I'm Congressman Roscoe Bartlett from the sixth district of Maryland; it was probably 40 years ago that as a scientist I started asking myself the question: I know that oil is not forever, what does that mean? Is it 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years?

With 5,000 years of recorded history, we are at about 100 to 150 years into the age of oil; when will it end? And I didn't know, of course, that just about the time I started asking myself those questions, M. King Hubbert was doing his record-breaking research, and just 50 years ago this March, he gave his first speech, I understand, on peak oil in San Antonio, Texas. I believe he gave that speech (of course, he was a prophet way ahead of his time) fourteen years before the United States reached its peak-oil production, he predicted we would reach our peak-oil production about then. I think there is no other single name that is so connected with energy and peak oil as M. King Hubbert; in fact, if you want to find out what other people are thinking and saying about energy, oil, and peak oil, just do a Google search for 'Hubbert,' 'Hubbert's peak,' and 'M. King Hubbert,' and you will get lots of references there. I think that his pioneering work has been quoted by just about everybody who is interested in this subject.

His interest cannot be overestimated; he was a giant, and I think that had we listened to him, you know, he predicted that the world would be peaking in its oil production about now, if you factor in a world-wide recession that he couldn't have anticipated, if he was right about the United States, why wouldn't he be right about the world, and shouldn't we pay attention to that? We've simply run out of time and run out of energy that's necessary for making the transition. I wish M. King Hubbert were still here, but his legacy lives on with us, and we are so pleased that he did this research, and had the courage, had the courage, because I understand that the Shell Oil company encouraged him not to make a fool of himself and them, but he was convinced that his logic was right, and he went ahead, and we are greatly indebted to him.

My name is Richard Heinberg, I've written a couple of books on the subject of peak oil; one called The Party's Over, another called Powerdown, and I have another one in the works right now called The Oil Depletion Protocol, and for the last three years, I've been traveling all over the world, speaking about peak oil before audiences of all kinds: business executives, peace groups, university audiences, and so forth. I've found the work of M. King Hubbert to be one of my greatest inspirations in all of this work. I came across his writings, oh, I guess about 5 years ago, as I was just starting the research for my first peak-oil book, and of course he was the geologist who originally understood the problem of oil depletion, and what amazed me from the very beginning was how he understood not only the geological process of oil depletion, but also what that would mean to society as a whole, and also what we should be doing about it. It's as though the whole peak oil discourse that's developed over the past 3 or 4 years, where now we see newspaper articles, magazine articles, and documentaries appearing almost on a daily basis about this subject. It's as though he understood all of that almost from the very beginning. He drew out all of the implications, and he saw this problem in its holistic, ecological, social and economic context before anyone else.

I think Hubbert is really one of the great visionaries of our age, and I think future generations will look back on him and say, "Here is someone who understood this before anyone else; it's too bad we didn't listen to him more."

In order to appreciate Hubbert's contributions, you really have to put yourself back into the time in which he was living - the 1940s, '50s, '60s - that was the time when the United States was by far the world's foremost oil producing nation. A TV show like The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1960s would sum it all up. We were not just dependent on oil, we were the epicenter of the whole petroleum universe. For decades the United States had been the world's foremost oil-exporting nation. Production was higher than it ever was before, and for someone to come along and say at that point that U.S. oil production was going to peak and begin its inevitable decline in just a few years (he said this in 1956, and it happened in 1970, that's 14 years ahead of the event) at that time, it seemed not just counterintuitive but crazy for someone to say such a thing.

Everyone assumed that the United States would continue to be the center of world-oil production into the foreseeable future. It's hard for us to understand that today; we take it for granted now that the United States imports 2/3 of its oil, and that the Middle East is where it is all happening when it comes to petroleum, but that certainly wasn't the case back then, and understanding that context I think makes Hubbert's contribution even more impressive.

I think Hubbert's understanding of money and the economy is something that is not often appreciated. He saw that we had a growth economy, based on the type of monetary system that we have, that can really only work when we have continually increasing supplies of energy to make economic activity happen.

