It was with something like an apology that Earl Cook, a geologist and executive secretary of the division of earth sciences at the National Research Council, began his December 1972 article for Technology Review on the energy issues that he felt people would face in the next millennium. Geologists tend to take the long view of our existence on this planet, but Cook worried that his readers would fail to see the relevance of his points.

It may seem only a pleasant intellectual excursion without practical significance to attempt to look either back or ahead on a scale of centuries at man's use of energy resources. Given the exigencies of public decision-making, this venture may be just an intellectual excursion and nothing more. But bear with me ... .