An elite government-appointed group called the National Conservation Commission is charged with taking a comprehensive inventory of natural resources in the United States and discover where resources are being inefficiently handled and even squandered. They come back to the United States Congress with an alarming report that the national supply of oil will be entirely used by within just 25 or 30 years more at the rate that the country is currently burning through the precious and decidedly finite fuel source. The year is 1909. What sounds like the story of a dystopian future is, in fact, a now laughable gaff from ... (full story)