For those of us who have been watching the energy scene for the last few decades, there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained from the daily fare on the peak oil newsblogs. Once the conservation and appropriate tech movements of the 1970s collapsed beneath the weight of the falling oil prices of the 1980s, it became highly unfashionable to question the theory that the market economy could extract infinite resources from a finite planet.
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A very short time ago, it bears remembering, the suggestion that crude oil might cost more than $60 a barrel within this decade was roundly dismissed as preposterous alarmism, while the grim prospects of economic decline and global famine raised by concerned voices in the Seventies were so far off the radar screens that nobody even bothered to denounce them.