Albert Bartlett: Self

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  Albert Bartlett : It's always a pleasure to be here and to meet with you and to think about some of the problems we are facing. Some of these problems are local, some are national, and some are global. But they're all tied together, they're tied together by arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn't very difficult.

• Albert Bartlett : The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

• Albert Bartlett : [given a constant growth-rate]  The growth in any doubling-time is greater then the total of all preceding growth.

• Albert Bartlett : *If* it's current modest yearly growth-rate of 1.3% *could* continue, world population would reach a density of one person per square meter of dry land in 780 years. And the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years.

• [repeated line] 

  Albert Bartlett : Think about it. *Think* about it!

• Albert Bartlett : In early 1995 the news told us that 1994 was the first year in our nation's history in which we had to import more oil than we were able to get out of our own ground.

• Albert Bartlett : Lets look at the definition of modern Agriculture. It's the use of land to convert petroleum into food. And we can see the end of the petroleum.

• Albert Bartlett : In your life-expectancy you are going to see the peak of world oil production. And ask yourself, What's life going to be like on this earth, when we have production declining and we have a growing population and a growing per capita demand for oil. Just think about it, this isn't rocket science!

• Albert Bartlett : One of Dr. Hubbert favorite graphs is this one. This is on a time-scale from 5,000 years ago to 5,000 years in the future. And the age of fossil fuels is this little blip in the middle of the screen. Think about it.

• Albert Bartlett : There's a lesson here. And the lesson is that we cannot let other people do the thinking for us.

• Albert Bartlett : The world is full of people who are yacking about sustainability. Now some of them are doing serious good things, like trying to reduce energy consumption. But some of them are just trying to attach the word sustainability to whatever they're doing, whether it's sustainable or not.

• title card : [also read out by Prof. Bartlett]  The first Law of Sustainability: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources CANNOT BE SUSTAINED!

  Albert Bartlett : This follows from the arithmetic of 'steady growth' which we've spent time developing. This is not an opinion. Opinions are debatable. This is fact, there is nothing to debate.

• Albert Bartlett : It's intellectually dishonest to talk about sustainability without stressing the obvious fact that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for sustainability. It's not sufficient. Stopping population growth alone is not sufficient, but there is *no way* you can have sustainability without stopping population growth.

• Albert Bartlett : In the last one hour the world population has increased by about 10,000 people. And the US population in this one hour has increased by about 280 people.

• Albert Bartlett : Because of our enormous per capita consumption of resources, we can say with confidence that the the world's worst population growth problem is here in the United States.

• Albert Bartlett : The average person in the US will consume in their lifetime maybe 30 times the amount of resources that will be consumed by a person in their lifetime in an underdeveloped nation. *We* are the problem. *We* have the responsibility. And we have the authority to deal with the problem here as a domestic problem in the US.

• Albert Bartlett : We have to remember the message of this cartoon.

  [Brickman 's cartoon "the small society" is shown] 

  Albert Bartlett : "Thinking is very upsetting. It tells us things we'd rather not know."

• Albert Bartlett : We should remember the words of Galileo, who said, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, has intended us to forgo their use."

• Albert Bartlett : We should remember the words of Aldous Huxley. He observed that "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

• Albert Bartlett : We should remember H. L. Mencken's philosophy. He believed that it is the nature of humans to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting.

• Albert Bartlett : And we should remember Eric Severeid's law. He observed that "The chief source of problems is solutions."

• Albert Bartlett : Now here's a challenge: Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by larger populations at the local level, at the state level, the national level, or globally?

• Albert Bartlett : Can you think of *anything* that would get better if we crowd more people into our communities, into our state, into the nation, or on this earth. Think about it, if anything would get better with increased population.

• Albert Bartlett : I like the words of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. He said, "Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases which we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are its victims."

• [last lines] 

  Albert Bartlett : And so I hope I've made a reasonable case for my opening statement that I believe that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand this very simple arithmetic. - I thank you very, very much, and i'll be happy to answer questions.