The United States of Nationalization

The New York Times reported yesterday that Obama is heading towards nationalization of the banking system in the USA.

Isn't that interesting?

I don't remember hearing that as a campaign promise. ;-)

Didn't somebody tell the Obama "team" last summer that nationalization was the only solution?

I'm guessing they knew it all along.

I wonder what happened to the idea of letting the banks fail, like Summers and Geithner told the asians in 1997?

We seem to be breaking our own rules.

Its interesting that you don't hear much discussion about the Gold Standard and Bretton Woods or Bretton Woods 2, and nobody, I mean nobody is talking about the banking crisis, the gold standard and peak oil all in the same sentence.

For some reason, the best and brightest continue to "see" (or not see, according to your point of view) the "economy" as an abstract floating in space completely independent of the energy it is floating upon.

Energy in formal economics is treated as a type of collateral co-factor or something to be plugged into supply and demand formulas or whatever.

It's real simple guys. Oil runs everything! 

Oil is captured sunshine. It took millions of years for sun energy to get stored in chemical form.

Sunshine gets stored in oil similar to a capacitor gaining a charge.

The problem is that now we are discharging the capacitor and we are going to use up millions of years of energy storage in a short time.

Oil is our God. In a very literal sense.

It may seem warm and fuzzy to talk about tax breaks and credits for "alternative energy" but the fact is that we slept through the last 38 years since oil production peaked in 1971!

38 years!

Electric cars sound like a good idea, but it won't solve the energy crisis and threat of Peak Oil because we can't replace enough of the fleet of 230 million gas guzzling cars and light trucks fast enough to make a difference.

This is the problem with laypersons who didn't bother to pay attention in science class. It is impossible for the public at large to grasp the fact that the scale of the problem is too large for  band-aid solutions and wimpy nonsense like the latest push to let the individual states set stricter gas mileage standards.

It is way too late for making a difference with state gas mileage standards. And, if state standards should be raised, why not get the whole country standardized and raise the Federal standards to equal the highest state levels? That is why the auto companies should be left to fail. We need new solutions.

Peak Oil is an emergency right now!

Oh well. Stay tuned to watch the show over the next few weeks and see how long it takes Obama and company to admit that we have to nationalize the banks.