Al Bartlett

Professor Al Bartlett of Colorado University is well-known in sustainability circles for his contributions to the population debate and especially for his famous lecture,


In this paper, Bartlett draws on the work of M. King Hubbert, who developed a concept for forecasting the nationwide or worldwide production of non-renewable fossil fuel resources: in short, that they can be expected to follow a bell-shaped curve. There are economic forces acting on real-world production so this curve will never be perfectly symmetric, but it is true that cumulative production of any non-renewable resource will follow some sort of curve with a peak and decline.

As an analogy, consider a large rowing boat. Suppose the rowers decide they want to see how fast they can make the boat go