I wondered, when I learned about Peak Energy, about the Bush administration. Did Cheney get this (being an industry insider with high-level visibility into many major's operations), and really think that putting a standing army in Iraq would give us a semi-secure source of oil for longer than we would have otherwise? That is exactly what Cheney and the NeoCons thought. He warned about Peak Oil when he was Haliburton CEO. The NeoCons advocated an Iraqi invasion before the election, and before W allowed Cheney to pack them into his administration. Cheney was Sec Def during the first Gulf War under Daddy Bush. The restrictions put on Iraq limiting their oil exports were to save the oil in the ground until needed. No one ever pushed Iraq to come clean on the WMDs during the 1990s..Why? Because we didn't need the oil yet. Baby Bush and Cheney decided it was time to get the oil so the second Gulf War was started under the guise of finally forcing Saddam to cough up the fictitious WMDs. How interesting: More business people are actually "getting it" and aren't panicked. The sky is not falling, but the bad news is that "two shoes ARE dropping." First shoe: It is no longer just that peaking will set off economic contraction. Second shoe: It is the hard physical science underlying net energy that undercuts the techno-optimism that still believes that "alternative energy bailouts" will allow us to easily resume our old ways of cheap energy