Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland) gave a series of speeches about peak oil on the floor of the House of Representatives. Mike Millikin of Green Car Congress -- who is, ahem, this week's Grist InterActivist -- discussed them here and here. Now (via Jeff), Global Public Media has an interview with Bartlett. It's absolutely fascinating -- the guy has obviously thought about and studied the issue extensively. It's rare to hear frank talk like this from a public official:
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. ... 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 ... Putting it off is going to make it just more and more painful and more expensive.
Yup. Anyway, read the whole thing.
(If this were a Daily Grist story, I would title it "Roscoe Peak Oil Train." Lucky for you it's not.)
Update [2005-5-3 14:21:42 by Dave Roberts]: OMG, and I just noticed this bit. When he's asked what his colleagues' reaction has been to his speeches, he says:
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."Most people," perhaps, but the leaders of our country? Truly we are in good hands, no?
Comments
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MikeCapone Posted 7:08 am
03 May 2005
--
SUVs are squared-out minivans.
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ronniehoresh Posted 7:15 pm
03 May 2005
Yes well it's you guys, the politicians, who have subsidised oil extraction and oil consumption. It's you who've brought about this crisis. And your response? Another top-down, governnment-led, think big programme. Yeah, that's bound to work.
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Thomas Palm Posted 8:19 pm
03 May 2005
http://www.issues2000.org/House/Roscoe_Bartlett_Energy_+_Oil.htm
Voted NO on raising CAFE standards; incentives for alternative fuels.
Voted NO on starting implementation of Kyoto Protocol
Seems odd, doesn't it, if he really worries about running out of oil.
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dgreene369 Posted 2:15 am
04 May 2005
Reagan let the markets do their thing (the opposite of a Manhattan project), and things calmed down nicely.
I'm curious what you all think of Peter Huber's book "Bottomless Well". I haven't read it yet, but was impressed when I saw him on C-SPAN.
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Thomas Palm Posted 5:05 am
04 May 2005
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jdhlax Posted 12:46 pm
05 May 2005
Excuse me, but the crisis here is that humans are extracting, transporting, refining, and burning oil, not that it might run out or be hard to extract some day. Significant pain has been felt by the Earth, air, water, plants, and non-human animals since oil extraction began. Human crybabies complaining about the possibility of oil running out make me either laugh or angry, depending on what mood I'm in.
Jeff Hoffman
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