He understood that growth is not just an ideology of modern economic theory, but the necessity of growth was built into the way that our economic system has been designed. He understood that we needed to change that fundamentally, because the last 150 years of constant economic growth has been really an anomaly in all of human history, and we really can't maintain continual growth, as Al Bartlett says, continual growth in any system is unsustainable. That I think is an aspect of Hubbert's teaching that we still have yet to digest.

My name is Albert A. Bartlett, and I am a retired professor of physics at the University of Colorado in Bolder. I've been on the faculty since 1950, and since 1969, I have been lecturing all over the country and quite a few foreign countries about the problems associated with steady growth of population, the rates of consumption of resources, and what these growth rates mean to the lifetime of resources. And I became aware of work of Dr. Hubbert sometime in the early 1970s. I had read a number of his things and got in contact with him, had some correspondence with him, sent him a copy of some of the papers that I had written, and I found he was very supportive of my efforts, and he was very kind and wrote to me, and several times he phoned me about some urgent thing that was going on in the congress. I remember one time in particular, he was upset about some bill that was being considered in the congress, and he said, "This is being pushed by the economist," and he said, and I quote, "if we let the economists have their way, they will ruin the country." He was quite outspoken on this, and I was at one time giving my lecture at one of the big hotels in Washington, D.C. to the National Science Teacher's Association, and I knew that Hubbert lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and I told him that I was going to be there speaking, and I'd be very honored if he wanted to come down to hear my talk, and while I was talking, I saw that he was in the audience, and in the talk I had mentioned Dr. Hubbert a number of times, and at the end of the talk, I closed by saying to the audience that we are very honored to have Dr. Hubbert here in the room, and I asked him to stand up, and we applauded for him, and that seemed to please him very much.

I remember he once sent me in the mail a copy of a cartoon, which he said was his favorite. I think I still have a copy of it around somewhere, but it shows a rather dejected Native American sitting on a rock with a great big macho-Anglo hunter with a gun, with the hunter saying, "What shortage of buffalo"? Give me guns and ammunition and hunters, and I'll find you all the buffalo you want." That was, he thought, very much the mood of the times, where all these nonscientists get up and say, "Well, we can find anything we want."

Now today is February 27th, and in just about a week, March 6, will be the 50th anniversary of his speaking to a group of petroleum engineers and geologists in San Antonio Texas. It was at that meeting that he set forth the results of his computations, which he said led him to believe and predict that the peak of United States oil and gas production would occur between 1966 and 1971, so he had a 5-year window there, and he was doing this by his analysis, which was very straight forward, and that was just 50 years ago (and about one week from right now), and in that 50 years (of course, he died in 1989, I think) up until the time of his death, he testified on many occasions before the committees of the House and Senate in Washington, and they listened and paid no attention.

And a sort of bible on my desk is a copy of a report (I think it is dated 1973) and its probably half an inch thick published by the U.S Printing Office, and it's a detailed report of his analysis, the methods of his analysis, and the mathematics he uses - the mathematics in that report are just first-year-college calculus. There is nothing complicated in there at all. But of course the global vision and wisdom of what is in there goes much farther than that first year calculus. It's truly spectacular, his method of analysis, and I still refer to that frequently, even though it's quite old now, but this is a report that he prepared at the request of Senator Henry M. Jackson in the state of Washington, who I think headed an energy committee or something at that time (maybe it was a committee on interior and insular affairs), but Jackson apparently understood some of the energy problem, but no one paid attention, and so over all of these years, if you want anyone to blame for the problems of the energy crisis, which are now getting to be very serious, you have to blame congress, because Hubbert testified over and over again, and no one listened, no one paid any attention. They listened to the nonscientists, who have Ph.D.s in all kinds of non-science, and they say the things that the people in Washington want to hear, and so, they just closed out their listening to Dr. Hubbert, and of course in 1956 (50 years ago), he predicted the five-year window for the peak of U.S. oil and gas production, and it occurred in 1970 within that window, and it fell very rapidly.

