The tumble in the oil price from the $US110 a barrel it was trading at until 18 months ago down to $US30 and heading lower this week demolishes the “peak oil hypothesis” — the theory that the exploitation of the earth’s finite oil reserves is approaching the maximum output that is physically possible beyond which world oil supplies will enter an irreversible decline. It is an idea that flowed from the arguments popularised in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the consumption of natural resources was unsustainable. Dystopias of the time, like Stanford University Professor Paul Erlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb , predicting mass starvation by the late 1970s as the world ran out of food, and The Limits to Growth arguing that the world would run out of mineral resources including oil, were hugely influential. The Limits to Growth , published in 1972 by the Club […]