Were we a rational society, a virtue of which we have rarely been accused, we would husband our oil and gas resources.

History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.

So long as oil is used as a source of energy, when the energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil becomes greater than the energy content of the oil, production will cease no matter what the monetary price may be.

Growth, growth, growth -- that's all we've known . . . World automobile production is doubling every 10 years human population growth is like nothing that has happened in all of geologic history. The world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything -- whether it's power plants or grasshoppers.

It is evident that the fortunes of the world's human population, for better or for worse, are inextricably interrelated with the use that is made of energy resources.

Our principal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth.

Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.