Jeffrey Ball

With oil prices surging, crude producers in the Permian Basin, the U.S.’s oil heartland, are scrambling to squeeze more oil out of their wells.

A retired Irish geologist is at the center of a small, but suddenly influential, band of contrarians known as the peak-oil movement, which believes that by as early as next year, humanity will have burned through half the oil it will ever get, and that the era of cheap oil is over.