Peak oil is a crisis cult, and here’s how you can tell:

1. Do they offer an apocalyptic vision of the future that can only be avoided by listening to their advice?
2. Is the threat wildly out of proportion to the evidence, or fabricated entirely?
3. Are they selling something?
4. Do they have any political motivations?

For the Peak Oil movement, the answer to all of these questions is yes.

1. Peak Oil is all about the coming mad dash for the last of Earth’s energy before the lights go out for good. From here on out, it’s oil wars, water wars, food shortages, mass dieoffs, and the rollback of Western civilisation as we know it. On the other hand, if we take the advice of the prophets, we can learn how to fight the starving hordes off our vegetable patches in 12 easy steps.
2. There is a finite amount of oil in the world, and it’s conceivable that one day we will have burned it all. It is a tremendous logical leap to go from there to doomsday scenarios. Given a relatively free market in oil, a gradually increasing oil price will create incentives to invest in alternatives. If this happens in the next 100 years, those alternatives will probably have to be natural gas and coal, of which there are hundreds of years supply left.
3. Check out the calmy named Life After The Oil Crash. The entire left hand side of the website is adverts for Peak Oil books, solar panels and bicycles. From The Wilderness invites you to make a donation, or purchase something from their store. Dry Dipstick is suffering from Adsense Acne, and every Joe Q. Peak Oil Theorist has a blog hawking his books, with scary titles like The Coming Economic Collapse and The End of Suburbia. They are whipping up fear, then selling you comfort - except the books will never completely assuage your fears while there are still more books to sell.
4. Peak Oil is a reaction against capitalism, globalisation, George W Bush, and the oil industry, all of which are all highly venned within a political movement self-described as Progressive. When the oil is gone, and war has come, it’s the Bushes of the world who will win, and thus is a conspiracy theory born. The core of the conspiracy seems to be the idea that Bush is in league with the Saudis to dominate the world by cornering the market in rapidly depleting oil supplies, but that they’re too stupid to realise this will destroy the world, or are driven by biblical prophecy to do so. The solution to all of this is political, and entirely Progressive: a planned society in which we abandon globalisation and return to low-tech, protectionist, and even tribal economies.

The world may be facing an energy problem, and it’s certainly facing a clean-energy problem, but a problem does not make a crisis, and the facts do not support the hyperbole.