Flashback: President Carter -- We Will Run Out of Oil By 1990

Link here.

“The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out,” warned the President in a televised speech on energy policy. And because we are running out, “we must prepare quickly” for a transition “to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.”

Of course, the President who said this was not Barack Obama. (Could you imagine Obama calling for a transition to coal?) The President was Jimmy Carter — on April 18, 1977. In the same speech, Carter also said that “in spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year.” Regarding oil in particular, he warned that if consumption continued to rise at the same five percent annual rate it had in the past, “we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” — that is, by the end of the 1980s.

Not only have we not run out of either oil or natural gas, but in the case of natural gas, America’s “proved reserves” have actually risen significantly since 1977. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA, a part of the U.S. Department of Energy), the United States possessed 207 trillion cubic feet of (dry) natural gas in 1977, as compared to 272 trillion cubic feet in 2009. How could the nation’s proved reserves go up instead of down, despite all of the natural gas that has been consumed since 1977?

I remember that speech very, very well -- the one in 1977 saying that we could run out oil in my lifetime. Hmmm.


Significantly more natural gas reserves in 2009 than in 1977. Hmmm.

I find it interesting that President Carter -- a nuclear engineer by training -- advocated a return to the use of coal, and interestingly, to solar energy. In an earlier post I noted that renewable energy accounted for 1.8 percent of all energy used by the world in 2010. One-point-eight percent, with all the incentives, tax breaks, government grants, ever-increasing price of oil, since 1997 -- and all renewable energy still accounts for less than 2 percent of global energy consumption. 

A few years ago I remember the former XOM CEO stating we would have to grow something like 20 percent in renewable energy annually for 20 years and renewable energy still wouldn't make a dent in the world's demand for energy.

Wow, google is incredible. I was able to find that 20/20/1 quote by Lee Raymond, from Newsweek magazine:

Wind and solar. People have misinterpreted what we've said for years. I'm not against wind. I'm not against solar. But they are uneconomic. They don't compete on a stand-up basis with fossil fuels. They require huge subsidies. If you assume 20 percent growth in wind and solar for 20 years, it's still a half of 1 percent of the world's energy. -- September 20, 2004. 

Hmmm.