by Matthew R. Simmons
Chairman and CEO
Simmons & Company International

Today’s energy reality amounts to a pretty simple story. We are in a deep hole. Times like these, I appreciate the words of the great Will Rogers, who advised, "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." Well, the United States and the world have dug a hole out of a benign energy war.

We’ve landed here because we believed demand was supposed to peak. If you could go back 10 years and Google the word "peak," you would find much talk about how demand was about to peak. It wasn’t supply; supply was supposed to grow, and grow cheaply. Energy economists said so; they told other economists who didn’t know anything about energy, and those people told everyone else. Everybody predicted technology would continually bring down the cost of extracting oil and gas, making it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

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