FT Energy Source | Did oil cause the latest recession? IEA weighs into the debate
Author: donagh of Dublin Opinion
Published: November 9th, 2009
Section: Best of the Web
Discussion: 5 comments ↓
FT Energy Source | Did oil cause the latest recession? IEA weighs into the debate
Though it’s universally viewed as a crisis of the financial sector’s making, several voices (notably James Hamilton) have argued the recession that began last year had a lot to do with the sharp rise in oil prices over the preceding months and years.
Discussion
We welcome and encourage lively discussion from the public about articles on Irish Left Review. You can leave a comment using the form at the bottom of the page. Please read through the existing comments before posting your own.
Leave a Comment
Latest Articles
Best of the Web
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
SOCIOLOGY LECTURE SERIES 2010
Prof James Wickham
Head of School of Social Sciences and Philosophy
Financial markets and social power - the new inequalities of turbo-capitalism
Wednesday 10 February 2010
7.00- 9.30 pm
Synge lecture theatre, Arts Building, TCD
A L L W E L C O M E
No comments »Kevin Doogan - Not all that is solid | New Humanist
Analysis of global foreign direct investment patterns also reveals two interesting and counter-intuitive trends. FDI expands during boom periods and contracts during recessions. To blame job losses on capital migration is questionable. Secondly the lion's share of overseas investment goes to the rich rather than poor countries. Between 1980 and 2006 the developed economies' share of global FDI inward stock has grown from 56 per cent to 70 per cent, consolidating their position as the prime target for overseas investment. In other words capital moves abroad to access rich markets rather than exploit cheap labour. This shows that fears of exporting jobs are not related to the actuality of capital relocation but to the threat of jobs going overseas. Research in America, where fears of overseas job loss have a much higher profile than in Europe, shows that companies use the threat of corporate relocation in order to maintain the compliance of trade unions during contract negotiations.
10 comments »Patrick Cockburn | The Case Against Tony Blair
The case against Tony Blair has revolved too much around his good faith and too little around his competence. The placards held up by protestors on Friday as he gave evidence should have read “sucker” and “dope” rather than “Bliar”.
Amateurs have a fluency denied to professionals because they see no “ifs” and “buts” which would interrupt the flow of their argument. Books proving that Bacon wrote Shakespeare are often highly articulate and have great narrative pace because their authors see all facts pointing to the same inevitable conclusion.
It is this mixture of amateurism and evangelical conviction which made Blair such a lethally inept leader before and during the war in Iraq. His greatest weakness was not so much that he adjusted facts to support his policies, but that he had so little grasp of the facts in the first place.
1 comment »Victor Grossman | Oskar Lafontaine and the Troubled German Left
While German politicians stared at the calendar, wondering nervously what the May 9th elections will bring in the biggest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, with its 18 million people, media attention suddenly switched to a personal drama within the party called Die Linke (The Left). A few years ago this party or its predecessors were getting laughed off the political map. But what is happening today in that party could re-draw the whole map.
No comments »Henry A. Giroux’s tribute to Howard Zinn | Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
"I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory and often scorned location. But reading Howard gave me the theoretical tools to understand more clearly how the mix of biography, cultural capital and class location could be finely honed into a viable and laudable politics.
Later, as I got to know Howard personally, I was able to fill in the details about his working-class background and his intellectual development. We had grown up in similar neighborhoods, shared a similar cultural capital and we both probably learned more from the streets than we had ever learned in formal schooling. There was something about Howard's fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not just his academic position, but also his life, that marked him as special."
No comments »ONE | Drop Haitian Debt
As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans. Sign the petition.
No comments »CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding | Foreign Policy
John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
No comments »The Real News | Haiti and the ‘Devil’s Curse’
Excellent 12 minute news segment from the Real News on Haiti’s history of poverty, which includes a critical examination of how mainstream media is reporting this history without mentioning the impact that various foreign interventions has had on the country.
