Emeritus Professor Albert Bartlett, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been fascinated with the idea of overpopulation and peak energy for some time now. With his scientific and common-sense approach toward these ideas, he has been unable to ignore the simple arithmetic surrounding overpopulation and the consequences humanity faces if it does not drastically curb population growth and petroleum use.

Overpopulation is a politically incorrect topic. Bartlett notes in our interview that any politician running on a platform of population reduction for the betterment of our society would never be elected, and the evidence can be seen worldwide: In the United States, when population growth began to slow after the post-world war II boom, legal and illegal immigration both became easier, and now our borders are simply fading. In Europe, countries like Italy, which had evolved to the point of negative population growth, had leaders worrying more about short term economics than how beautiful more resources for less people could be, and as a result, immigration policy loosened throughout Europe. Now, countries as far north as Sweden have to deal with a huge influx of Muslim immigrants, and Italy has had to deal with an influx of illegal immigrants from all over, simply because their political leaders have wrapped the term progress around forced assimilation of an outside population.

The well eventually runs dry, and this is Bartlett's point of contention. Consider the fact that the United States currently imports approximately 60% of its petroleum, 15% of its natural gas, and 20% of the food we eat. These figures alone demonstrate that the United States has reached its carrying capacity and should quickly limit population by any reasonable means. Dr. Bartlett understands the long term effects of damaging growth – to the environment, to resource supplies, and particularly to personal freedoms once enjoyed in the United States. He points out in his "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy" lecture, that democracy has been reduced in Boulder by a factor of five, when considering population has increased by a factor of five with the same amount of political representation in the city for the past fifty years. These are astounding figures, and one need only look to our own Constitution which was supposed to prevent the effects of power concentration despite population growth. It states in Article 3, "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand". The term "shall not exceed" was upheld as a maximum number of 30,000 per representative by President Washington's first veto and federalist papers on the topic. Dr. Bartlett poses a challenge here to those that would insist population growth is somehow necessary to a healthy economy or long-term outlook, or even those that feel richer nations should allow immigration from poorer nations as an altruistic gesture: He states "Can you think of any problem, on any scale, microscopic or global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, nationally, or globally?"

This is all aside from the environmental damage and lack of sustainability of any population growth with 6.7billion now on the planet. Population growth ends up having an exponential effect on resource consumption at today's levels, and Dr. Bartlett shows that we already seem to be on the downward slope of available resources, by using the Hubbert curve, so named after Dr. M. King Hubbert. In order to sustain the current population at current rates of consumption, we would have to find more petroleum in the ground than we have ever found before in the history of petroleum discovery and exploration, and even this amount would only last a very short while. This is a simple fact: as the population has grown, we have used an increasing amount of petroleum, and so it follows with Bartlett's arithmetic that to sustain those levels of consumption, more than we have ever used would have to continually be found – and we all know that is not possible. Even with reduced consumption per person in some small degrees, due to green technologies and more conservative energy use, population growth still requires more and more energy. Any population growth at current levels only hastens the end of all petroleum exploration in our world, which would be disastrous in terms of the resource wars and the chaos which will ensue.

As noted by Dr. Bartlett, petroleum isn't just used to power vehicles; it's used for fertilizer to help grow food. This means that we are tying our very survival as a species to petroleum – a non-renewable energy source – with a population dependent on that non-renewable energy source growing by the tens of millions each year. Where is the common sense in politics, such that we are ignoring this problem and pretending it doesn't exist? Dr. Bartlett notes that even Al Gore, someone who has been preaching environmentalist and greenist values for some time now, mentions the issue in his book, "An Inconvenient Truth", yet refuses to offer population reduction as an answer to any of our environmental problems.

Bartlett speaks of solutions such as net-zero immigration policy, and reversing tax policy which rewards those with more children instead of punishing those with more children, considering our current population crisis. Of course, reproduction is beautiful, which is all the more reason to be less careless about reproduction and implement policies and education to help people better understand the negative effects of unwanted children and too many new children. Dr. Bartlett has stated many times in the past: the goal of reproduction education should be that, "Every child is a wanted child". Again, we see a theme of common sense and logic permeating Dr. Bartlett's arguments, yet most are unwilling to accept these ideas because they go against the grain of the freedoms and conveniences we enjoy in modern society, preferring to shut out the idea that one day, this could all end.

And speaking of human convenience in modern society, in response to a question regarding what would happen to human dignity if population growth continues at current rates; Isaac Asimov was quoted as saying: "It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom any time you want to, and stay as long as you want to, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution. But, if you have twenty people in the same apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door; 'Aren't you through yet?', and so on. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies; the more people there are, the less one individual matters."

