When Wall Street estimates how soon Peak Oil will hit our pocketbooks, and Forbes Magazine passes it on, we listen.

“We’re obviously in an unsustainable situation.”

Charles Maxwell, senior energy analyst at Weeden & Co., talked to interviewer Wallace Forbes in September.

“We are now beginning to use up [oil reserves] relatively quickly–with scary consequences for the future.

“We’ll be living in a dream world . . . for now. The problems come around 2013 or 2014, when we begin to find that this higher growth . . . is nowhere matched by higher production of petroleum products and, obviously, we begin to run tight.

“The difference between supply and demand is not going to be very much at first. It would not normally cause a big rise in price. On the other hand, in 2014, that tightness begins to grow and it is now a trend. By 2015 . . . we have to raise prices enough to stop some people from using that oil because it is actually not available. We call that ‘the destruction of oil demand.’ It is important because it forces the price of oil up on an accelerated basis.”

Of course, Maxwell has some stocks to recommend – companies that will benefit from these “scary consequences.”

(Who else are wagering on an oil price rise? The US and German militaries to start with.)