An Almost Friendly Update on World Oil

Perhaps the best way to begin is to say that I find it difficult to accept that there are still serious students of the oil markets who believe that the crust of the earth is flush with oil, and a global output peak will not take place for many decades, if ever. Other observers aggressively maintain that technology can take the place of natural resources, by which they mean in the short as well as the long run. I mentioned several of these pundits in my energy economics textbooks (2000, 2007), but one escaped my attention. His

To my way of thinking, the ideal written or spoken discourse on world oil does not avoid theoretical issues, but at the same time is easily absorbed. It attempts to provide anybody and everybody having a genuine interest in the topic with enough information to impress at any hour of the day or night friends, colleagues, and potential employers. An effort would also be made to keep esoteric concepts at a minimum, although when these are essential the presentation remains within the framework of mainstream economic theory. Higher mathematics are not taboo, but would be carefully isolated, because it is