There are those who will tell you that oil is a cyclical business and a global fungible commodity. It rises and falls with the business phase. If you look at a hundred-year chart, it is as obvious as a sidewinder on a sand dune. A sine wave through time — up and down in seven-year cycles.

But there are others who believe in the “Peak Oil” argument, the ultimate end-game, like a Suburban crushing a Subaru at the end of a long hill. Peak Oil enthusiasts will point to long lists of numbers, detailed maps of known reserves, past prognosticators of genius, and declare with tinfoil-hat fervor that “we are running out of oil.”

I’ve read these books and listened to the speeches. The idea that there is a finite amount of oil on the planet, and we are near the point where we will extract less in the next hundred years than we did in the past. Makes sense to me, as does the business cycle. I don’t know if the hundred-year history of the oil cycle is over. There is always a “this time it’s different” ideology at the peak. But then again, sometimes, it is different.

What we do know — what isn’t in dispute — is that oil is expensive, and that by all accounts the easy oil has already been found and is being extracted at a furious pace.

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