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When I read articles that talk longingly about going to a “Steady State Economy,” I am perplexed. If governments were to take away fossil fuels, or even reduce their use significantly, it would likely cause a crash of the financial system, and this would likely lead to a crash of other systems, particularly international trade. It would seem to be virtually impossible to keep this crash from affecting food production systems, international food export systems, and even such basic systems as electricity (because workers need to be paid, and fuel needs to be purchased). It seems to me that without a lot of intervention and planning, we would soon fall back to a very low level, very quickly, perhaps much lower than the 1750 level.

The U.S. government has confirmed that indeed a recession began in December 2007, when the price of oil climbed to nearly $100 a barrel.

And this is what governments are seeing, banks are seeing, what markets are seeing, but no one is talking about it because it portends changes that are greater than anyone can seriously contemplate.

Critics of the concept of peak oil claim that it is crazy to suggest we’re running out of oil – and they’re right! These critics fail to understand the predicament of Peak Oil which is that the rate of growth in the daily/monthly/yearly production of oil is slowing and after the peak, will fall into permanent decline.

NIce one Gail, but I wonder personally if debt is the issue: to me its just a symptom. If you take economies as pure systems, then they have natural feedback and feedforward paths. Debt is a way – especially debt based on notional, rather than actual, security – of trading notional surplus today for increased prosperity tomorrow: That is, it is a hugely effective way of accelerating growth in a system that is not resource limited. IN a system that is resource limited, where no growth is physically possible, spiralling debt merely reflects an attempt to engender growth where none is available. Debt itself is not the problem, its merely a symptom of the problem, associated with the fact that governments financial institutions and so on, are desperately trying to create the growth they need to balance their books, when it cant be done. Debt is conceptually easy to solve. simply devalue it by 10 or so. All savers lose 90% of their savings, all borrowers lose 90% of their debt. Wealth gets transferred from lenders to debtors. That’s largely what debt ridden governments have done with QE et al.