Does ‘Peak Oil’ Cause Oil Prices or Do Oil Prices Cause ‘Peak Oil’?

‘Peak oil’ is meant to drive a secular increase in oil prices.  But what if the cyclical behaviour of oil prices actually drove belief in peak oil?  Matthew Kahn notes that traffic at the peak oil blog The Oil Drum is closely correlated with oil prices.  The direction of causality is fairly unambiguous:

I don’t believe that the Oil Drum blog causes gas price dynamics. The causality runs from oil price dynamics causing interest or declines in interest in the Oil Drum blog.

posted on 10 January 2009 by skirchner in Economics, Oil

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