People continue to explain this the wrong way. There was not a crude oil bubble but a financial bubble...

Another way of looking at it is that there wasn't a bubble in anything--there was a functioning, "growing" economy. Which is the way I see it.

I think the only way the whole shebang can be seen as a bubble is if we look at the economy as a whole as having outgrown the true source of wealth, which is energy. Everything in the economy is basically energy in another form. We "bubbled" in everything because we stopped getting more energy efficient at a time when it got too costly to produce more supply. (And I see virtually no improvement in efficiency happening now or in the immediate future.)

The fact that people still think in terms of a bubble in oil tells me that people will never understand what's going on. In fact, because many of the people talking about bubbles are at TOD, it tells me that people are incapable of understanding it. Which means that as the price of energy rises again, they're going to be screaming about bubbles again. This will lead to the political "solution" of crashing the economy again to bring down the oil price. And each time we crash the economy, we'll be taking out a bigger and bigger percentage of the population.

We've essentially decided to deal with peak oil by letting the richer part of the population continue to thrive at the expense of the poorer part.

From this point, you can pretty much map out your future based on where you are in the food chain right now. Sad.