Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis (NPG Special Report)

• Albert Bartlett
• April 1, 1998
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

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Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis
An NPG Forum Paper
by Albert A. Bartlett
April 1998

Negative Population Growth is indeed privileged to be able to reprint “Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis” on the 20th anniversary of its first publication in the American Journal of Physics in September of 1978.  Since then, it has been reprinted in full or abridged in over 30 different publications or proceedings, including translation into Spanish for publication in Mexico.  The special importance of this article as a resource for educators is reflected in its use in several introductory physics textbooks, in the “Physics Teachers’ CD-ROM Toolkit” published by the University of Nebraska, and in the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization’s journal New Trends in Physics Teaching.

Around 1969, college and university students de­veloped a major interest in the environment and, stimu­lated by this I began to realize that neither I nor the students had a good understanding of the implications of steady growth, and in particular, of the enormous numbers that could be produced by steady growth in modest periods of time. On September 19, 19691 spoke to the students of the pre-medical honor society on ^–The Arithmetic of Population Growth.” Fortunately, I kept my notes for the talk, because I was invited to speak to other groups, and I gave the same talk, appropriately revised and enlarged. By the end of 1975, I had given the talk 30 times using different titles, and I was be­coming more interested in the exponential arithmetic of steady growth. I started writing short numbered pieces, “The Exponential Function,” which were published in The Physics Teacher. Then the first energy crisis gave a new sense of urgency to the need to help people to gain a better understanding of the arithmetic of steady growth, and in particular of the shortening of the life expectancy of a non-renewable resource if one had steady growth in the rate of consumption of such a re­source until the last of the resource was used.

When I first calculated the Exponential Expiration Time t EET) of U.S. coal for a particular rate of growth of consumption, using Eq. 6. I used my new hand-held electronic calculator, and the result was 44 years. This was so short that I suspected I had made an error in entering the problem. I repeated the calculation a couple of more times and got the same 44 years. This convinced me that my new calculator was flawed, so I got out tables of logarithms and used pencil and paper to calculate the result, which was 44 years. Only then did I begin to realize the degree to which the lifetime of a non-renewable resource was shortened by having steady growth in the rate of con­sumption of the resource. and how misleading it is for leaders in business and industry to be advocating growth of rates of consumption and telling people how long the resource will last “at present rates of consumption.”

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