Then the Alaska pipeline started delivering oil, and there was a partial recovery, but it never got back up to where it had been at the peak, and that production has reached a secondary peak, and now everything is going downhill in unison, just the way that Hubbert predicted, so now you hear the President of the United States saying, "Oh, we are addicted to oil. We've got to do something about all this importing of oil."

The same thing is happening now with natural gas. Natural gas production in North America has gone over the Hubbert peak; it is declining, and that's the reason why we have high-natural-gas prices. Now there are little ups and downs, like the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and so on, but the price trend is very seriously upward, because we can't bring new gas online as fast as we're depleting the old gas well, and so now we have big major companies trying to build port facilities so they can import liquefied-natural gas from Indonesia, North Africa, Middle East - they're all Muslim countries - so not only are we presently very heavily dependent upon petroleum from those countries, we are now moving as fast as we can to increase our dependence on the Muslim countries for natural gas that we use to heat our home.

So Hubbert, you know, he had so many things that were just right on. He understood the problem, and he lectured widely, and he was a very effective person in terms of convincing people who wanted to listen, but in terms of convincing the congressional people - they wouldn't listen. So it was just a very sad situation, but I am terribly pleased that I got to know him and correspond with him, and I always think that that was one of the highlights of my lecturing on this problem, and I take great inspiration from his pioneering work. You know, he saw the problems, he applied straightforward analysis to them, and came up with straightforward answers that were unpopular.

My name is Megan Quinn, and I am the outreach director for Community Solutions. We're a non-profit based in Yellows Springs, Ohio. We've been looking at the peak-oil issue for about 3 years now, and when I first heard about peak oil, I think Hubbert was one of the first words I had read, about his predictions coming true for the United States, and his contemporary, Colin Campbell, for this decade, so I've been very familiar with his work, and I've been talking about his example in the presentations that I give.

It's conceivable that none of us in this peak-oil-awareness movement would be here if it weren't for Dr. Hubbert. He's not only the intellectual grandfather of the movement, he's also the figure who inspires the movement and inspires me. I think his bravery in the face of the unrelenting criticism he received from the oil companies and the government and others in the geology and other industries-that criticism and the way that he faced that, his bravery, is really a powerful example to us. I think we are called to be as brave as Hubbert was when we face our economists or politicians or people that deny the truth of peak oil, or even when we are talking to friends, even family, it's really important that we stand up for our belief, and to speak the truth as Hubbert did. And I think it is important that we speak the truth not only about peak oil but the possibilities for creating a better world in the wake of peak oil. So I think we should honor doctor Hubbert for his calculations and his scientific insights and all that, but I think its also important that we honor him for his strength and courage and resolve.

I'm Pat Murphy, executive director of Community Solutions. We're an organization that's offering small, local communities in different value systems to the upcoming crisis about peak oil. I first heard about King Hubbert when I read Hubbert's Peak, a book written by Ken Deffeyes in 2001, and I have been working in the peak-oil movement, if that's what we want to call it, since that period.

My view of Hubbert is, first, he was a great scientist, of course, but more than that he was intellectually honest and very courageous, and he brought this forth and had overcome Shell Oil and other people, including his own peers, who found that Hubbert was certainly going to disturb the sleep of the oil-company executives, and I think Hubbert, followed many years later by people like Colin Campbell and Matt Simmons, shows people who put their convictions before their own personal well-being.

One of things I lament about the situation with peak oil is, although we have tens of thousands of scientists and Ph.D.s that are working in this area, and yet we only have a handful of people who are willing to speak out in what may be the greatest calamity that can befall mankind.

Hello, my name is Walter Youngquist. I am a petroleum geologist by trade, although I was in academia for a number of years, and in the process of being a petroleum geologist and belonging to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, I became acquainted to some extent with M. King Hubbert, and he was at one time the distinguished petroleum geology elector for the Association of American Geologists. When I was on the faculty at the University of Oregon, he was a visiting lecturer, and I got to know him there, and then I saw him at a number of meetings.

