BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY:

The decision to shutter "The Oil Drum," the leading website devoted to peak oil, has come to symbolize the end of an era - and sparked a furious debate about whether the theory was all along based on a fundamental mistake. 

Commentators have been worried about food and fuel shortages since at least the 18th century. The prototype worrier was Thomas Malthus, who believed food shortages must eventually limit population growth.

Writing in his famous "Essay on the Principle of Population," published between 1798 and 1803, Malthus warned population would grow geometrically, while the means of subsistence would grow only arithmetically. "Misery and vice," in the form of war, disease and famine would keep the population in check, Malthus argued.

By the 1860s, concern had switched from food to fuel. Economist William Stanley Jevons worried the exhaustion of Britain's "present cheap supplies of coal" would eventually threaten the country's industrial pre-eminence.

"The exhaustion of our mines will be marked ... by a rising cost or value of coal, and when the price has risen to a certain amount comparatively to the price in other countries, our main branches of trade will be doomed," Jevons noted gloomily in his unlikely bestseller, The Coal Question: an Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines, which was first published in 1866.

Of course, coal was eventually replaced by oil, and the forecast shortages never appeared. By 1919, however, concerns were being expressed about the adequacy of oil supplies. The United States is facing "a serious shortage of petroleum," geologist Carl Hugh Beal wrote in a report that year for the U.S. Bureau of Mines on "The Decline and Ultimate Production of Oil Wells."

Follow @brothersjudd