Paul Krugman: Oil wells that don't end well. This was occasioned by a report that Russian oil production has peaked and may never return to current levels. Quote:

One of the defining features of the last 8 years or so has been the way ideas go from crazy stuff that only DFHs [Dirty Fucking Hippies] believe to stuff everyone knows, without ever going through a stage in which the holders of conventional wisdom acknowledge that they were wrong. Oh, and the people who were right are still considered DFHs; you see, they were right too soon.

In a subsequent post Krugman notes that gross world product has accelerated from 2.9 percent in the 90s to almost 5 percent in recent years, mostly from China but all from emerging economies. Meanwhile world oil production has stalled: having grown around 1.6% per year in the 1990s, it's been "basically flat for the last three years." The result is the run up in prices:

This is what peak oil is supposed to look like -- not Oh My God We've Just Run Out Of Oil, but steady pressure on the economy and the way we live from rising energy prices and their consequences. And it doesn't matter much whether we're literally at the peak, or whether production can rise by a few million more barrels a day; unless there are big sources of oil out there, we'll be feeling peakish for the foreseeable future.

Michael Klare: Oil Rules!. Author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, Klare has a new book out on energy politics: Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Oil. He offers five theses:

1. "Intense competition between older and newer economic powers for available supplies of energy": i.e., China's gonna eat our lunch.
2. "The insufficiency of primary energy supplies": peak oil within a decade; peak everything else within a few decades.
3. "The painfully slow development of energy alternatives": wind, solar, etc. Switching to coal causes more problems. Oil companies are still chasing more oil with meager results.
4. "A steady migration of power and wealth from energy-deficit to energy-surplus nations": the net flow was already $970 billion in 2006, and rising fast.
5. "A growing risk of conflict": as the US, China, and whoever else try to protect their dwindling energy supplies.

I don't quite buy this, especially the last point. Even if you buy the notion that the US invaded Iraq to secure its oil supplies, what we've learned (at least those of us who have learned anything) is that such oil supplies are very vulnerable to sabotage. It's clear now that the US will never be able to recover its costs in Iraq. So instead of producing more cost-ineffective conflicts, we will be better off just trying to live with the losses, at least in the short term as long as the losses are manageable. In the long run, some nations may become so desperate they figure they have nothing more to lose -- in which case they're likely to attack not the producers but the competitive consumers. I'm already worried that China's being scapegoated as the cause of rising gas prices in the US, even though China's per capita usage is still a small fraction of what we use.

As for the "rising powers," their fate will depend not just on having an energy surplus but on how they use it. Thus far oil wealth has not proven much of a boon to economic development, without which none of these powers will rise. If anything, oil appears to stunt the brain. You can find evidence for that all over, starting in the White House.

Klare has never been all that sharp on peak oil, and still refuses to recognize that it may already have occurred. But he does seem to have turned the corner -- further evidence that the theory is becoming a commonplace.

Andrew Leonard: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire of Debt. Book review of Kevin Phillips' Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Short story is that it reiterates pretty much everything in Phillips' previous book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, somewhat condensed, except for an extra helping of I-told-you-so's.

Leonard quotes Phillips:

My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation's history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence, and quantitative negligence.

While Phillips concentrates on finance, he traces US imperial rise and decline to oil, which peaked domestically in 1969. Ever since then the US has run trade surpluses to keep oil flowing, a necessity given that the only alternative would be to change our way of life and conserve. Leonard writes:

As for oil, while at first it might seem a bit off-putting to find a chapter on "peak oil" in the middle of a book mostly devoted to financial shenanigans, the current price tags of a barrel of crude and a gallon of gasoline obviously pile even more stress on top of an economy already teetering after years of gross mismanagement. Phillips has long castigated the Bush administration for its energy misadventures -- believing, as do many Bush critics, that the invasion of Iraq was motivated in large part by geopolitical petroleum concerns. But how could two oilmen in the White House have screwed up so spectacularly? Dark times are ahead, he foresees, as the major powers of the world struggle for control of the world's dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. But as this time of peril hastens toward us, the once mighty U.S. is no longer master of its own manifest destiny.

I have a copy on order, so will be writing more later.

Andrew Leonard: McCain-onomics: Cheap Gas in Every Tank. McCain picked April 15 to unveil his so-called economic plan, since it's pretty much limited to the Republican orthodoxy of cutting taxes, and what better time to push that button than on tax day? His first plank is to temporarily suspend federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents per gallon. While people are hurting from gas prices, making it a wee bit cheaper in the short run does nothing good in the long run. One funny thing about the proposal is that for most other things, like health care, McCain thinks it's good to raise prices so people will have to consume less. On gas, which in the long term we will have to learn to consume less of because there will be shortages, he wants to lower prices so we can consume more. Or maybe not; it's temporary after all. Maybe he just wants to sweep it under the rug, especially since his beloved Iraq war is the main proximate cause.

Jared Bernstein: More Reasons to Worry About McCain-onomics. More dope on McCain's tax cut plan, like how it's skewed to help the rich, how the personal exemption boost is just a loss leader, how there's no way McCain can recover the losses by cutting spending, especially while he's keeping all his wars firing.

Steve Benen: The "Distractions" Debate. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates are debating in Pennsylvania. What are the big issues?

About half an hour into tonight's debate in Philadelphia, Barack Obama warned that the political world had become "obsessed" with "distractions" and "gaffes."

Watching the debate, I think he wasn't just talking to the political world in general. In a 90-minute forum, the first 45 minutes included the following topics, in this order:

1. The "bitter" controversy
2. The Jeremiah Wright controversy
3. The Bosnia "sniper fire" story
4. The flag-pin question
5. The William Ayers story

When the candidates would try to suggest that these issues are unrelated to the challenges facing the country, they were ignored.

Josh Marshall added: "Looking around other sites, I guess I'm not the only one that thought this debate was unmitigated travesty. Maybe the embargo on debate rebroadcast was a pro-human rights stand."

Steve Benen: The Master of His Flip-Flopping Domain. A laundry list of McCain flip-flops.