when oil prices were rising, a lot of people were talking about "peak oil." Now that oil prices are falling, and OPEC is scrambling to fight that result, I haven't seen that kind of talk. It would be interesting to do one of those surveys to see if there are oscillations of references to "peak oil" in newspapers that are correlated with (real) oil price fluctuations.
I've always been afraid that they were confusing the results of short-term supply bottlenecks and steeply increasing demand with those of a fundamental and final running-out of oil supplies. Of course, we can't know for sure. The big problem, I think, is that falling oil prices may discourage conservation efforts, the struggle to replace fossil fuels with clean ones. That would speed up global warming. -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
