Building a world of resilient communities.    Other commodities
and recessions  Last week, I wrote a couple of posts about the
relationship between energy prices and US recessions.  The
second one had this graph:  I observed that    Several readers
objected to this on the grounds that I was overemphasizing the
role of energy relative to other commodities. Commenter Nick G,
for example, wrote:   I would certainly agree that a "steel
shock" for example, could in principle cause a recession.  If
for some reason there were suddenly to be considerably less iron
and steel available than the economy had been expecting,
producers could not, in the short term, adapt very readily
except by producing less stuff.  Particular models of cars or
trucks currently in production require a set amount of steel,
current building codes demand a certain amount of rebar in
concrete, buildings currently under construction were designed
some time ago and probably cannot be redesigned on the fly to
use fewer steel girders, and so forth