This statement by Asimov, quoted by Dr. Bartlett in his "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy" lecture, is profound when considering the mentality of our politically correct world and the crowd which allows it to perpetuate. We are told that all life is special and everyone should be equal, yet we ignore the simple fact that we are creating too much life, which actually reduces the quality of life for everyone in the long term. A conscious decision to reduce our population in the long term by breeding at below replacement levels with the goal of shrinking to a few hundred million would solve most of the resource-related issues in health care, government, and agriculture very quickly. Corrupt believes this should go hand in hand with limited immigration policies and a focus on local, organic cultures which are self-sufficient: after all, if there was plenty of space and resource for everyone, who would want to emigrate away from their culture and homeland?

Part of the problem, as always, is the hunger for power by those that already have it. If one is part of the political elite, able to direct militaries and withstand coup attempts as countries become increasingly unstable, being able to control more people can be seen as a good thing. In a democratic government, being able to represent more people is a good thing, because there's less accountability in government: there are so many people of varying backgrounds in each district, that a representative is free to do almost anything in terms of voting for certain laws, because unified political ideas and beliefs are lost in the crowd. As such, Dr. Bartlett bemoans the fact that even scientists have succumbed to political correctness, when in the past, scientists seemed to pay it no mind. In other words, the people who are currently the most qualified to direct us toward these ideas and pay them the attention they deserve, are making a conscious effort not to do so.

It is easy to lose hope at hearing such facts. The future of our planet and the human race is increasingly uncertain. But Corrupt believes that we are most certainly going to reach a point where population growth will stop. In fact, extrapolating Dr. Bartlett's logic out to its conclusion, there is no question that human population growth will stop. The only question is: will we, as an enlightened species, stop population growth willingly, and pay attention to long term solutions to our problems? Or will we wait until petroleum is completely dried up, there is no more of it to find, and all of our air travel, car travel, water travel, massive corporate-owned farms, supermarkets, and all commercial transportation cease or are drastically curbed down to nearly nothing? In this scenario, our economists and political leaders will no longer be speaking of democracy, helping out foreign nations, allowing immigration, nor will religious leaders be speaking of producing as many good Christians, Jews, or Muslims as possible to fulfill prophecies. Our apocalypse will be in the form of stupidity: continuing to grow well beyond our means and failing to adjust to the simple arithmetic and common sense described by Dr. Bartlett in his published works and lectures.

Recently, we were able to spend some time interviewing Dr. Bartlett to gain additional insight into his ideas.

Frank Azzurro:

Thanks very much for taking the time to answer some questions for Corrupt.org today. We'll be discussing some of your ideas which are reviewed per some essays you published online and particularily the DVD lecture titled, "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", which I thought was very good, so - let's get right to it. The first question I had was: was there a specific event during your life, either before or after you joined you joined the staff at UC Boulder, which triggered this intense dedication to the idea of overpopulation?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

I don't know if there was a single event... It just sort of grew on me, as I - you know, I dropped out of college years ago, worked on iron-ore freighters on the Great Lakes, and I wondered, will we ever run out of this rich Mesabi iron ore? You know, we'd go out and get 10,000 tons and send them down to a blast furnace in New York. And I sort of dimissed the question from my mind. I said look Al, you're just a dishwasher; and there are smart people in Washington, so if there's any danger of running out they'll alert us in advance so we can slow down. And I'm sort of ashamed to admit how long it took me to realize that the people in Washington will not tell you when there's a problem, and they just go on. And of course most of that Mesabi ore is gone now, and so we have a completely different steel business in this country. And so as I began to lecture on Arithmetic and Growth and applying it to populations I realized more and more that population growth is really the central problem in the whole system. For instance in global warming: If any fraction of the observed global warming can be attributed to the actions of humans, this is all the proof you need, this is positive proof that the human population is larger than the carrying capacity of the Earth. And so we're living on borrowed time. And this means then that it's an inconvenient truth that any and all efforts to reduce global warming that do not address overpopulation are doomed from the start to just be marginal.

Frank Azzurro:

Right. Very true. Now, a lot of the political leaders and journalists today, they talk about greenhouse emissions and "eco-products", things you can buy to say you're "Green", but they never really mention anything about overpopulation or overconsumption; why do you think this is?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

I think it's politically incorrect. Scientists especially don't want to be politically incorrect. Politicians certainly don't want to be politically incorrect. And journalists, by and large- you may get a crusading journalist at some point who will go out and write about it - but by and large, journalists aren't crusaders like that so they won't take it up. In the US it's a problem because something like 80% of the population growth in the US now is due to immigration, and most of it is legal. And so if you say anything about immigration, people will call you all kinds of bad names.