No comments »According to Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment Haiti’s poverty can be explained as a series of foreign responses to the independence and strength of the Haitian people, but since the media doesn’t acknowledge this, they are forced to propose weakness and bad luck as the sources of Haiti’s poverty.
k-punk: Spectres of revolution
Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, is talking about "Revolution" :
No comments »
"So let's be clear. I'm very far from saying that nothing can ever change. There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn't pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life - it is what Zizek would call the "spontaneous unreflective ideology" of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively - the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain - the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects - is there to be fought over."UK company law is terrorism’s friend | Prem Sikka | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Over the years, I have conducted many investigations into dubious corporate practices for newspapers, radio and television programmes and the trail always leads to tax havens, which hold no public information about the individuals behind those companies. The registered address is about the only publicly available information. One building in the Cayman Islands, a UK overseas territory, is the registered address of 18,857 corporations. British Virgin Islands, another UK overseas territory, with a population of 23,000 has more than 813,000 registered companies, the highest number per capita in the world. These companies rarely carry out any trade in their locales, but facilitate secrecy to their owners.
No comments »
Authors
- Alex Klemm
- Andrew Flood
- Andy Storey
- Anne B. Ryan
- Birgitta Jónsdóttir
- Bryan Mukandi
- Chekov Feeney
- Cian O Flaherty
- Ciaran O Kelly
- Ciarán Wallace
- Clive Hamilton
- Conor McCabe
- Damian OBroin
- Dan Boyle
- Daniel Finn
- Dara McHugh
- David Manning
- Dermot Casey
- donagh
- Eamon Gilmore
- Eamonn Crudden
- Ed Walsh
- Editor
- Editor
- ejh
- Eoin Ó Broin
- Fergus O'Rourke
- Fíona Ní Chinnéide
- Gavan Titley
- Gerry Burke
- Gordon Hewitt
- Graham Stull
- JC Skinner
- Jenny Muir
- Joe Costello
- Joe Higgins
- John Baker
- John Green
- John Hurston
- Justin Frewen
- Justin O'Hagan
- Kevin McLoughlin
- Kieran Allen
- Liam Herrick
- Manuel Estimulo
- Marie Mulholland
- Mark Byrne
- Mark C
- Michael Burke
- Michael Taft
- Michael Youlton
- Miriam Cotton
- Niamh O’Grady
- nineteensixtyseven
- Paul OMahony
- Paul Sweeney
- Peadar Kirby
- Prenderghast
- Proinnsias Breathnach
- Raymond Deane
- Research Section
- Rod Stoneman
- Seanachie
- Sheila Killian
- Sinn Fein Keep Left
- Smiffy
- Stephanie
- Stephen Kinsella
- Terrence McDonough
- Tom Griffin
- Tombuktu
- WorldbyStorm
- Wu Ming
Topics
- Art
- Banking
- Budget 2009
- Cinema
- Class
- Consumerism
- Corporate Finance
- Cost of Living
- Credit Crisis
- Criminal Justice
- Economics
- Education
- Employment
- European Union
- Fascism
- Film
- Financial Crisis
- France
- Government
- Health
- History
- Humour
- Immigration
- Income
- Industrial Relations
- Infrastructure
- Inheritance Tax
- International Media
- International Politics
- Irish Media
- Lesbian & Gay Issues
- Lisbon Treaty
- Marx
- Middle East
- Neo-liberalism
- Occupations
- Policing
- Press Council
- Public Finances
- Public Private Partnerships
- Recession
- Reproduction
- Social Partnership
- Spain
- Sport
- Strategies
- Taxation
- US Election 08
- Wages - income
- Women's Issues
Comment by: Pope Epopt
Nov 11th 2009 at 10:11
We’re well over the peak of oil production and sliding down the other side. That’s why, financial instability aside, no recovery of growth can be sustained, despite the asset bubble de jour. The first sign of a real ‘recovery’ will be a sharp rise in oil prices.
