I don't think anyone saw this coming. Because of tax and regulatory incentives, it has always been difficult to find a totally straightforward relationship between the price of oil and alternative energy stocks. Yet no one ever really disputed that, say, if oil prices had remained low - at $10 a barrel as they were in 1999 - there's no way we could have had the boom in alternative energy investment of recent years.

However, over the last few weeks, they have clearly been heading in the opposite