​Oil is often called a 'fossil' fuel; the idea being that it comes from formerly living organisms. This may have been plausible back when oil wells were drilled into the fossil layers of the earth's crust; but today, great quantities of oil are found in deeper wells that are found below the level of any fossils. How could then oil have come from fossils, or decomposed former living matter, if it exists in rock formations far below layers of fossils - the evidence of formerly living organisms? It must not come from living matter at all!

The United States has allowed multiple large, vertically integrated oil companies to merge over the last five years, placing control of the market in too few hands. The result: uncompetitive domestic gasoline markets. Large oil companies can more easily control domestic gasoline prices by exploiting their ever-greater market share, keeping prices artificially high long enough to rake in easy profits but not so long that consumers reduce their dependence on oil (after all, if prices went up too high for too long, then we’d seek alternatives to oil).

Recently, numerous publications have appeared warning that oil production is near an unavoidable, geologically-determined peak that could have consequences up to and including “war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens” (Campbell in Ruppert 2002) The current series of alarmist articles could be said to be merely reincarnations of earlier work which proved fallacious, but the authors insist that they have made significant advances in their analyses, overcoming earlier errors. For a number of reasons, this work has been nearly impenetrable to many observers, which seems to have lent it an added cachet. However, careful examination of the data and methods, as well as extensive perusal of the writings, suggests that the opacity of the work is—at best—obscuring the inconclusive nature of their research.