Does anyone still look at oil prices?
Seriously look at them.
Not as scrolling decoration beneath catastrophe headlines, but as signals.
Because while the world is busy inhaling the next scare story, the market appears to be whispering something profoundly inconvenient.
Perhaps even mocking us.
We are in year five of the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
Not some peripheral brushfire.
A grinding industrial war involving one of the top oil producers on earth.
At the same time, conflict in the Middle East threatens or disrupts the Strait of Hormuz—the single most important hydrocarbon chokepoint in the world.
On paper this ought to be the sort of geopolitical cocktail that sends crude screaming.
In a normal world?
This would be $250 oil territory.
Possibly worse.
Analysts would be fainting into spreadsheets.
Governments hoarding.
Commentators speaking in apocalyptic tongues.
And yet—
oil loafs around near $100.
After daily horror headlines.
After war upon war.
After endless breathless talk of supply risk.
One begins to suspect reality is quietly refusing the script.
Because if even the combined crises of the age cannot push oil much beyond a modest drift north of $100, something important is being revealed.
Demand may not be what the panic merchants imply.
Correct for inflation and that $100 is closer to roughly 65 dollars in 2008 terms.
A bargain, really.
Especially compared with the 2008 oil price spike near $148—
which happened without today’s grand operatic war backdrop.
That should provoke thought.
Instead it barely provokes curiosity.
And meanwhile the green priesthood dances.
Dances!
At a moment that should, if their theories possessed muscle, inspire awe bordering on terror.
Because what should this crisis have demonstrated?
The fragility of oil?
No.
Its resilience.
Its stubborn abundance.
The world does not run without oil.
That remains true no matter how many glossy transition brochures are printed.
And plainly, there is enough oil still moving through the system to prevent even combined geopolitical disorder from producing the price apocalypse perpetually forecast.
That matters.
Because markets, however distorted, still leak truth.
And one truth leaking through is this:
The system is not starved.
It may be stressed.
It may be politically noisy.
But it is not starved.
And that fact is a rather impolite commentary on much of the energy transition mythology.
Because if unreliable intermittent energy could genuinely substitute for hydrocarbons at scale—
why do the serious countries still cling to oil with both hands?
Why does China, import dependent and strategically unsentimental, not run on wind sermons?
Why does Israel, hardly known for casual attitudes toward survival, not entrust its future to weather-dependent virtue?
Because states living in the realm of consequences do not confuse aspiration with systems engineering.
They use what works.
And what works still runs, overwhelmingly, on hydrocarbons.
Especially oil.
Always oil.
This is the piece ideology keeps tripping over.
If “green energy” were genuinely ready to displace oil in the way advertised, oil markets under this level of geopolitical strain ought to be reacting very differently.
Instead crude behaves almost insultingly calm.
As if shrugging.
As if saying:
We’re not done here.
And perhaps that is the true scandal.
Not that oil survives.
That so many still pretend it is on the verge of obsolescence while every serious nation behaves otherwise.
There is a strange beauty in watching reality humiliate dogma through pricing.
No manifesto.
No debate.
Just a number on a screen refusing to cooperate.
Sometimes markets whisper what propaganda shouts over.
And right now the whisper sounds suspiciously like an obituary.
Not for oil.
For illusion.
Perhaps this is not the birth dance of green supremacy.
Perhaps it is the death dance of a fantasy that mistook subsidized theater for civilizational replacement.
Reality, as usual, gives very few rat droppings.