Back on July 19th, I wrote about an interview Matthew Simmons gave to King World News. Yesterday Simmons died at his home in North Haven, Maine. Published reports cited law enforcement sources who said the 67-year-old Simmons died of a heart attack in his hot tub.

Simmons was hardly a household name, mainly because his controversial views on how much oil is left to extract from the earth—a theory known as “peak oil,” his newfound determination to find renewable energy sources and his recent insistence about the criminal culpability of BP plc in the Gulf oil spill were not entirely palatable to the mainstream media. This would be the same mainstream media, mind you, that has no trouble engaging in completely serious discussion about whether Barack Obama’s mother and Hawaiian state officials were part of a far-reaching plot to cover up the true location of Obama’s birth, presumably so he could one day become president and complete America’s transition to a socialist nation.

While the circumstances behind Simmons’ death will be the topic of endless conspiracy threads on the Internet, the reality is that a contrarian voice in the conversation about our energy future has been silenced. Everyone from energy consumers to energy speculators should take note.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 10:23 am and is filed under People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.