King Hubbert was a rather modest man, in general, he was of medium stature, and in his old age, he had distinguished gray hair, very polite, but he was very firm in his opinion of what he said, and he was very firm in that regard, because he had good basic facts, and considering that he did not have a computer when he made this famous prediction in 1956, why it's amazing how well he did with the material he had available. Of course, the Hubbert Peak has become so well known that it has influenced not only me but a great many other people in the concept that you have a sort of a bell-shaped curve, in a sense, in the production of any finite resource. Now the curve is not symmetrical, because the rise in production tends to be rather slow, and when the peak of the thing is reached, you have a tremendous demand, as we have now, 84-million-barrels a day, and the down slope of course can be much steeper than the up slope, but in any event, King Hubbert has certainly influenced me and a great many other people.

His work has become a point of controversy, chiefly between economists and geologists, and the result of this is that it has reached the general public, and now instead of just a few of us over the past ten or fifteen years talking about peak oil, peak oil has become an item on the front of many newspapers, and it has been the subject of TV and radio programs.

So King Hubbert in many ways directly and indirectly influences the discussion of peak oil today. He was a fine gentleman, he was a recluse to some extent, but he was willing to speak out, and as I say again, he had very strong opinion and good reason to do that , and it was a pleasure to know King Hubbert. It was interesting when King Hubbert made his prediction, it was at a technical meeting, and as I understand it, someone got up at the back of the room, and said, "you're crazy!" And for a number of years, because we were still in the United States heading upward in terms of production, King Hubbert's prediction was essentially totally ignored, but when we peaked out in 1970, as King Hubbert had predicted, why, all of a sudden, he was launched into prominence, and people had begun to unearth, so to speak, this obscure talk he had given, and from there on its been an upward trajectory in terms of the interest in King Hubbert. As I say, he took considerable abuse initially in the matter, but he stood by his prediction, and of course he's been ultimately justified.

My name is Ron Swenson and since ten-years ago, I have hosted the Web site hubbertpeak.com, and at this web site, I list information from all the leading geologists, engineers and economists who are concerned about peak oil, and it is through the inspiration of King Hubbert, who 50 years ago established the fact that in the United States we would see peak oil in year 1970, so this is an important time for us to reflect on his wisdom. I knew Buzz Ivanhoe who worked directly with King Hubbert, and he said he was one of the most brilliant people he ever knew, and he is maligned by the press, even today we read articles where people say, "Well, he just happened to get it right, but if you knew the man, I believe that you would understand that this was no guessing game on his part, that he had a profound understanding of how resources affected humans and how we exploit resources, and he was able to pass his understanding on in a way that was very helpful to us as we ourselves now face the global Hubbert's Peak and have to make changes in our life style and in our technology and so many things about our living to be able to come to grips with this change that's taking place.

I am Ken Deffeyes, and I am a retired-geology professor at Princeton University, and I grew up in the oil fields, and when I arrived at the Shell Research Lab in Houston in 1958, M. King Hubbert had just come out with his 1956 prediction that the U.S. oil production would peak in the 1970s. No one believed it, but a lot of us around the lab did believe it; he was a very tough guy and a fearsome opponent in a debate, but I got along with him just fine. But you kind of got your act together before you went to see Hubbert about something. I've used his stuff exactly, but directly, because there's so much criticism, "Oh, all those predictions are wrong." So I've been doing for the world production exactly what Hubbert did for the U.S. production. I said on my Web site a couple of weeks ago, it's happened. The world oil peak was probably December 16, 2005, and I said I am now looking at it in the past tense, I am no longer a prophet, now I'm an historian. Hubbert told me that until 15 minutes before he went on the platform to give his original talk in San Antonio, the Shell-Oil head office was on the phone saying, "Don't do it, don't do it."

