"President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the "imminent exhaustion" of fossil fuels and other natural resources--"the weightiest problem now before the nation." Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued "the present rate of increase in production," a "marked decline" would begin "within a very few years." Output would hit zero about 1935--a prophecy the survey repeated, annual report after annual report, for almost twenty years."