If the world’s economy returns to normal, then you’ll see the price of oil go up, because demand will increase to where it was pre-crash, but to my knowledge, supplies have not increased.
One way of forestalling peak oil and buying us time to develop and deploy alternatives would be to adjust our ideas about what constitutes a “normal” economy.
If I were inclined towards conspiracy theories, I might suppose that the current global economic situation was engineered for just this purpose.

It was the wrong sort of bet to make.
You don’t try to project the price. You project production. John Tierny may win the bet, but he is an idiot who has no business or scientific background to tell geologists what they should know about their own field of expertise.

Julian took up gambling during the last end-of-oil crisis, in 1980, when experts were predicting a new age of scarcity as the planet’s resources were depleted by the growing population. Julian had debunked these fears in “The Ultimate Resource,” the bible of Cornucopian economics, which showed how human ingenuity had kept driving down the price of energy and other natural resources for centuries.
Utter rubbish to compare this book to peal oil. Oil production peaked in the United States in 1971 or so as predicted by geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956. His bell curve model for oil field production is the standard for predictions in geology and petroleum engineering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
The more I read of Mr Tierny, the more I wonder that anybody lets this fool near a computer.

Supply and demand was not the cause of the huge increase in the price of oil that peaked in July 2008 and the dramatic decrease in oil prices that started in July 2008. Oil speculators drove up the price of oil with credit default swaps. The price started to fall in July 2008 because Congress was putting pressure on the CFTC to review for oil speculation. In addition, several industry experts were researching the issue. The reports issued around August and September 2008 found that supply and demand were not the cause for increased prices.
The global economic crash further limited the oil speculators because a large number were coming from the big investment banks that received bailouts.

I have a peak oil nutter in my family, who speaks of this topic to the exclusion of anything else. He makes family gatherings painful. So I have been following this topic involuntarily for years. The actual issue is flow rates and production. The declines in oil production predicted by Simmons have yet to materialize. He predicted Mexico would cease to export oil by now. Uber peak oil hysteric Matt Savinar predicted the end of civilization was imminent due to unsustainable oil prices of 400 a barrel and up!! Peak oil nutters wild impossible fantasies have yet to materialize. Apocalypse is a delusional fantasy.

Peak oil is real, but it is not realistic to imagine it playing out in the course of a couple years. Rather it will play out over decades. $200 oil may happen– but not necessarily in our life times. And of course oil is not perfectly inelastic in respect to price: as the price goes up people can and do use less of it. That’s been the case in the US since before the recession.

I am not an expert in the oil industry, but I’d be willing to speculate that at $200/barrel, to say nothing of $400/barrel, it would be economical to synthesize oil using coal as feedstock.

celtic, Hubbert’s theory is the standard for peak oil theorists, but as you know there are lots of people who disagree with him and his ideas. There are also lots of models other than Hubbert’s for peak oil, so I’m not sure Tierney is an “idiot” in anyone’s eyes but your own.
As I’m sure you know, Hubbert also predicted peak oil in 1995 which didn’t happen; that does not mean he was wrong, just that we probably can’t predict peak oil at all.

Stagflation *is* the new normal.

Which “peak oil” measurement are we talking about?
Peak oil per capita happened in 1979.

but as you know there are lots of people who disagree with him and his ideas.
Are they trained geologists?
If not, then I take their scepticism as seriously as I do with that of flat earthers and young earth creationists.
As I’m sure you know, Hubbert also predicted peak oil in 1995 which didn’t happen; that does not mean he was wrong, just that we probably can’t predict peak oil at all.
So the correct predictions he made were not really correct? We imagined it?
Fortunately, science tends to be self correcting, and when the observations don’t perfectly match the prediction, we can adjust the model.
M. King Hubbert initially predicted in 1974 that peak oil would occur in 1995 “if current trends continue.”[104] However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, global oil consumption actually dropped (due to the shift to energy-efficient cars,[105] the shift to electricity and natural gas for heating,[106] and other factors), then rebounded to a lower level of growth in the mid 1980s. Thus oil production did not peak in 1995, and has climbed to more than double the rate initially projected. This underscores the fact that the only reliable way to identify the timing of peak oil will be in retrospect. However, predictions have been refined through the years as up-to-date information becomes more readily available, such as new reserve growth data

No obvious racial angle to ‘Peak Oil’ — if I think of something, I’ll get back to you all.

stari_momak, crude oil is black, so I’m sure you can come up with something.

By Jove you;re right, MH.
Indeed they used to call crude Black Gold, as well as Texas Tea. But the former, I think that would be LeBron James these days.