Few people have done more to coax a complacent, energy-voracious world out of its self-induced stupor than Matthew Simmons.

A successful energy industry investment banker from Houston who once advised the Bush campaign in 2000, Simmons is the Saul of Peak Oil. His transformation from oil and gas project financier to peak oil apostle didn't occur during a blinding encounter on the road to old Damascus, but over weeks and months of reflection and research on comments he'd heard during an oil industry conference on the Persian Gulf several years ago.

And like nascent Christianity in the first century, the Peak Oil movement has been growing slowly, but steadily, which Simmons briefly recounted in his opening remarks to the several hundred attendees at the first meeting of the United States chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Denver, Colorado. He noted that there were just 45 "odd" people who met for the first conference in Upsala, Sweden some four years ago. By last year's meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, attendance had grown to several hundred, including 10 film documentary crews. It was decided at that meeting to found ASPO-USA.

Simmons, who stands maybe 5' 5" and has the ruddy complexion of an English schoolboy, placed the purpose of the Denver meeting in its context by observing that the "issue, basically, is pretty simple: Is peak oil real and if it is, is it important?"

He pointed out that despite being five years into the new century, "we've not had a crisis yet," curiously ignoring the 'war on terror' or the invasion of Iraq'.

"So, this might actually be the first crisis of the Twenty-first Century".

To answer the question of will peak oil be the first major crisis of the new century, Simmons asked rhetorically, "Does the twenty-first century need abundant energy growth? And second, can this growth be met by technology and hard work? And if not... if for some reason technology and hard work fail to create more energy, will demand for more energy understand and not grow anymore, or could a gap between demand and supply morph into what is commonly called a crisis?"

Simmons explained to the gathering of energy industry experts, government policy makers, environmentalists and the media, what he means by the word "crisis".

"A crisis, through all the ones we've every had, is basically a series of problems that we ignored until they combined to become terminal".

He pointed out that the twentieth century was the "greatest century of enlightenment and innovation ever. Unfortunately, the twentieth century was also marked by unintended problems that became awful crises."

These included four major crises: "The Great War (WWI) and its non-resolution", the unregulated economic excesses of the "Roaring Twenties that morphed into the Great Depression", the "Peace in Our Time movement that basically became World War Two", and finally the well-intentioned socialist revolution that was derailed by the Bolsheviks and was then hijacked by communist thugs like Stalin and Mao who caused the death of 100 million people.

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Full story at: http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=article&storyid=944