Gail, Jeff Rubin , and now James Hamilton (warning- pdf) of the University of California – San Diego have produced literature correlating either this financial collapse or recessions more generally with peak oil and oil prices. The take-away message of their work is that oil prices played a fundamental role in causing the current recession and many previous recessions. In this post I, along with Steve Balogh, a fellow researcher here at the EROI Institute at SUNY-ESF, will add to this discourse.