The visible invisible hand

The invisible hand of the marketplace is not so invisible if you know how to look. Peak Oil and climate change are converging to drive new directions in the energy market.

Market moves cause behavior change. Are you ready for this?

There has always been a limit on the amount of petroleum in any given oil reserve and the apparent glut of oil we’ve all lived on since 1859, when we began extracting crude oil in Titusville, PA, exists only because we have continued finding more oil elsewhere. But all of the elsewheres have been drying up for over 150 years.

Is there a supreme irony in the fact that just as carbon dioxide is accumulating in environment-killing proportions in the atmosphere we are running out of the stuff? Or is the universe telling us something profound that we need to pay attention to? Are we running out of oil? The idea of peak oil is not new. It was first brought to our attention in the 1950’s but because there were still many more elsewheres to drill no one thought much of it. But that’s not true anymore.

In 1956, M. King Hubbert, then a geologist and geophysicist working at Shell Oil Company, in Houston, Texas, predicted that the rate of oil production in the US would peak in about 1970 and begin to decline thereafter. Hubbert’s prediction was remarkably precise but should not be a surprise. New inventions like horizontal drilling and fracturing (fracking) have made additional oil from…