As you’ll see below, Ursula left a substantial comment and I thought I’d respond to it in a new post rather than an equally long comment…

The first thing Ursula asked was whether or not I was happy that Gordon Brown has passed the huge bailout package. Would it have been better for the whole system to come fully crashing down rather than the status quo being sustained?

I don’t really have an opinion either way in terms of ‘being happy’ with it. It was the only option on the table for a mainstream politician, and the consequences of not doing it are more unknown than the consequences of doing it. However I think it’s wrong to characterise the current situation as ‘non-radical’. We’ve seen an unprecedented nationalisation of UK banks, and it’s far too early to assess the medium-long term implications of the last few months of turmoil.

We now have an economy organised in a way that is more similar to Chinese capitalism; that is it’s a strange hybrid of state-planned and free market economics that doesn’t have any real precedent in poitical or economic theory. The closest we’ve got is Keynes, who suggests ’spending our way out of a crisis’, but he conceived of his ideas way back when we didn’t have huge public deficits, or such a hugely bloated and internationalised financial sector. So what we’ve got is Keynes-style economics applied in a wholly new circumstance, without the public finance that is really required. Instead of using historically-accumulated taxpayer revenue to finance new public projects, we’ve got debt-financed public money (fuelled mainly by government bond revenue) bailing out the private sector, seemingly for the benefit of the public who must continue to borrow. I read this situation recently described as ‘hurling money at the face of capitalism’.

So we have a completely unprecedented situation unfolding before our eyes. As well as the approach outlined above, Brown has recently been off courting Middle Eastern businessmen/oligarchs (made rich by the money we gave them for oil) to get them to invest in the flailing Western economy (via the IMF and other institutions). This is pretty ridiculous but again not too surprising because there is very little that Western leaders can do to within the current (increasingly morally bankrupt) paradigm of Western economic growth theory.

The purpose of this blog is to explore what we can do differently, and to try and highlight the inherent logic of supporting the development of new innovative clean energy technology industries. As well as decreasing our reliance on global energy supplies (be they from the Middle East or Russia), it will employ lots of people who will soon be out of jobs. Much as readers like Dave and Sundal will hate me for it, I’m now going to invoke another mainstream US politican, Barack Obama, and his recent call to create millions of green jobs if he were to be elected. In addition the UN is starting to talk in the same language of a ‘green new deal’.

In the words of one of the best Bobs ever to walk this planet, ‘times they are a-changing’. The impact of the financial turmoil of recent months will be felt over the next couple of years, and it’s way too early to assess whether things will largely continue along the same path or not. We’ve already seen vast sums of money mobilised to deal with one element of the emerging crisis, and that potentially sets a precedent for further radical change. The important thing is to work out what that change should be, and how politics and economics interplays with our daily lives. It is this last point that has been neglected for the past twenty years or so, and even that one change could create ripples across society.

Carbon Capture and Storage - need to do more research, but it seems that increasing numbers of people are coming round to it potentially working. I’m going to the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland in early December, and I’ll be posting more specific thoughts on climate change policy here in the next few weeks. I’ll address CCS as part of that.