This Saturday just passed – July 11 – was unofficial Peak Oil Day. On July 11, 2008, the price of a barrel of oil hit a record $147.27 in daily trading. That same month, world crude oil production achieved a record 74.8 mbpd.

Since then, a pressure group called the Post Carbon Institute has been trying to get the anniversary marked as the day world oil production began to decline, with one activist at the Institute recently declaring:

"In July, 2008 the production of oil around the world peaked. For years prior to this, geologists, economists, politicians, and a growing number of concerned citizens had tried to sound the alarm bell – that world oil production would max out around the year 2010 and begin to decline, no matter what we tried to do.

"Peak Oil, they insisted, would mark the end of the growth phase of industrial civilisation, because economic expansion requires increasing amounts of high-quality energy.

"Where are we now? A year after the peak, the global economy is in tatters. World energy consumption is down, world trade is down, the airline industry is shrinking, and most of the world's automakers are on life support. Meanwhile, evidence has mounted that we are already past safe levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"Maybe it is a stretch to say that the production peak occurred at one identifiable moment, but attributing it to the day oil prices reached their high-water mark may be a useful way of fixing the event in our minds. So we suggest that we remember July 11, 2008 as Peak Oil Day."

There's a petition in support of this movement – www.thepetitionsite.com/1/peak-oil-day

But the target for signatures runs to just 500 names. The Post Carbon Institute may have attracted 418 names towards that, but doesn't seem much of a movement to me, pressing us all on towards some post-petroleum world.

No matter. The reason for mentioning it here is just to illustrate, in passing, how relentlessly "political" the price of oil has become.

You might well declare: "What's changed!" But I do have a sense that this whole issue is ratcheting up in terms of intensity.

Note the complaints by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the G8 summit on Friday: "We expressed our disapproval over the resumption of speculation internationally. Despite oil consumption falling one per cent from last year, oil prices have risen from $30 a barrel to $70 a barrel… We have talked to international financial institutions; giving them the mandate to study how to intervene to block this speculation that is being driven by hedge funds."

Blaming hedge funds says plenty about Berlusconi's lack of financial sophistication, but the point is unavoidable: oil price remains close to the top of the global policy agenda.

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