Now Hubbert drew a lot of water, he had a lot behind him, he had done half a dozen different important things about geology that had nothing to do with this oil problem, and he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he was a few years later the president of the Geological Society of America, so he held a lot of weight. Part of the reason that no one paid attention to him was that the industry largely felt that -oh, no, we've had all these predictions, they are always wrong, and give us our tax breaks and good access to drilling country, and we'll keep you in oil forever and ever. So they just weren't ready to hear the message that Hubbert was preaching. Of course the Geological Survey reports didn't start coming out until long after Hubbert was dead, so Hubbert did not clash directly with the U.S. Geological Survey; in fact, after he reached retirement age at Shell, he moved to the Washington D.C. area and was an employee of the U.S. Geological Survey, so at the time there wasn't much of a conflict between him and the Survey. There was kind of a disconnect, at least I didn't have a very high regard for the way the McAlvey went at it, and in fact, the later USGS predictions don't use McAlvey's methods directly, so there was a lot of disconnect at the time. People weren't talking to one another, there weren't public debates about it, there was a general skepticism, and it wasn't until 1970 happened and we hit the peak that suddenly Hubbert was a folk hero. Right after 1970, the actual production had been going up, and it could have continued to stagger upwards, but the Texas Railroad Commission announced two years later, in 1972, that production rationing in Texas would be stopped. You could produce all the oil you could find, and Texas Railroad Commission was the OPEC of its day; now the parallel thing happened in March of 2003, the Saudi Arabian government and Saudi Aramco told Western governments and international and international oil companies that they were maxed out at 9.2-million barrels a day, and that story received very little attention. Yet to me, it was the exact parallel to the Texas Railroad Commission announcement.

He's in the first rank of earth scientists for the mechanism of great-thrust faults, hydrodynamic-well entrapment, the theory of hydro-fracturing, the theory of ground-water motion, Darcy's Law - these are major accomplishments - so he has a place in the first rank of American geologists, maybe the first-half-dozen all-time-American geologists, and as a result, he's got a reputation that's above and beyond the oil prediction as far as geologists are concerned. So he's a major hero in my book for reasons in addition to the oil; the oil thing was a part of his career, and certainly in his later years a major thing that he had to deal with, but in fact his scientific reputation is much, much larger than the oil thing itself.

Early on, back in the great depression when he was at Columbia University , was part of a movement called technocracy, in which technocrats, scientific people and engineers were going to run society. This never caught on, and our two presidents who were engineers, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, don't rank amongst our top presidents, so that didn't catch on, but he was strongly in favor of population control. When I got married, he told my wife and me, "Look, you can have two children, you can have them in series or in parallel, but no more than two," which I was terribly afraid that our second one would be twins, and we'd be in deep trouble. But he was strong on population control. Now, I don't know whether that's the reason, but he never had any kids himself, but he was married for many, many, years, and he was concerned about these things, and he had population control very high up on its list of priorities. Because he had friends all over there were many opportunities to visit with him occasionally, either he would be visiting where I was or I would be visiting where he was, so yes, we did stay in touch, and he did keep track that we didn't have more than two kids.

People were so terrified of his scientific ardor and skill; I saw him once just demolish this speaker at Shell. This guy had a demo and Hubbert said, "That doesn't work the way you say." He [Hubbert] had calculated the permeability and Darcy's Law in his head while watching this demo, and it was incredibly impressive, but he devastated this guy, and it doesn't take many things like that - and the expression I put in one of my books that went around the Shell Lab was one that had been said about a number of tinhorn-dictators in Central America - that Hubbert is a bastard, but he's our bastard.

I am Matt Simmons, Chairman of Simmons Company International, which is an energy investment banking firm. I can't actually remember when I first started hearing about the Hubbert Peak or the Hubbert Curve. It seems like the sort of term I have heard for ages, but what is interesting is that, for a long period of time, I actually didn't have any idea of what it was even all about. It was just one of those terms, oh, yes, I've heard that, but at some point I remember I'd written a paper, and the newsletter at Colorado School of Mines, written by Doctor Ivanhoe, which was something to do with the Hubbert Curve, and then occasionally some economists would say, well, you must be one of those peak-oil people. I didn't quite know what peak-oil people even meant. I think the first time I really understood what the Hubbert Curve was is when Ken Deffeyes published his book, Recovering the Hubbert Curve and the second was Beyond Peak Oil. In his book he lays out in great specificity (because he worked for Dr. Hubbert)how he did the analysis, how much Shell Oil company didn't want him to make the statements he made in 1956, how he made it anyway, how discredited his curve became, how many people laughed at him. By 1970 when they said, "Remember that guy who said we were going to run out of oil, and it turns out we set a new record," ironically the year we peaked.

