The oil man

Maryland's most conservative congressman leading charge against fuel dependency

By Alan Zibel
Baltimore Business Journal

U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, the seven-term congressman from Western Maryland, eagerly flips through the large stack of charts and graphs mounted on white poster board.
"Oh, this is an interesting one," he says, pointing to the chart, propped up against the wall of a conference room in his district office in Frederick.

It's a presentation that Bartlett has given before on the floor of the House of Representatives -- 14 times to be exact, sometimes starting as late as 11 p.m. But that doesn't diminish the folksy 79-year-old Republican's enthusiasm for the subject: a looming crisis, he says, in the worldwide supply of oil.

Bartlett, who was elected to Congress in 1992, has been known in Maryland as a staunch social and fiscal conservative. But over the past year, he has been attracting national attention for his persistent advocacy of the theory that the world's oil production is at or approaching its maximum capacity. In doing so, he is echoing concerns among liberal environmentalists and national security-minded conservatives that the nation's reliance on foreign oil enriches hostile interests and puts the country's security at risk.

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