Funferal

Hubbert’s peak

Over the last 6 weeks or so I’ve been intrigued at the number of varied sources that have raised the topic of peak oil – from friends to the New York Times OpEd page. Now there’s a useful and informative overview of the topic in Alternet. It’s very weird to see this sudden bump in attention to an issue such as this, especially from such a range of sources.
Ignoring the environmental questions for the moment, the economic issues are straightforward – if average annual output decreases and demand stays static (or decreases at anything less than the rate of decrease of the supply) we can expect oil prices to continue to rise. However the rise in cost of energy intensive services and products, such as air transport, is probably much less significant than the geo-political machinations that will arise.
Of course, oil prices have actually decreased today. Kind of like an alcoholic – I have not increased in price today, I did not increase in price yesterday….