Where are the “peak oil” alarmists?

Where are the “peak oil” alarmists when we need them to spice up the news of rising gasoline prices? Have they all gone into hiding?

Gas prices in Colorado are about to crack $3 a gallon again and possibly stay there for some time. Isn’t the moment ripe for doomsayers to emerge, blaming this market fluctuation on America’s fossil fuel “addiction” and the depletion of world petroleum supplies?

Instead, we read sober articles such as the one in Tuesday’s Denver Post analyzing factors responsible for the price rise without mention of the trendy theory that global production has peaked (or will peak soon) and that shrinking supplies will trigger an oil shock sooner rather than later.

Maybe the alarmists are still updating their talking points.

Back in 2005, when the Denver World Oil Conference featured a parade of pessimists predicting a future of soaring prices and depleted reserves, another Denver Post columnist (who has since moved on) warned of oil hitting “$200 a barrel, which even the experts in the industry see coming soon to a gas station near you.” Unimpressed, I e-mailed her with an offer.

“If the inflation-adjusted price of oil hits $200 a barrel in the next five years and stays there for three months . . . I vow never to write about oil again,” I promised. She should take an identical vow of silence, I suggested, “if the price doesn’t achieve that level.”

Alas, my offer was spurned. But as I recently discovered, The New York Times’ John Tierney was making a somewhat similar wager around that time involving the same $200-per-barrel price in 2010. And Tierney, being a media big dog, went right to the top, sealing a five-year wager for $5,000 with Mr. Peak Oil himself, Matthew Simmons, author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.”

Needless to say, Tierney won. (Simmons, unfortunately, died in August, although the debt was paid.)

In a recent column, Tierney explained that while he was no expert in “Saudi oil production or the other ‘peak oil’ arguments that global production was headed downward,” he had learned from the late economist Julian Simon that “you can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.”

The exuberant Tierney maintains the “overall energy situation today looks a lot like a Cornucopian feast” — maybe a tad too rosy — ticking off such examples as “giant new oil fields” off the coasts of Africa and Brazil, the oil sands in Canada, an increase in U.S. production, and the discovery of “vast quantities of natural gas.”

He might also have mentioned the uptick in Russian production after its collapse in the 1990s, a potential surge of oil from Iraq and even the surprising yield from the Bakken formation in North Dakota, which The Associated Press reports “could leapfrog in a few years from the fourth-biggest oil producing state to No. 2, trailing only Texas.” The Bakken is now believed to hold 25 times as much recoverable oil as the official estimate just 15 years ago.

Not that an oil glut is in the offing, given rising demand in China, India and elsewhere. More to the point, inept governments from Venezuela and Mexico to Nigeria and Iraq keep a throttle on supplies.

If we do suffer an oil shock in the next decade, it will be the product of political constraints, not played-out reserves. Otherwise, remain calm. Oil historian Daniel Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which never hopped aboard the peak-oil express, expects supplies to grow for the next two decades. And any longer forecast is suspect on its face.

After all, who knows what technologies will be employed by then to reduce the need for petroleum or to boost its supply? As Yergin explained a few years ago, “This is the fifth time the world is said to be running out of oil. Each time . . . technology and the opening of new frontier areas has banished the specter of decline. There’s no reason to think that technology is finished this time.”