The Simmons–Tierney bet was a wager made in August 2005 between Houston banking executive Matthew R. Simmons and New York Times columnist John Tierney.
The subject of the bet was the year-end average of the daily price-per-barrel of crude oil for the entire calendar year of 2010 adjusted for inflation, which Simmons predicted to be at least $200.
Their association began after Simmons had been interviewed by a journalist colleague of Tierney's, Peter Maass, for a New York Times Magazine article called "The Breaking Point," published on August 21, 2005.
The article heavily emphasized the doomsday claims of Simmons's latest book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, which contains Simmons's prophecy of imminent global catastrophe which he asserted will be triggered by the allegedly soon-coming "peaking" of Saudi oil output, and the supposed domino effect of destruction that will subsequently be wreaked upon the global economy.
The bet was made public just two days later in an op-ed piece by Tierney published in The New York Times on August 23, 2005, called "The $10,000.00 Question".
Tierney was a lifelong friend and protégé of the late Julian Simon (the winner of the Simon–Ehrlich wager), and eagerly embraced the opportunity to follow in his mentor's footsteps.
Meanwhile, Simmons' Twilight in the Desert seemed to Tierney to be cut from the same doom-and-gloom cloth as Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, a book published in 1968 which later became the impetus for the Simon–Ehrlich wager.
Tierney made unabashed reference to that legendary wager as he gave his apologetic for embarking upon this redux of it: I didn't try to argue with [Simmons] about Saudi Arabia, because I know next to nothing about oil production there or anywhere else.
[5] Both Simmons and Tierney publicly availed their e-mail addresses with a formal and open invitation to anyone else in the general population who might like to make similar wagers.