History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations..

Growth, growth, growth -- that's all we've known . . . World automobile production is doubling every 10 years; human population growth is like nothin….

Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know..

[The] first postulate of the Principle of Uniformity, namely, that the laws of nature are invariant with time, is not peculiar to that principle or t….

The steep ride up the and down the energy curve is the most abnormal thing that has ever happened in human history. Most of human history is a no-gro….

Historical chronology, human or geological, depends... upon comparable impersonal principles. If one scribes with a stylus on a plate of wet clay two….

It is evident that the fortunes of the world's human population, for better or for worse, are inextricably interrelated with the use that is made of ….

So long as oil is used as a source of energy, when the energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil becomes greater than the energy content of the oil….

It is hard to know which is the more remarkable- that it took 600 million years for the Earth to make its oil, or that it took 300 years to use it up..

Were we a rational society, a virtue of which we have rarely been accused, we would husband our oil and gas resources..

Our principal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved wh….