But when I look back, I've had the opportunity to read an important paper he wrote in the Physics Journal in 1949, talking about how we have 50 years to prepare ourselves for the peak in fossil fuels, and when you read that with benefit of hindsight, you say in 1949 he wrote that, and he wasn't talking about running out of anything, he was talking about peaking 50 years from now, and how much time it would take to start to mitigate the impacts of peaking, and then I go back and I say, one of the reasons I don't think I ever heard anything about the Hubbert Peak is that for about 20 years after we peaked, as far as I know, there wasn't very much written about the fact that we clearly peaked, so it took a couple of decades before people finally realized - you know, I guess we're not going to find another Prudhoe Bay, and I guess we're not going to find a string of oil fields further out in the Gulf of Mexico.

During the 1970s, the oil boom created the illusion that -boy with all this drilling, we're going to find a lot more oil - and we didn't. So he became, with the benefit of hindsight, a remarkably important figure in the resource question on earth. The fact that his career ended on such a sad note, with him seemingly being discredited, when in fact he was absolutely right, is really an astonishing story. The fact that his ability to hang in and doggedly do research by hand, by himself, against defined conventional wisdom, I think became an inspiration for the next generation of guys: John Laherrère, and Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes.

I was speaking at a California energy program in Santa Barbara about 4 years ago, and Bud Ivanhoe and Walter Youngquist were both there, and Steve Andrews took a picture of the three of us, and about 9 months later, Bud Ivanhoe died. It turns out that Dr. Hubbert, Buzz Ivanhoe and Walter Youngquist were sort of the three musketeers that were working on all this stuff, during the 1950s and 1960s, and now Walter Yongquist is the only living one left, and he's still tirelessly working away updating a new book that he's been working on, so the fact that - none of them have an axe to grind - they are basically all futurists really worried about the sustainability of society, and I gather that's where Dr. Hubbert was coming from.

Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall:I heard about Hubbert when the Geological Survey was under my general supervision, and I had heard about his prediction and so on, and then, I am not sure of the contact I had in 1968 and 1969, the last year I was there, but the OPEC embargo brought that whole thing into a screaming focus, of course, and that's when people began to talk about his prediction, which had already occurred, but I came to be one of his greatest admirers. He and I had correspondence, we had talks and that went on for several years. I just went to him for advice, and since I was an outspoken advocate of his after I left, he really liked that, and he appreciated having someone as prominent as I was praising what he had done.

There was a petroleum geologist in the Geological Survey, named Vince McAlvey. You know the oil companies, they had there own geologists, and Hubbert of course worked for Shell. Hubbert didn't work for the Geological Survey, you know, he made his prediction when he was with the private sector, but he was a very bold, outspoken person, and his prediction was so greatly at odds with the official prediction, which was quoted in government circles of the Geological Survey.

You know, petroleum geology is a specialized science, and McAlvey always said that Hubbert was wrong, that we had vast, the term 'vast' was thrown around, we had vast reserves of petroleum, and there was no need to worry about anything in the future. Their differences were so great that it became a kind of celestial joke when Hubbert's prediction came through. I think he looked with some contempt on McAlvey, I know that's true, because he always referred to him in a negative way. I don't know to what extent there was in the industry, you know, the Geological Survey, because they were the government agency that was supposed to know something about petroleum reserves and so on. I am sure there are other geologists, you know, he presented papers at their meetings, I am sure he did, and he was regarded as a strong person who had strong views and he was sticking his neck way, way out. They all respected him, but I think a lot of them thought he was too far out and was wrong.

