Ian Holdsworth: I once came across a letter to a newspaper from someone who had calculated that wind turbines and tidal power might damage global weather patterns by extracting too much energy. Another reader suggested that he should put away his solar calculator to avoid draining the sun.

Some other energy scare stories are not so easily dismissed. "Peak oil" campaigners warn, for example, that the world's supplies of oil are about to peak and then quickly enter an irreversible decline, causing a global oil crunch. Among their number is solar power pioneer Jeremy Leggett, who this week wrote in the FT that "premature peak oil would be quite as bad as the credit crunch". Leggett is a member of the UK's Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, which fears "an irrecoverable fall in global oil supply by 2015 at the latest". The taskforce warns that "if oil producers then husband resources, a global energy crisis could abruptly morph into energy famine for some oil-consuming nations".

There are people on YouTube who believe peak oil has already arrived. Yet, in their annual reports, many oil companies continue to state they are finding at least as much oil as they are producing. If you believe such data, reserve bases aren't shrinking and peak oil could even be receding. On Wednesday BP published its Statistical Review of World Energy 2010. There's a table saying that at the end of 2009 the world's proved oil reserves totalled 1,333.1bn barrels , which should last 45.7 years if production continues at the 2009 rate.

Such figures won't impress Mr Leggett: "Every year, peak-oil worriers say that they doubt the Opec oil producers' reserve statistics echoed in BP's review, that technology can only slow depletion not reverse it, that rising oil prices do not help when it takes so many years to extract new oil from increasingly exotic locations and that global supply is heading for an imminent fall."

Full text: www.ft.com/ftdotcomment