The Rainwater Prophecy  

Richard Rainwater's tale in Fortune is probably the most entertaining of the day - even billionaires can get a bad case of peak oil fear. Of course, its a bit easier to insulate yourself from some of the prospective problems if you can afford a fully fledged self sufficient rural retreat (and presumably some people to guard it if your worst nightmares are realised). Anyway - if this wasn't just a way of pumping up the oil price then good on him for taking the risk of looking a bit nutty.

Richard Rainwater made billions by knowing how to profit from a crisis. Now he foresees the biggest one yet.

Richard Rainwater doesn't want to sound like a kook. But he's about as worried as a happily married guy with more than $2 billion and a home in Pebble Beach can get. Americans are "in the kind of trouble people shouldn't find themselves in," he says. He's just wary about being the one to sound the alarm.

Rainwater is something of a behind-the-scenes type—at least as far as alpha-male billionaires go. He counts President Bush as a personal friend but dislikes politics, and frankly, when he gets worked up, he says some pretty far-out things that could easily be taken out of context. Such as: An economic tsunami is about to hit the global economy as the world runs out of oil. Or a coalition of communist and Islamic states may decide to stop selling their precious crude to Americans any day now. Or food shortages may soon hit the U.S. Or he read on a blog last night that there's this one gargantuan chunk of ice sitting on a precipice in Antarctica that, if it falls off, will raise sea levels worldwide by two feet—and it's getting closer to the edge.... And then he'll interrupt himself: "Look, I'm not predicting anything," he'll say. "That's when you get a little kooky-sounding."