energy as the average person in
our country. I'll tell you, most Californians
would deny that they live a less fulfilling
life than the other people in this country.
Europe uses half the energy per person that
we do. When you travel in Europe, they seem
at least as happy as we are, and they are
using half the energy that we do. We can do
this. We just need a leadership that helps us
understand how critical it is to do it.

DR: One thing I've noted is that Europe is
able to use much less, it has to do with the
built infrastructure, how their cities are
laid out and their mass transit. Do you think
we will have to change how our cities are
organized?

RB: It's going to be very difficult because
we've moved to suburbia and we've kind of
abandoned the cities. We have very
interesting statistics in this country where
we're somewhere between a third world culture
and the premier technology culture in the
world. That's because in our inner cities we've
kind of abandoned them. They have a third
world culture there and we moved out to
suburbia. Suburbia is an enormous consumer of
oil. We do not have mass transportation.where
we have them they are enormously expensive.
Maryland uses 40% of its transportation money
for mass transit, 5% of the people ride mass
transit. In the future, people are going to
have to do what they did when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, most people didn't drive to
work. They walked to work because they moved
to where they could see the building that
they worked in. I walked to school the first
two years of my life, there was no bus. I
walked to school. There were all sorts of one
room schools within about a mile of everybody
in the country, and you walked to school. By
the way, the best two years I ever spent in
school were those two years in a one room
school with eight grades and one teacher. In
fact, I learned so much that when I went to a
consolidated school I was one grading period
in the third grade and they put me in the
fourth grade.

DR: It's going to be very difficult for
people to be able to walk to work when you
consider that a lot of the suburbs are set up
such that the zoning laws separate
residential from business.

RB: We are going to have to rethink a lot of
things. The tragedy is that we didn't use the
25 years when we knew this was coming to do
something about it. Now we have got to do it
in kind of a panic. We have really got to be
aggressive, the longer we wait the more
painful the transition will be.

DR: I have one last question, I really
appreciate the time you have been giving
this. How did you find out about peak oil and
when was this?

RB: Probably 30 years ago I was concerned
about this. In another life, I was teaching
school and all the textbooks came over my
desk. I was teaching the biological area, I
taught human anatomy and physiology and I
taught a basic biology course, too. All the
books would come over my desk to see if I
would use them for my class so they could
sell some books. They sent me at least one of
every new textbook. I always turned to the
environmental chapter and the energy chapter
and read.
It's not that people didn't know this was
coming. We certainly did know, we've known
for a very long time. I'm very privileged to
have a staff member who has been concerned
about this. We've been friends for 25-30
years probably. He is great - Dr. John
Garnell, he is very knowledgeable in this.
There's no other combination in the Congress
where they had a Congressman who was himself
interested in this and had a staff member
that is knowledgeable in it and has a
background in it. We're kind of in a unique
position, and we're trying to exploit that
position to be useful to our country and to
try and get this word out. And I was a
teacher in a former life but this is kind of
the role we're playing now. It's kind of like
teaching and it's kind of fun. You have an
audience out there and I can't see them (a
million and a half people), but I'm used to
teaching and it's a matter of educating. I
believe that repetition is the soul of
learning, so I don't mind saying the same
thing in different ways over and over again.
I've had students who have had difficulty in
some concepts, but boys who go over it often
enough, by-and-by, they get a bright look on
their face and they finally got it. We're
trying to do that with our people.

DR: Wow, that's very commendable. We thank
you very much for your time.

RB: Thank you so much. Thank you for your
help in getting the word out.

-----------------------------------------------------------------