Think back to early 2004. Oil cost around $40 per barrel 1 —on the high side compared to the previous few decades but not much out of the ordinary. Gasoline still cost under $2.00 a gallon for most of the country. The evening news was more concerned with wardrobe gaffes by Janet Jackson ( too little , at the Super Bowl) and President Bush ( too much , on the USS Abraham Lincoln ) than with energy prices. In retrospect, these were the last days of “normal.” Most everyone in business, the media, and government assumed that the world had plenty of cheap oil. 2 And hardly anyone outside the fossil fuel industry had heard of peak oil, the idea that we were nearing physical limits to global oil production and a new period of oil price and supply volatility. We now know that the world’s conventional oil production […]