It’s also, incidentally, why the reformist left is barking up the wrong tree in trying to restart growth in order to ameliorate social conflict. That is a strategy of the past, and the sooner we abandon the growth fetish and concentrate on the redistribution of power and resources, the better.
The IEA has been cooking the books on fossil fuel reserves and the cost of extraction almost since it was set up.
The decline in fossil fuels could be seen as a huge opportunity for a lightly populated country with plenty of renewables, but instead we’ve got NAMA and na Glasraí in a government who will borrow to bail out a bankrupt financial system, rather than reflating by spending what’s needed on a renewables infrastructure.
Tragic.
Comment by: Donagh
Nov 11th 2009 at 11:11
Thanks for that Pope. I think though you have to look to what sort of growth is suggested. As David Harvey has pointed out:
It is far too simplistic to say that the left is trying to “restart growth in order to ameliorate social conflict”. What is social conflict if not the class dynamics behind this crisis. The situation must be rectified by dealing directly with the way that class and power are at heart of the conflict and that can only be done, as you say, by some form of redistribution.
I too would see the decline in fossil fuels as an opportunity to boost sustainable alternatives, but we also have to acknowledge that given the propensity of financial capital to invest in bubbles, it seems that any news of scarcity might also spur on price speculation. However, rather than investing in biofuel from Brasil, another boon for the speculators no doubt, we should concentrate on the resources we have.
Comment by: Pope Epopt
Nov 12th 2009 at 10:11
Agreed on bubbles, and of course we’re not talking about biofuels from Brazil, or biofuels in general for that matter.
Energy sources should be ranked by their EROI (Energy Return on Investment) i.e energy extracted divided by the total energy to produce, to assess their viability.
The ranking by the way, goes 1. hydro (by a big margin), 2. onshore wind, 3. offshore wind and then 4. nuclear fission (although uranium supplies available and energy costs of extraction are highly disputed). All the fossil fuels have a declining EROI (ignoring their greenhouse gas emissions) and biofuels (with the exception of low-energy-input forestry) are right down the bottom of this league. Google the work of Charles Hall and his collaborators for more on this.
My point is that we are suffering two types of systemic crises - intrinsic and extrinsic. Perhaps the crisis intrinsic to capitalism is one of over-accumulation. But it strikes me as a non-expert that attributing the intrinsic crisis to a single contradiction may arise from a doctrinaire desire to make the facts fit the texts. I’m probably caricaturing much more nuanced positions, but I can’t help thinking that were Marx alive today his analysis would be significantly different from that in the canonical texts.
What the neo-Marxist left fails to realise is that the extrinsic crisis of fossil energy scarcity and the decline in the societal EROI is at least as serious as the intrinsic crisis, and applies whatever the relations of production. There is an interplay between the intrinsic crisis and the external crises of peak fossil fuels and climate change. Unless the two types of crisis are addressed simultaneously and given equal weight (as some eco-socialists are attempting to do) we’re being dishonest about the world.
The neo-liberal greenery espoused by the Greens in government has been so counter-productive for progressives in this country because, through their policies, citizens are coming to associate action on energy use and production with the savage class war being conducted by the elite against the rest of us. Carbon taxes are going to be seen as attacks on the poorest and progressive proposals like Feasta’s Cap and Share, are being ignored.
Comment by: Pope Epopt
Nov 12th 2009 at 10:11
More on the IEA shenanigans
Comment by: Donagh
Nov 13th 2009 at 12:11
Thanks for the great comment Pope. I saw that Guardian report in the Print edition. I almost entirely agree with you here and there is much I’d like to comment on and will when I have the time. On the Feasta Cap and Share scheme see a similiar idea proposed in the early days of ILR by Damian O’Broin.
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2008/06/11/left-climate-change-green-red/
Also, wasn’t that being examined by an Oireachtas committee last year? They seemed enthusiastic about it. How come its not in the program for government?