Peak Oil peak

…The Peak Oil crowd is in a struggle with reality. The sandwich-board energy theorists who claim, “The end is near” for oil, are glumly looking at the crash in the price of crude. What was supposed to be heading for $200 now seems set to dip under the $100 mark. Over at Peak Oil: The End of the Oil Age, the Web site operator is absorbing the shock. “Oil prices have fallen and with it the mass interest in the Peak Oil phenomenon.”

It looks grim. “The hits on this Web site have fallen, my webstore DVD stocks have suddenly stopped shrinking rapidly and it is business as usual again.” But the writer adds: “Don’t be fooled by falling oil prices.”


Over at the Post Carbon Institute, “the excitement is over.” When the price of oil was above $140, “it was easy for Peak Oilers to feel vindicated and to hop on board the giddy Ferris wheel ride.” But as the price of oil drifts down, “the excitement is over … Page views on Peak Oil Web sites have fallen. All that talk of the party being over was just so much scaremongering.”

So what went wrong? The market, apparently. When it comes to capturing the scope of the looming Peak Oil disaster — shrinking supplies, soaring prices, economic crises — the market is “not very useful.” Worse, the market can be downright misleading. Oil went down, it is said, “because manipulators have enough money to overwhelm almost any buying frenzy for a short period of time; once they’ve created the illusion that ‘all is OK’ and oil is not going to go through the roof, they start accumulating positions. Once the positions are accumulated, they then jam the market up with a burst of buying that overwhelms the supply, the mood is thus thrown into uncertainty, the talking …” Huh?

Financial Post