What is the International Energy Agency (IEA) up to, yelling about a supply crunch? These are not prophets of doom, walking the streets with sandwich boards bearing dire warnings about Armageddon. These are sober civil servants, serious forecasters, and as such they ought to know that commodities don’t run out. They just get more expensive.

If the world is a queue of motorists waiting to fill up, the petrol station owner raises his price as he watches the queue lengthen. Those of us at the end of the queue see the litre price on the sign change from 95p to £1 to £1.20 and so on, until we either give up and park our cars or, more likely, we only half-fill our tanks. As the queue shrinks, the petrol station brings its price down. Prices rise, in a market, to the point where something gives. There was a missing number in the IEA’s Mid-Term Oil Market Report and that was its oil price assumption. The agency doesn’t issue public forecasts of the cost of crude – it’s too political a number and the IEA is too august a body to allow its internal price forecast to be broadcast on the street like a grubby brokerage.

What the IEA is really doing is making an urgent call for more investment in energy. Claude Mandil, its executive director, has done this before, but few are listening and those who do listen are unable to respond. The multinationals are full of cash and are spending aggressively, drilling at stupendous depths in the Gulf of Mexico and mining oil sands in Canada. Yet the best opportunities to spend are in places where the Western companies are unwelcome, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, or where it is too dangerous, such as Iraq.

The bigger question is why so many do not listen to the IEA. The answer is that they cannot hear the price signal. Demand for oil is strongest in those places where the price signal is weakest. The agency points to rampaging oil consumption in East Asia and the Middle East – only last month riots broke out in Tehran when Iran’s Government introduced petrol rationing.

Fuel is priced at a fifth of its market value in Iran, energy is similarly underpriced in Saudi Arabia. In Russia, gas prices are a fraction of the world market price. Fuel subsidies are a heavy burden on the Indian Government and in China oil refiners would rather export fuel than sell at official prices.

For most of the world, oil is way too cheap. As long as weak or corrupt governments continue to fiddle with the underlying cost of energy, what hope is there for conservation? What is the incentive to invest in new energy supplies when the oil price is pegged at the level of abundance?

There are some signs of sanity: Gazprom has invited Norsk Hydro and Statoil back to discuss Shtokman, a huge gas project in the Barents Sea. Only a year ago, President Putin told the foreign investors to walk, but Shtokman is technically difficult and the Kremlin has seen how high European gas prices can stimulate rival gas supplies. While Gazprom tinkers with its blueprints for Shtokman, the old giant gasfields of Western Siberia deplete and Gazprom’s customers are not waiting for the “supply crunch”.

This week, Europe’s Energy Commissioner was discussing a project to build a gas pipeline across the Sahara from Nigeria to the Algerian coast. It sounds bonkers but it’s really only about one question: what’s the price?

It’s all a bit rich

It’s easy selling oil and gas, everyone loves the same product, but some companies have a daily struggle with difference. For L’Oréal, the struggle has become acutely embarrassing. A court in Paris found the cosmetics firm and a branch of the employment agency Adecco guilty of racial discrimination and fined them each €30,000 (£20,400).

It’s the accusation, not the fine, that hurts and L’Oréal denies it (the company is appealing). It centres around the hiring, in 2000, of staff for instore promotions of a hair product, Fructis Style. The court was told that Garnier, a L’Oréal subsidiary, had asked the agency for women aged 18 to 22, size 38 to 42 and “BBR”. This is apparently code for bleu, blanc, rouge, the colours of the French flag, implying that nonwhites would not be chosen.

L’Oréal is not a racist company; it has made a fetish of ethnic diversity. investing countless millions in developing products for different skins and hairs. It bought Carson, the black hair products company, and invested in a research facility in Chicago dedicated to the study of African hair – what makes it different and why it needs different products. It has made similar investments in Asia and in its Paris laboratory you can see black, brown and white skin grown in petri dishes. The Frankensteinish cultures are used to test creams and lotions to ensure universal skin compatibility.

It’s the universal bit that causes problems, because what the scientists tell you is not always helpful to the marketeers. If beauty is only skin deep, L’Oréal has found great profundity in the dermis. The Paris research facility examines the science of sunscreens, there being a huge market for spotty, pale people who prefer a bronzer complexion but do not wish to die for the look. L’Oréal has discovered that many East Asian women have an opposite attraction – skin as pale and smooth as alabaster – while African-Americans long for straight, shining hair.

It’s a puzzle, selling a universal notion of beauty to a multiethnic world. L’Oréal’s answer is to focus on glamour and status. Wealth is beautiful everywhere, it thinks, and similar images of impossibly beautiful starlets and beauty queens adorn L’Oréal billboards worldwide.

Are they still appropriate? Could L’Oréal’s real problem be that its notion of beauty is not racist but elitist and that it is losing touch with ordinary consumers. Images of remote and neurotic women and spoilt, rich teenagers are not appealing. Perhaps L’Oréal has forgotten that most of its consumers don’t expect to get rich, they just want to be loved.

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