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The dustiest portion of my home library includes the 1980s books — about how Japan's economy would dominate the world.

And then there are the 1990s books — about how the Y2K computer glitch would end the modern era.

Go up one more shelf for the late 2000s books — about oil "peaking." The authors claimed global oil production was reaching a peak and would soon decline, causing economic chaos.

The titles include Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, Peak Oil Survival and When Oil Peaked.

When those books were written, worldwide oil drillers were producing about 85 million barrels a day. Now they are pumping about 93 million barrels.

NPR/U.S. Energy Information Adminstration

Despite growing violence in the Middle East, oil supplies just keep rising.

At the same time, the growth rate for demand has been shrinking. This week, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast for oil-demand growth for this year and next. Turns out, oil demand growth — not production — is what appears to have peaked.

Now prices are plunging, down around 25 percent since June.

What did the forecasters get so wrong? In large measure, their mistake was in failing to appreciate the impact of a relatively new technology, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Because of fracking, oil is being extracted from shale formations in Texas and North Dakota. Production has shot up so quickly in those areas that the United States is now the world's largest source of oil and natural gas liquids, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia.

This new competition has shocked OPEC. Members say they want to maintain their current market share, so they are keeping up production and even boosting it.

Bottom line: The peak of production is nowhere on the horizon.

So are the authors of "peaking" books now slapping themselves in the head and admitting they had it all wrong?

Some are, at least a bit.

Energy analyst Chris Nelder wrote a book in 2008 titled Profit from the Peak. The cover's inside flap said: "There is no doubt that oil production will peak, if it hasn't already, and that all other fossil fuels will peak soon after."

In a phone discussion about his prediction, Nelder said "my expectation has not materialized."

The surge in oil production in Texas and North Dakota "has really surprised everyone," he said. "If you had told me five years ago we'd be producing more oil today, I would have said, 'No way.' I did not believe at all that this would happen."

But while he acknowledges that oil has not peaked yet, he says it might soon because "oil is trapped on a narrow ledge" where it must stand on stable prices. Holding the price of a barrel steady around $110 for years allows energy companies to invest in fracking operations.

Over the past three years, those are exactly the conditions drillers have enjoyed. Oil was sitting pretty on a stable plateau of roughly $110 a barrel. But now, as global growth slows, the price is plunging, down to around $83 per barrel.

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"China is cooling off quite a bit. Much of Europe is slipping back towards recession," Nelder said. If oil prices stay low for long, frackers may need to stand down. "There is a lower level [in price] where they just can't make money," he said.

And with OPEC pumping so much oil now to hold down prices, maybe they are using up their supplies more quickly. "Depletion never sleeps," he said.

So perhaps Nelder has been wrong so far, but could be right before too long.

That's what Kenneth Worth thinks. He's the author of Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, a 2010 book. He says the fracking boom has been so frenzied in this decade that drillers may have extracted the cheapest oil already. With fracking, oil supplies "deplete very rapidly. You have to keep drilling really fast," he said.

With prices now so low, the money to keep up the frenzy may not be there.

So maybe the "peaking" predictions weren't wrong, just premature. Then again, at some point, any forecast can turn out to be right, he says. "If you take enough of a timeline, eventually we're all dead," Worth noted.

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A group of Hong Kong pro-democracy student leaders were turned away at the airport as they sought to board a flight to Beijing in hopes of meeting with mainland officials to discuss greater freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.

The South China Morning Post says that an airline staff member told Alex Chow Yong-kang and two others from the Federation of Students — the main group leading protests that began in September — that their travel documents had been revoked by authorities in Beijing.

Chow, Eason Chung Yiu-wa and Nathan Law Kwun-chung "looked shocked when they heard the announcement from a Cathay Pacific staff member, who said the airline was 'notified this morning' about the revocation of their home-return permits," SCMP says.

The Beijing government offered no explanation for the move.

According to the BBC: "The three said they wanted to talk directly with national leaders because so far, the Hong Kong government has told them it is powerless to offer them any concessions."

