The Wall Street Journal's page one story on the "peak-oil" theory on how we are about to start not having enough oil (story here, requires subscription) describes the theories of Dr. Colin Campbell, a prominent "peak oil" theorist (in a nutshell, we've reached the peak of reserves and are now on the down hill slope). What is interesting is Dr. Campbell's reaction to the most prominent critic of the theory mentioned in the article, Michael Lynch. Here's what the article says: "Dr. Campbell so dislikes Mr. Lynch that he has declined invitations to appear with him in debates. 'It's like asking a doctor to talk about medicine with a faith healer,' Dr. Campbell says. He calls Mr. Lynch 'the high priest of the flat-earth economists.'"

Let's see - someone proposes a theory that reaches conclusions dramatically different from all of natural resource economics and most everyone else, and his response to someone questioning his theory (which predicted that we'd hit the peak in 1995, then when we didn't, moved it to 2005) a "faith healer" and equates the person with all the natural resource economists on his side to a flat earther? It certainly fills me with confidence that Dr. Campbell won't debate people with whom he disagrees. Lynch has a good critique of Campbell here. There is also a good 2001 piece from The Economist here which terms Lynch "one of the few oil forecasters who has got things generally right."

Maybe this was supposed to be one of those stories they used to run in the center column on cute animals and odd people.....