This is Jan Lundberg of culture change.org Ironically, I was in the oil industry for about 15 years, and hadn't heard of Hubbert. It was after I left the oil industry and stopped serving utilities and government agencies when I learned about Hubbert's Curve, and about peak oil, so I was intrigued to learn that not only was the world running out of oil on a statistical curve, but that there really weren't substitutes at the ready, so we have to get to the point of acknowledging that Hubbert was right, and we are now in a new age.

Unfortunately, most people are still driving around and using energy and procreating as if we are in a time of endless growth. As the economist Herman Daley said, the economy grows, but the ecosystem does not. So it's time for a culture change, we must all be grateful to M. King Hubbert for warning us and for trying to pass along his wisdom that we are in a very brief time in human history whereby growth is not sustainable, but our culture is going to have to be sustainable.

Colin Campbell: Well I am a retired oilman, and I've been studying the issue of peak oil for several years now. I've written about 5 books on the subject and various papers.

Hubbert of course, was, a geophysicist, actually, and he worked in the oil business in America, and he was able to see the maturity of discovery in that country, he could see the scope of finding new fields and so on, and I think that he just started in a pragmatic, very simple way, with a sketch on the back of an envelope, to realize that there was a finite amount there, that discovery started, and you found the big fields first, it reached a peak, and then began to decline. This was fairly obvious, really. And then he related that to the resulting production, and when he saw the production was beginning to decline, he saw the basis on which to forecast when peak would come.

He was a very intelligent man, he did a lot of work on a whole lot of subjects besides this one, but I really think he started in quite a simple way, and it wasn't exactly rocket science to begin with. And he did use two alternative assumptions about what the total of the United States would be, and one of them got it more or less right, allowing him to forecast the peak accurately about 15 years before it actually happened.

I think really the significance of his work is as much as anything, which is not always appreciated, is that he saw the significance of this for society as a whole, and for the political management of countries, and so on, and I think the real significance of his work was not for the famous Hubbert's Curve itself, but for the realization that this would have a huge impact on life in general and the way countries are managed, and that sort of thing, so this perhaps isn't widely publicized, but I would say that was his best contribution to the subject.

I don't know about financial things, but as far as I understand, over the last century, the banks have been lending more than they had on deposit, confident that the resulting economic growth and prosperity was collateral for their debt, and that system worked perfectly well, so long as the energy needed to make the expansion possible was there, and so I think that Hubbert was entirely right to see a link between the energy supply and the money supply, and I think now that we are close to peak, we face the decline in the energy that is needed to support the debt, which in other words makes the debt go bad, and you'd be surprised how many banks come to see me these days, and I think the financial people are beginning to understand this, although they don't know naturally know exactly how to react.

I think he was a distinguished scientist in many ways, and this was just one of the achievements he had. Of course when he said it, he found himself under much pressure not to say it. I mean the Shell Oil company, under whom he worked, tried to suppress it, and then the U.S. Geological Survey got upset, so he was courageous enough to keep doing it, because he could see the underlying science and logic of it, so I guess one has to admire him particularly in that regard.

My name is Steve Andrews. I am an energy consultant, and have been in the field since 1980. My work has been primarily on the efficiency side of the isle, but I've increasingly spent time in studying and analyzing the supply-side issues as well.

I interviewed doctor Hubbert in March of 1988 at his home, over the course of a 4-hour period, and that was quite the experience for me personally. Prior to that I had read a couple of books that dealt with the issue of peak oil, especially the book Peak Oil by Geever and company, and had talked with several other people who had some well-published opinions and thoughts on the world of peak oil, which was obviously very much in its infancy then, but the interview with Hubbert really stands out as that sort of experience that used to be written up in the Reader's Digest - My Most Unforgettable Character - if you will, he certainly qualified.

Hubbert was very memorable for a number of reasons. He was a man who would not be steered. He had very strong convictions. I heard that from others prior to meeting him, and he more or less said that the afternoon I spent with him, and during the interview process, he certainly wouldn't be steered away from what he wanted to say. It was less an interview and more of a monologue for a long portion of the afternoon.

