John Kinhart gave us permission to repost this cartoon from Sorry Comics.

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.

Despite the first rejection of the Paulson Plan, the effort is ongoing in Washington to push through a plan that is likely to be substantially similar to the first one (as far as I can tell, the only changes will be tax cuts and the inclusion of the renewable energy bill items). Given the overwhelming pressure to "do something", and despite warnings that we are being rushed for no reason into a terrible plan, it is rather unlikely that the final version of the plan is going to be very satisfactory. In any case, the following will hold true irrespective of the outcome of the Paulson Plan.

(Note: This was written for the European Tribune this week-end, ie before the rejection of the plan by Congress, and before the most recent bank bailouts, but its conclusions stand)

• the consequences of the financial crisis are so dire that the lesson here should not be that a bailout is necessary (it is, at this point) - but to acknowledge that the financial sector has the power to hold the rest of the economy to ransom during both good times and bad times and thus that it need to be emasculated so that we never get again to the stage where a bailout is necessary. The lesson is that the financial world cannot behave responsibly, if left to its own devices and thus should not be left to its own devices;
• another is that the main argument to give financial markets a free hand — that they have created so much growth and prosperity — needs to be called for what it is: a lie. Not only the so-called prosperity of the past year was highly unequally shared (see the next point), but it was not even real, as the income and profits of the good years are now dwarfed by the losses of today. Arguments about growth need to be dismissed by a reference to the "full cycle," i.e. the prosperity of the recent past can only be accepted as real if it wasn't a capture of the prosperity of today and the near future. If the forthcoming growth and GDP numbers are dismal, this should be seen as a direct proof that the growth of the past was nothing but, and that the policy prescriptions focused on financial profit are abject failures;

I was complaining about the "Australian disease" in my post about coal to liquids last week, as it became clear just how much King Coal is coming to dominate the local economy.

Ross Gittens can see the sunny side of this though in today's Sydney Morning Herald, as he idly contemplates the de-industrialisation of the economy and the transformation of the nation into a giant quarry in "Everything's coming up roses", in which he predicts that we'll be "riding on the back of a coal truck" for the next few decades.

Global warming apparently isn't a problem in his eyes - or at least not one that people will bother to try and mitigate by burning less coal.