“Surely it is obvious enough, if one looks at the whole world, that it is becoming daily better cultivated and more fully peopled than anciently… What most frequently meets our view and occasions complaint is our teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance.”

Is this Al Gore’s acceptance speech of yet another award for saving the world? Wrong guess. Is this some other “environ” trying to make us feel guilty for existing? Wrong again. It is Quintus Septimius Florens Tertulianus, AKA Tertullian. He was a Christian author who flourished at the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius around 160 A.D. As best we can estimate, the number of humans on earth probably stood at about 200 million. That is approximately 4 percent of today’s figure. Paolo Malanima, a historian who specializes in ancient Roman technology, estimates that per capita consumption of energy was probably 15-20 percent of what it is now. Assuming the figures are more or less correct, the reader is invited to calculate by how much the total use of energy has increased since then.

Fast forward to 1880. At that time Britain was still the world’s largest manufacturing country, though the U.S and Germany were catching up. But how long could the mineral energy sources that had fueled the industrial revolution since the eighteenth century last? Enter William Thomson, AKA Lord Kelvin, one of the nineteenth century greatest scientists. No mere academic, he had a hand in almost every major technological enterprise from the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable down. Today he is remembered above all for formulating the first and second laws of thermodynamics. From his post at Glasgow he sounded a warning. “The subterranean coal-stores of the world,” he said, were “becoming exhausted.” As a result, the day was approaching when “little of [them] is left.” The answer, he thought, lay in windmills.

Since then, probably not a generation has passed when assorted experts did not claim that the resources of “spaceship earth”—as one author called it—were being depleted at a rapid pace and that, unless things changed, disaster was inevitable. Here I shall focus on the most-talked about single resource, i.e. oil. My guide in doing so is Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, an 820-page tome on the search for energy that got under way in earnest around 1880 and has lasted to the present day.

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The name John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937) remains familiar to millions the world over as one of the richest people who ever lived. Not so that of his one-time partner John Dustin Archbold (1848-1916). In 1885, alarmed by a geologist’s warning that the flow of oil in Pennsylvania was but a “temporary and vanishing phenomenon,” he sold his Standard Oil shares at a discount. Not that he was ruined. He still remained a director of the company and sufficiently rich to donate $ 6,000,000 to the University of Syracuse. But it was not the same.

Lord (George Nathaniel) Curzon (1859-1925) was a highly successful British statesman who served first as viceroy of India and then as foreign secretary. In the latter capacity he drew the border between Poland and the Soviet Union named after him. Reflecting the common wisdom of the time, at the end of World War I he declared that “the Allied cause [had] floated to victory upon a wave of oil.” In fact it had been oil which, while only available to the Central Powers in very limited quantities, propelled Allied navies, armies, and air forces all over the world. As so often, dependence led to fear. “There seem[s] to be,” said President Wilson at almost exactly the same time, “no method by which we [can] assure ourselves of the necessary supply at home and abroad.”

A similar warning was sounded by Marion King Hubbert (1903-1989). One of the most preeminent earth-scientists of his time, in 1956 Hubbert shook the world with his idea of “peak oil.” Its subsequent career may be judged from the fact that it has almost three million hits on Google.com. Peak oil, Hubbert explained, meant that American oil production would peak between about 1965 and 1970. At that point it would start declining without anybody being able to do anything about the matter. Totally wrong. In 2012 U.S production was four times greater than Hubbert thought it could be. In his favor it must be said that he also pioneered another concept, “hydraulic fracturing,” which formed part of the title of a seminal paper he wrote in 1957. It was partly the development of this technique that has led to the decline in the price of oil over the last few years.

Since then we have gone through two more scares, one—probably the best known of all—during the 1970s and one in 2008-12. Each time prices, driven by tremendous demand as well as sheer speculation, rose to what had previously been considered unimaginable heights. Each time, as the representatives of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries) met in Vienna, the world shuddered in anticipation of their fateful decisions.

I am old enough to remember a lecture, held soon after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The speaker, a highly-respected Israeli economist, assured his listeners that it was not all our, meaning Israel’s, fault. Even if the number of barrels being produced each day were doubled, he said, a shortage would prevail and prices would continue to go up. It took a few years, but he proved to be totally wrong. During this cycle, as during all previous and subsequent ones, a combination of new extraction technologies, conservation and substitution brought about a glut followed by a price collapse.

And—this is the real point of the story—driven by low prices, lack of investment, and growing demand, each time the price recovered.