Rethinking Our Relationship to Nature, 1920–1959 111
... On the basis of the present estimates of
the ultimate reserves of petroleum and natural
gas, it appears that... the culmination for petro-
leum and natural gas in both the United States
and the state of Texas should occur within the
next few decades.
This does not necessarily imply that the
United States or other parts of the industrial
world will soon become destitute of liquid and
gaseous fuels, because these can be produced
from other fossil fuels which occur in much
greater abundance. But it does pose as a national
problem of primary importance, the necessity,
both with regard to requirements for domes-
tic purposes and those for national defense, of
gradually having to compensate for an increas-
ing disparity between the nation’s demands for
these fuels and its ability to produce them from
naturally occurring accumulations of petroleum
and natural gas.
Source: M. King Hubbert, “Nuclear Energy and the
Fossil Fuels,” in American Petroleum Institute Drilling
and Petroleum Practice, Proceedings of the Spring
Meeting, San Antonio, TX, 1956, abstract, p. 7, and Shell
Development Company Publication No. 95 (Houston,
TX: Shell Development Company, Exploration and
Production Research Division, 1956), pp. 23-24, 26-2710 or 15 years can have any significant effect upon
the date of culmination. A more probable effect
of improved recovery will be to reduce the rate of
decline after the culmination with respect to the
rates shown in Figure 21.
...
The Outlook for Fossil Fuels
From this inventory of the energy supplies
represented by the fossil fuels, it appears that
about three-quarters of the reserves of the fossil
fuels of the world are represented by coal and
the remaining one-quarter is equally divided
between liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons,
and oil shales and tar sands. Production of the
world’s coal has already consumed about 3.7
percent of the minable reserves initially present,
that of oil and gas about 7 percent, while the
production from shale and tar sands has barely
been started.
However, because of the versatility and use-
fulness of the liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons,
and also because of their relative ease of extrac-
tion, the rate of exploitation of the latter has
increased disproportionately to their magnitude
as compared with coal.
DOCUMENT 95: John Kenneth Galbraith Asks, “How Much Should a
Country Consume?” (1958)A professor of economics at Harvard who worked in the State Department Office of Economic Security Policy in
the 1940s and served as ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration, John Kenneth Galbraith here lays
out the dilemma confronting the United States in its attempt to be both a consumer society and a sustainable society.What should be our policy toward consump-
tion?
First, of course, we should begin to talk
about it—and in the context of all its impli-
cations. It is silly for grown men to concern
themselves mightily with supplying an appe-
tite and close their eyes to the obvious and
obtrusive question of whether the appetite is
excessive.
If the appetite presents no problems—if
resource discovery and the technology of use
and substitution promise automatically to
remain abreast of consumption and at moderate
cost—then we need press matters no further. At
least on conservation grounds there is no need to
curb our appetite.
But to say this, and assuming that it
applies comprehensively to both renewable