While covering cleantech on VentureBeat, we write often about individual technologies, but rarely about the driving forces behind the market. Global warming is an oft-cited reason for developing renewable energy, but there’s also peak oil — the idea that some day we will hit the maximum possible production of oil, and that supplies will thereafter decrease as the world’s reservoirs diminish.

Author Chris Nelder has been writing on the subject for years, and believes that we may have already hit peak oil. The book he co-wrote with Brian Hicks, Profit from the Peak, is ostensibly written for investors, but spends much of its time exhaustively arguing for peak oil, with much of its first half reading like a condensed form of years of studies on industry blog The Oil Drum, the source of much of the in-depth material on the subject.

According to Nelder, we’re on the verge of a years-long upward trend in oil prices, which, without replacement energy sources — especially for transportation fuels — spells serious trouble for the world economy.

Nelder’s next book, also co-authored, is Investing in Renewable Energy: Making Money on Green Chip Stocks. It will be available in October.

VB: What is going on with oil prices right now? Will they fall or rise?
Oil is sensitive to minor fluctuations, and the price is set at the margins. Prices are set by supply and demand. There’s not a lot of growth in supply anticipated — that has been flat since 2005. And I don’t see a global depression yet, which is what it would take for demand to fall below what it is today. So on the whole I expect prices to go up.

VB: Your focus is peak oil production. Is that an issue that people are becoming aware of?
I think traders have started to come around and pay attention, but not the public. Frankly, Wall Street should have been on top of this years ago. The data was out there, plenty of people were talking about it. To this day, I don’t think hardly anyone in the public understands what peak oil is about. If they understood, then there wouldn’t be this chorus of monkeys out there saying we should open up Alaska.

The politicians don’t want to hear it, don’t want it to be on their watch, they want to ignore it until they get out of office. Then it’s someone else’s problem. Their current raft of terrible ideas [ed: Nelder is referring here to proposals to drill in ANWAR, lift the gas tax, and drain the strategic reserve] is proof.

VB: What do you think of the national energy plans from Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens?
They sincerely want to solve these problems, but both have made claims that can’t be supported by the data. Gore’s proposal that we can somehow go from producing 1.5 percent of all our electricity with renewables to all of it in 10 years is ludicrous. I can’t imagine anyone showing me an intelligent plan that plots a course from here to there. But I suspect Gore is playing a shoot for the stars of strategy.

I think T. Boone is serious about his goal [ed: more on T. Boone's plan is in this article, or at his website]. But there are a couple