The student-led protests were triggered by Beijing's move to rescind a promise made when the former British colony was handed back to China in 1997 that elections for the territory's leader would be free and fair by 2017. In a policy paper issued earlier this year, the Chinese leadership said it would retain the authority to hand-pick candidates for the job.

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The so-called Islamic State has released a new video purporting to show the beheading of Peter Kassig, an American aid worker in Syria who was kidnapped in 2013

The radical jihadist group posted the video on social media early Sunday. The video and the identity of the victim has not been confirmed by U.S. authorities.

The 16-minute video "bears the Islamic State's hallmarks of slick footage and horrible violence," reports NPR's Alice Fordham.

"It differs from previous filmed deaths of American hostages," Fordham says. "It also features gruesome beheadings of Syrian soldiers, a history of the group and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and a meditation on the nature of Baghdad as a Sunni city."

At the end of the video, masked man with a British accent and a knife is shown standing over what a bloody head, which he claims is Kassig's, Fordham says.

The U.S. is working to confirm the video's authenticity, said Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, in a release.

"If confirmed, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American aid worker and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends," Meehan said.

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His family said he converted to Islam and changed his first name to Abdul-Rahman after his capture.

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He served as an Army Ranger and was deployed once to Iraq, according to the Pentagon. Kassig told CNN in 2012 that he went to the Middle East because there's a sense that there's no hope in that area of the world.

"We each get one life and that's it. We get one shot at this and we don't get any do-overs, and for me, it was time to put up or shut up," he told CNN. "The way I saw it, I didn't have a choice. This is what I was put here to do. I guess I am just a hopeless romantic, and I am an idealist, and I believe in hopeless causes."

Kassig's capture had been under a media blackout until last month, when he appeared in a video in October showing the beheading of British aid worker Alan Henning.

On China's cyberwarfare capabilities

The thing that China has going for it that we do not have is people. The number of people within the People's Liberation Army, within the sort of intelligence apparatus of China, which is a very opaque system in its own right, is believed to be thousands of people, who are basically hired hackers who spend much of their day aggressively trying to penetrate the computer networks of U.S. corporations especially. China is sort of gathering information that they can then pass on to Chinese businesses and corporations that give them a leg up in negotiations and in the global marketplace. They're trying to advance their economy very quickly and stealing information to do it.

Less clear is how sophisticated their sort of military offensive apparatus is compared to ours. For instance, if China ever went to war with us in the South China Sea, let's say, how sophisticated and how good would their hackers be trying to break into our naval systems and confuse our ships? We know less about that but I think the conclusion we have to reach is that because they're having so many more people doing this than we do — I mean, we have a few thousand — that China is a really formidable force. And that makes a lot of sense that they would put so many resources in this. China will never be able to, at least in the near future, challenge us in a conventional military way. They can't go head-to-head with us on land or on the sea. Cyber is a place where they can gain an extraordinary advantage and do a lot of damage.

On the U.S. government positioning itself as a victim

The United States government loves to come out and talk about how relentlessly we're being hacked and how our intellectual property is being stolen from our businesses. And that's true.

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But what that covers up is that we are also one of the most aggressive countries going out there breaking into other countries' systems and spying on them. And we are one of the few countries that we know of that has launched offensive operations in cyberspace. We have used computer viruses to break infrastructure, physical things that are connected to computer networks. Very few countries are known to have done that.

I think one of the reasons why U.S. officials have been keen on showing how we're victimized is because they believe that U.S. businesses have not done enough to secure their own computer networks. From the government's perspective, they can't go in and necessarily force those companies (at least not yet) to improve their defenses, so it's been sort of more of a strategic, rhetorical calculation on the part of the government to come out and say, "We're victimized, it's terrible, lots of information is being stolen, and the only way we can stop this is you corporations have to do better security and work with us and let us help you do that."

So there's a reason why the U.S. has tried to play that victim card so repeatedly: It's because they want to get results from private businesses.

Read an excerpt of @war