Some time back I received an e-mail that told me that Albert A. Bartlett’s days were numbered. The note that he wrote to us after he visited his doctor was filled with the peace and happiness of a man who had understood long ago what was important in life and had lived his own life accordingly. Al died at the age of 90 years over the weekend.
I met him for the first time in 2005 at a conference in New Zeeland and since then we have had sporadic e-mail exchange. For him peak oil was a must and one of the reasons was that exponential growth using a limited resource will always come to a maximum. His most known quote is “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”, and his lecture on the subject has been seen of millions. “The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See” was originally in 8 parts on YouTube but you can now see the entire lecture as one video. If you have seen it, see it again. If not, you must see it:
The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See
Sam Powrie
September 11, 2013
Hi Kjell,
I agree with your observations about Albert Bartlett. He’s a great example for me of why constant and ongoing public information, teaching and education at all levels of society is an important responsibility of all those who have benefited from a higher education. I always imagined him to be a modern equivalent of what in Australia we knew as the ‘community institute’ – knowledge for Everyman. I would support your estimation of his chalk-board lecture. As a non-mathematically trained person it was indeed the first, the clearest and probably the most telling ‘mathematical experience’ of my life! The 2nd most important was getting my head around Jeffrey Brown’s ‘Export Land Model’, another very important step in my understanding of energy resource. As was understanding the demands of energy flows in western society as modelled by Prof. Susan Krumdiek in New Zealand – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9YRNqewGIY. All this available on Youtube!
Sam Powrie, Adelaide.