You can see that the price stayed within a factor of 2 of its average price (around $20 in 2009 currency) for roughly 100 years. Furthermore, before World War I, coal was our primary energy source-- less than 20% of our global energy usage came from oil before 1920. To say that the oil industry has had the same drivers as it's changed from being just a source of kerosene to the primary world energy source is inaccurate.
Incidentally I do agree that "presupposing a [sic] impeding [sic] permanent shortfall in global hydrocarbon supplies" is likely to be a poor idea, but not for the reasons you state. I think it's a bad idea because the actual history of oil has been so unpredictable, so acyclic.
Look at the price history-- there is no 25 or 30 year cycle of crude oil crashes beyond the gap from 1979 to the mid-2000's. We can all confirm this for ourselves here: http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inf...
and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_1861_2007.svg
You can see that the price stayed within a factor of 2 of its average price (around $20 in 2009 currency) for roughly 100 years. Furthermore, before World War I, coal was our primary energy source-- less than 20% of our global energy usage came from oil before 1920. To say that the oil industry has had the same drivers as it's changed from being just a source of kerosene to the primary world energy source is inaccurate.
Incidentally I do agree that "presupposing a [sic] impeding [sic] permanent shortfall in global hydrocarbon supplies" is likely to be a poor idea, but not for the reasons you state. I think it's a bad idea because the actual history of oil has been so unpredictable, so acyclic.