Frank Azzurro:

Yeah, this is true. What changes do you think need to be implemented to the system of our government before our leaders begin taking these problems seriously?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

Well... I don't know. We need to have a national dialogue from coast to coast to say, "Where do we want to be population-wise in 30 years? Do we want to just keep on growing by 3 million extra people every year, or do we want to stabilize it, or do we want to decrease it?" And I like to ask people, when they resist the idea of addressing population growth: Can you think of any problem, on any scale - microscopic or global - whose long term solution is any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced, by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, nationally, or globally. Can you think of ANYTHING that will get better if we crowd more people into our cities, our states, our nation, or the world. And there aren't any answers. Nothing gets better. Everything gets worse.

Frank Azzurro:

This is true, I see that as a recurring theme, in the literature for sure, that you sent over. Now, in terms of - what I want to transition to here - is would you support more local communities that are self sufficient, over this kind of national, you know, everything being centralized and regular old international trade being the norm for basics like food and energy... instead of that, go to more of a local model of self-sufficiency?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

Well, we have to, because petroleum production worldwide has either peaked, or is just about to peak. The data are not clear yet. You have to go maybe 8 or 10 years after the peak to see a real downtrend before you can say, oh the peak was back there. But we're very close to the peak and so when we start down the other side of peak, we'll see a rapid rise in oil prices. Now that means then that everything - and we see it already - automobile travel, air travel, ocean travel, shipping things large distances, food in particular - that's all going to go way up in cost. And [indecipherable] will be less popular. So we need to go to getting more of our food locally. Of course some people say there's no problem with food as long as we've got Safeway supermarkets. We don't need farmers.

Frank Azzurro:

Yeah. A very silly notion, obviously. The convenience with which people enjoy being able to gather food from the supermarket is absurd. It can't last. And you know, that kind of leads people into this illusion, where they just buy packaged food. Do you think humanity in that sense is kind of past the point of understanding this simple arithmetic such that the sudden and drastic decline in energy, and democracy, and economic activity you've been talking about here is inevitable?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

I suspect it is. It is inevitable simply because once oil production clearly peaks worldwide then we will we see a peak of almost everything in the society that depends on oil. A peak in commuting traffic, a peak in airline travel. A peak in big agricultural food production, perhaps starting our shift back to the small independent farmers. But part of the shift is going to be hard to do because the best farmland now is being paved over for subdivisions. But I suspect that we will see things just gradually get tighter and tighter, and once it's clear, which might be 10 years from now, that oil production worldwide is well into its irreversible decline towards zero, then people will really panic. Have you ever read the book Limits to Growth?

Frank Azzurro:

I have not.

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

You've heard of it.

Frank Azzurro:

Yes.

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

Well, it was published in 1972 and it was a computer model, where they plotted things like population, food, pollution, energy, and a couple of other variables as a function of time for the world total global economy. So in 1972, they had the whole history from 1900 to 1972, and that part of the graph is history, and the graph in the future was produced by the computer program. And no matter what they did, population in particular collapsed in the mid part of this century- collapsed means dropped 10% or something. That's a colossal, catastrophic drop. And the whole world community of economists just fell all over themselves to say, this is wrong, you know, doing analysis like this is wrong, and it's just too terrible to be true. And the editorial writers picked up on what the economists said, and they repeated this, that it's terrible; and there were claims that the Club of Rome, which had sponsored it, had withdrawn their approval for it or something like this. And I talked once to a member to the Club of Rome and asked him, on that thing specifically, and he said oh no, we haven't withdrawn our approval for it, that's still a good report. Now in 1992 they published a 20-year update, and their conclusion was we lost 20 years. And in 2002 they published a 30-year update. And it still says the same thing.

Frank Azzurro:

Now, you almost think that, if they had started the analysis maybe 20 years earlier, you know 1972 was kind of this blossoming of politically correct thought, that maybe things would have been different...

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

Well, one of the things that economists love to say is that we've proven Malthus was wrong. Now Malthus wrote his essay on population about 200 years ago. And in the environment that he knew, namely of England and Europe around the year 1800, he predicted widespread famine. Well, these economists all say that we have more people well-fed today than ever before, so we've proven Malthus wrong. And I have to rebut it and say, well yeah, but there's more people starving today than there have ever been before, so maybe Malthus was right. And then you look at it, well how come we do have so many people well fed today, and the answer is petroleum. And [modern] farming is just the use of land to convert petroleum into food. And so, without petroleum, we're going to see a peak in agricultural production, and that could trigger this downswing in US population, in world population.

