Big Oil is making money but losing sleep. Sure, high oil prices are nice; we’ll find out next week exactly how nice when the majors report first-quarter earnings. But what goes up must eventually come down. And even though US oil executives and insiders are worried that energy market disruption stemming from the war in Iran is poised to get significantly worse, they’re not ready to ramp up drilling to counteract it.

“The real problem is the back end of the curve is lying to us,” Kaes Van’t Hof, CEO of Texas independent producer Diamondback Energy, said during an energy summit at Columbia University this week. He was referring to the widening gap between the high price for oil delivered today, and the significantly lower price for oil futures contracts, a gap that reflects Wall Street’s sanguine view that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened soon.

The low future price signal is both misleading — because it severely underplays the likelihood of forthcoming major disruptions to airlines, food systems, and other energy users — and a deterrent to drilling investment, Van’t Hof said: “I do think you’ll see US production respond slightly, but it’s nothing compared to the size of the issue, like putting a garden hose into an emptied Olympic-sized swimming pool.”

Backstage at the Columbia event, other energy executives and observers expressed frustration about what they see as mixed signals from the Trump administration — which says publicly the crisis is almost over but privately is still urging companies to drill more — and trepidation about the possibility that increasing US oil exports, a development Trump has celebrated, could backfire by driving up domestic prices and fueling political momentum for a crude oil export embargo, a move that would be disastrous for the industry.

Throughout the conflict, execs and observers told me, the administration ignored or downplayed well-known red flags about risks to the strait, waited too long to try to rally the industry, and failed to take preparatory measures that could have given the energy market a bit more flexibility and bought Trump’s negotiators more time.

Traders and US officials also got too comfortable over the past few years with the idea that massive US production could buffer any geopolitical shock, Bob McNally, president of the consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group and former energy adviser to President George W. Bush, told me. Now they’re being Pollyannaish. “All the barrel-counters agree the Hormuz disruption is going to cause a severe crisis due to shortages and price spikes, but so far the broader community of macro investors and traders seems to have a rosier view,” he said. “It’s extremely rare — if not unprecedented — for all barrel-counters to agree, so someone’s really wrong.”