I should perhaps add that I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. I just like being skeptical, and I smell ideology in these predictions.
Edit: I'm being too hasty this morning. How exactly does "supply peaking" not have to do with "oil running out"?
Demand trails price and production trails demand by several years and it's related to politics. So it's hard to make real predictions. In the end politics plays a huge role in today’s oil prices and long term we can manufacture it from other sources for less than 200$ per barrel. Granted we use a lot of oil so infrastructure costs are huge so the major players are going to be vary conservative.
Edit for the down-modders: Our "years of consumption" for oil, which is known oil reserves divided by current usage, has increased pretty constantly since 1920. In 1945 we had about 20 years of consumption left, in 2000 we had about 40. You can find this stat as figure 66 in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" which sites the primary source. "Peak Oil" is an unproven baseless scare-mongering prediction about the future.
It should also be noted that these kind of simplistic doomsday predictions have been going around since at least 1865, when Stanley Jevons predicted that England's coal supplies would run out and torpedo the industrial revolution. He failed to account for the incentive effects of rising coal prices.
But you know what they say about those that do not study history...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8183966529898602701
I've seen the hearing at the congress last week, these excutives didn't look and sound very confident to me...
Lots of people aren't happy with President Bush - he's got approval ratings somewhere in the low thirties, I think. Even less people are happy with Congress - they were in the 14% ballpark recently. I'm tired of the whole lot. There are some good Republicans, but I'd sacrifice them to wipe the slate clean.
Term limits!
It's a bootstrapping problem, and a particularly difficult one because there is a reasonable argument against it (people should be free to elect whomever they want).