Frank Azzurro:

Right, it's certainly inevitable. And just kind of switching gears here - there was a representative from Louisiana named John LaBruzzo - he recently gained some press by outlining a plan of allowing volunteers on social welfare programs to be sterilized for a thousand dollars. So this is for volunteers. This is probably not a good longterm solution, in terms of protecting liberty, and forming a better society; but in the context of the times, and the information you've shared over the years, what do you think of that plan?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

Well I don't - you know - that is eugenics, and again that has a bad name. And 100 years ago people talked about sterilizing people that were in insane asylums, and - I think society's completely rejected that today to say that the few cases that may have been done, in the past hundred years or so, they were wrong. So... no, I think we just have to educate people, and get them to realize - for instance, here's a very local thing: you have to realize that at the local level, part of the Chambers of Commerce are out promoting growth, and the growth never pays for itself. Your taxes have to go up in your community to pay for the cost of growth in your community. And that's the thing I think we ought to just hit on as hard as we can. And there was a study done by a planter in Oregon, it's in a little book called Better, not Bigger, and the author is Eben Fodor. And he says every new house in Oregon costs Oregon taxpayers overhaul, something in the order of $25,000. Unpaid public requirements for schools, and fire protection, police, water, sewer, all the municipal infrastructure- highways, streets, and so on... it never pays for itself. Yet you hear all these promoters saying oh, yeah, well you've got to get new industry here, to broaden the tax base or something like this. And I'm debating it once in a while, with big promoters, and I say, I know what you mean when you say broaden the tax base. You mean raise everyone's taxes to pay for the cost of your growth, don't you? And yet [indecipherable]

Frank Azzurro:

Right. Given what I feel is your libertarian viewpoints to an extent, I am curious as to your thoughts on the fact that statistically speaking, we tend to have people with higher IQs having fewer children and later in life. And you mentioned education. Would you support measures that would encourage those with higher IQs – well, they're already having fewer children; maybe encourage those with lower IQs to have less children, and vice versa?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

I would just encourage everyone to have access to family planning; to make sure that medical care [is a priority]…the ultimate goal should be that every child is a wanted child. You cannot pick out people by IQs and treat one group one way and another group another way…that is not an acceptable because of the great uncertainties, and it isn't fair.

Frank Azzurro:

And, it might take – we say education and we've been talking about this throughout the interview; what might some of the other measures be, short of, if you simply overthrow regimes; which is a radical solution and tends to be counterproductive...more aggressive than just education, but short of a directionless revolution?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

Well, you can use a tax policy; what you can do is say if you have two children you get no exemptions on your income tax, then if you have 3, 4, and 5 children, each would require higher taxes paid. Now that's just the reverse of what it is now, you get benefits and reductions for extra kids. That in a sense encourages larger families so what you should do is, you can use a tax situation to convey a message that more children don't help get us toward sustainability. You can see that zero population growth is not something to be feared, virtually all of Europe is at zero population growth right now, and it hasn't been the end of the world. There are some problems in making the transition, but there's nothing inherently difficult about having low fertility rates.

Frank Azzurro:

Right, and economically speaking it doesn't make sense; we do have a tax policy that tends to reward people with more kids – certainly something I feel might work. Final question, Dr. Bartlett if you could – if you've thought about this, if you could implement five important changes to society today, what would those be?

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

First of all, through an educational program, try to get the fertility rate down. The second thing would be zero net immigration. It's estimated a couple hundred thousand leave the country voluntarily every year; we could let in a couple hundred thousand so there would be no net gain or loss from immigration. And you do that for a period of time until you get used to it, and learn how to run our society, because it's very clear that any society that has to import people to do the work for the society is by definition unsustainable. The third thing is to put a great emphasis on energy conservation, meaning all sorts of things to get people to use less energy in their homes, their daily lives, and their workplaces, because we need to – we import a big fraction, something like two-thirds of the petroleum we use in this country is imported. We should try to get those imports down just as far as we can. Then I think we need to have a program of good medical care, so people can live longer and more productive lives, but that sort of reinforces that if you do that, if you help people live longer, then you need to reduce the fertility rate to compensate for that. And then I think we need a big environmental program, to ensure the air is clean and the water is clean; that we're not continuing this business of all this pollution that we have. But the top of the [list] is to get the population stabilized and get it on a downward curve, down to a level that is sustainable.

Frank Azzurro:

That's all I had, Dr. Bartlett, right now, and once again, thank you very much for spending the time to talk with me today.

Dr. Albert Bartlett:

All right, thank you.

Frank Azzurro:

Thank you very much!

Correction: Article 1, section 2, states in the Constitution that there should be one representative for every 30,000 people.

Transcribed from phone interview by Frank Azzurro and Anton Rays.