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But every drop saved in the OECD is more than consumed elsewhere. The non-OECD countries are sucking oil like it's free champagne. In 2005, their consumption figure was 34.2 million barrels a day . The IEA expects it to go to 39.7 million barrels a day next year, thanks to voracious demand in China, India, parts of Africa and the other usual suspects. Non-OECD growth is propelling overall oil demand, taking the world figure from 84 million barrels a day in 2005 to 87.8 million barrels a day in 2009 . Don't confuse slowing demand growth for slowing demand.

You might ask where the extra millions of barrels will come from. Most of the world's oil still comes from the big, prolific fields found by the 1970s. They are getting tired .

North Sea production is in freefall and Britain is now a net oil importer. Cantarell, the supergiant field that made Mexico the biggest supplier of oil to the United States in the 1980s (Canada now has that role), is also in rapid decline. Three years ago Kuwait shocked energy markets when it announced that Burgan, the world's second-biggest oil field, was past its peak and that production would have to be trimmed. And so on.

James Buckee, the former CEO of Canada's Talisman Energy, has a good point about the ability of oil companies, or lack thereof, to meet rising demand. Most of the world's oil is now in the hands of the huge national oil companies, from Algeria's Sonatrach to Saudi Aramco. They don't move as fast as the smaller private oil companies like Exxon and Shell. The national oil companies run like juggernauts and their oil fields can't be ramped up and down quickly. "There is no instantaneous supply response from them ," he says.

You might argue that the flaw in the rising oil scenario is the speculators, who widely took the heat for using index funds to drive prices to unheard of levels. They're apparently gone, meaning oil should settle to a natural (lower) economic level, whatever that is.

But guess what? Last Thursday the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission concluded the speculators can't take the blame. In fact the speculators were getting out of the market in the first half of the year, even as prices were soaring. If I were a speculator, I would consider this a fine time to get back in .