Francis de Winter

Mechanical engineer

He was born in the Netherlands in 1935, but as a child went briefly to Argentina where his father was marketing machinery. He and his family returned to spend the war in the Netherlands under very difficult circumstances but returned to Argentina after it, before taking a degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He remained in the United States, working in the Space Propulsion Laboratory for eight years on space projects before setting up his own company in 1974 to concentrate on solar energy and energy efficiency. He began to appreciate that solar energy had to compete with fossil fuels that were, so to speak, a gift of nature, but subject to depletion. That led him to the recognition of Peak Oil, arranging for several articles on it to be published in journals related to solar energy, and helping with the establishment of one of the first web sites covering the subject.

The US consumes the full body-weight of its total population in petroleum each week. To somebody who survived on very little, this is very clearly not a US need. Instead, it is very clearly aUS disgrace.