When President George W. Bush announced last May that "we're running out of energy in America," students of history could have been forgiven for thinking ruefully of George Otis Smith. Once a formidable figure in Washington, DC, Smith led the U.S. Geological Survey from 1907 to 1930. Just after the First World War, Survey geologists assessed the state of the world's petroleum reserves-and concluded that they would be totally exhausted before 1940. Alarmed by the prospect of what he called a "gas famine," Smith charged that the position of the United States "can best be characterized as precarious."

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