At age 85, at that time, he was still very intellectually there; he did occasionally repeat himself, but was very sharp in most ways and was still engaged at that age, in the study of data, and trying to analyze, for example, where he might have gone wrong on his natural-gas studies, which he knew he had, and he had admitted as much, but said he had to stand by his data until he figured out why it was wrong and where, but he was still very active, and had clearly been a giant in the world of contributing to this peak oil concern that is now very much center stage, but was then on the side, if you will, of energy discussions going forward.

In 1956, March of that year, when he stood before 500 members of the southwest division of the American Petroleum Institute and delivered his famous paper "Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels," he was coming from a position of 'minority one.' He was working for Shell, had been since 1943, and worked for them through his mandatory retirement in 1963 or 1964. Right up to the point where he delivered his talk, Shell was trying to, as he told me, Shell was trying to get him to soften the message, but he said, "I wouldn't steer very well. They tried to steer me, but I wouldn't steer very well." So clearly, he was a man of very strong convictions, who stood by his data, and in the face of enormous disagreement over the years (particularly from the USGS, when he worked there during the late 1960s and early 1970s), he was a man of tremendous conviction, as well as extraordinarily sharp intellect, great experience with data analysis, plus, during his youth, some direct field experience in the petroleum industry.

Doctor Hubbert's contribution is invaluable, and yet it is also a lightening rod. It is invaluable with respect that he pointed out to us the nature of the way finite resources, particularly petroleum, is likely to be produced. There will be a day when it will go over the top of production and slip into decline. He made it clear that we wouldn't be running out, he said oil production would peter out gradually. You can't find it all at once, and you can't produce it all at once.

He warned us that there would be a time when depletion would outrun new supplies and available energy to industrial society, at least from petroleum liquids would go into decline. While given credit for picking accurately the date when U.S. oil production would peak, he's been criticized by many, especially economists, but also others in the industry, for having a methodology that doesn't stand the test of time, and that doesn't reflect, oh, anything from geopolitical realities to the impacts of financial investment and this, that and other, so he was indeed a lightening rod, but he was a very helpful one in that respect. He withstood the barrage he took very well, and he almost enjoyed the verbal combat over the issues.

He said we are dealing with a cultural problem. We've had nothing but exponential growth for over 200 years. Most of us, the history we carry in our head is limited to back about the American Revolution, or when our ancestors came over from wherever they came from. And during that period, we've had exponential growth, and so we've developed an exponential growth culture. That's the reason one of the most ubiquitous expressions in the language right now is 'growth,' how to 'maintain our growth.' If we could maintain it, it would destroy us. Another quote he said, "At the same time, it will probably require a spiral of adversity, in other words, things will have to get worse before they can get better, but the most important thing is to get a picture of the situation we are in and the outlook for the future, exhaustion of the oil and gas, that kind of thing, an appraisal of where we are, and the time scale, and the time scale is not centuries, it is decades."

Here's my favorite quote from that 4-hour interview, he said, "Were we a rational society, a virtue of which we have rarely been accused, we would husband our oil and gas resources." That in a nutshell is both his exhortation and his lament. It was pretty intriguing that he used those words in writing and several times during the interview.

The last I leave you with is the paper in 1956 was on nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Within a decade or little more he had changed his position on nuclear energy. He didn't see it as the big future energy source that he had seen back in1956, he had become both pessimistic on nuclear as well as optimistic about solar. He viewed it as the biggest source of energy on earth, it's not impractical, it's something we need to pursue and develop, so he was a visionary in more ways than I think people give him credit for.

He would deplore the deplete-America-first policy, in fact he used those phrases, he deplored the, what he said is "You've got the U.S. Geological Survey, which misled the government for 15 years. You can do what they do with pencil and paper, but you can't do it with a drill, and that sort of thing." But at the end, he had some hopeful vision for us down the road, and he saw us ultimately switching over to renewable energy, and perhaps becoming a less consumptive society, less engaged in work, and maybe engaged in other pursuits -it was an interesting vision.