For latter day new agers, the believers in the digital economy, oil is such an old fashioned commodity that it barely rates a mention. In their visions of the future, the economy will run on ideas and computer codes, and somehow escape one of the iron laws of economics: scarcity.
But if the laws of supply and demand have apparently been suspended in the digital world, they are back with a vengeance in the world of energy, as Opec has demonstrated this year. The production cuts that the oil producers' cartel implemented last year have trebled the price of crude, and some economists believe the soaring price of energy will inevitably send the industrialised world into recession.
"The modern world turns on energy; and the biggest provider of that is petroleum," says Professor Andrew Oswald, from the University of Warwick. "I am sceptical when people tell me that Bill Gates and computers have taken over so we don't need to worry about oil stocks any more."
Rather than being the bad guys, though, it is possible that Opec has done the west a good turn this year by putting up the costs of its favourite fuel, even if the price is a painful slump.
We simply cannot afford to consume as much of the stuff as we have been doing. Burning oil is choking the world with carbon dioxide, an important cause of global warning. Second, even without the hand of Opec interfering, oil prices could be about to rise steeply because of dwindling supplies.
The nightmare scenario is outlined by David Fleming in a recent article - After Oil Prospect, November 2000. "The steep decline in the discovery of oil since 1965 means that production, too, must decline, and the turning point is expected in 2005," he writes.
Such gloomy prognoses have been dismissed in the past by analysts, who argue that there are further reserves out there waiting to be discovered.
But Mr Fleming says that many of these new fields are of lower quality than great oil fields which have fuelled world industry since the war and will be more expensive and slower to extract. The turning point will come when demand outstrips supply, sending prices through the roof.
Higher prices will prompt new exploration and make some marginal fields viable. This will only delay the inevitable, according to Mr Fleming. "Within the period 2001-3, the tension between demand and the reduced growth in supply can only be expected to raise the price of oil supplies even further," he says.
Even the relatively conservative International Energy Agency agrees that world oil supply will peak, although it predicts a deadline of 2012.
But its analysis is based on assuming demand grows in line with past trends. An even scarier possibility is raised by Prof Oswald. At present the US, with its 250m consumers, sucks up the largest proportion of world oil - 19m of the 74m barrels the world uses daily. Two-thirds is used for transportation. "Forget software taking over from steel mills," says Mr Oswald. "It is the rise and rise of the motor car and the lorry which is the issue."
At the moment, the average American consumes 25 times the amount of oil used by the average Chinese citizen. China consumes just 4m barrels of oil a day for transport, despite having five times as many people as the US. But what happens when the growing Chinese middle classes trade in their bicycles for cars?
China is about to open its markets and join the World Trade Organisation, a process which involve painful disruptions for many of its citizens, but growing wealth for many others - and the arrival of foreign car firms will provide the opportunity to spend their money.
The country is industrialising rapidly, and while there are only 15m cars in the country now - one for every 125 people - the numbers are rising rapidly.
Prof Oswald says that once China gets the motor car all bets are off. "It's not clear how world oil demand and supply will cope in our children's lives," he says. It is a problem, too, for the politicians gathering at The Hague this week to thrash out an agreement on cuts to carbon dioxide emissions to tackle global warming.
Developing countries such as China were excluded from the agreement outlined three years ago in Kyoto, when industrialised countries agreed to cut emissions back to an average of 5% below 1990 levels over the next decade.
The US is calling on developing nations to shoulder some of the burden of cutting emissions - provoking outrage from their politicians, who point out that it was the west that put most of the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The US position is particularly galling because it has not even managed to sell the relatively modest cuts outlined at Kyoto to an American electorate hooked on oil. The US economy has been firing on all cylinders during the past few years, increasing its demand for energy, and it would now have to cut back its emissions by 20% - a target US industry says is impossibly painful.
One stumbling block which should not be allowed to derail an agreement this week is the question of so-called emissions trading - allowing countries to pay other nations to make carbon dioxide cuts on their behalf.
As a price of signing up to the Kyoto protocol, the US wants to be allowed to achieve its emissions cuts through trading or through other flexible measures such as the clean development mechanism, where developed countries pay to clean up carbon dioxide emissions in the developing world, in exchange for a credit towards their own quotas.
The EU is demanding that emissions trading and other such mechanisms account for no more than half a country's cuts. It is irrelevant for global warming where carbon dioxide is produced - and it makes sense to make the cuts where it is cheapest. If US industry can pay a fac tory in another country to clean up its emissions more cheaply, that will soften the economic impact of the cuts.
If the US signs up to a deal this week then American consumers will just have to change their ways, even if industry is able to make deals offshore. The biggest single contributor to global warming is the private car. US negotiators at the Hague recognise these realities, although few are optimistic about a deal being ratified by Congress any time soon. But if the threat of global warming will not persuade Americans to abandon their love affair with the car, perhaps the prospect of a world running out of oil will.
The US has already used more than two-thirds of its own oil reserves and is now dependent on foreign suppliers for half its daily needs. The remaining reserves are concentrated in countries which regard the US with some suspicion, if not downright hostility. The prospect of being over a barrel to the Middle East might be the shock that America and the world needs to put the necessary investment into cleaner technology.
