The price of crude oil broke through its symbolic $100 a barrel ceiling again yesterday. The first of the UK's major energy utilities, Npower, signalled plans for double-digit hikes in both its electricity and gas tariffs. The others will certainly follow. Petrol at the pumps is already priced at more than £1 a litre. Our collective carbon footprint looks like costing us even more in 2008. And that's before we even get round to accounting for its impact on global climate change.

With rising domestic and business fuel bills comes a grimmer warning: that higher-priced hydrocarbons spell an even sharper economic downturn in a new year already slated as extremely difficult, as the impact of the global credit crunch bites deeper into demand and confidence. For the past 30 years, successive oil-price shocks have typically been seen as major drivers of economic slowdown, often of outright recession.

That was true in 1974/75 when the oil price trebled following the Yom Kippur War, and Middle East producers applied a supply embargo on states supporting Israel. It happened again, in 1980/81, following the Iranian revolution. In 1990/91, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, another oil-price spike put paid to the boom years of the late 1980s. And in 2001, following the Californian energy crisis and rising tensions in the Middle East, after the start of the second Palestinian intifada, more expensive oil again helped drag down world economic activity. So there is plenty of historical precedent for current concerns.

However, a quite different slice of oil history has been playing big here in Scotland, as the latest release of old UK cabinet papers, this time from 1977, hands Alex Salmond another propaganda stick with which to beat what he sees as London chicanery. Once more, he can berate the "deceit" of past Westminster governments, for hiding the true extent of Scotland's oil wealth from us and dreaming up ways to allocate the proceeds to an artificial offshore region so they wouldn't show up in Scotland's GDP.

As I've explained before in this slot, having lived through that espisode in a bit role on the other side of the argument, I would argue that the great oil robbery, now centrally enshrined in SNP demonology, was actually carried out in bright daylight, with all sides, including the then Nationalist leadership, fully aware of what was at stake. No-one suppressed the scale of the oil wealth that lay under the North Sea. No-one doubted Scotland could be much wealthier if most of the reserves were allocated to an independent Scottish state. But in the class-based politics of the time, that appeal to Scottish national self-interest lost out, at the ballot box, to a Unionist insistence that the new oil wealth should be used to improve working people's lives right across the UK.

Yesterday our First Minister was demanding some of the increased tax revenues from $100 oil be diverted into a Scottish oil fund that might one day begin to rival Norway's. Now that Mr Salmond is in government and the Unionist parties are in varying degrees of disarray, I can readily see how politically potent he and his advisers must think it is to rerun the "It's Scotland's Oil" campaigns of the 1970s. But have they given anything like as much attention to that other oft-repeated history lesson from the 1970s - that when the global oil price surges, recession is rarely far behind?

The SNP government is committed to growth. It knows, in its very bones, that a sense of material prosperity is a necessary precondition for ever winning a convincing mandate for Scottish independence. So it has a deep vested interest - widely shared, notably with all the contenders limbering up this morning in Iowa to become the next President of the United States - in trying to avoid an oil-induced economic recession polluting progress on these disparate political journeys.

So, as the crude price pushes into record territory, what chance history repeating itself in 2008 or 2009? Everyone is already predicting slower growth. But how slow? Is outright recession on the cards? First, we should remember that the efficiency with which modern economies use energy is improving all the time. The oil shocks of 1974/75 and 1980/81 did much more damage, in terms of people thrown out of work and once-great industries trashed, than those of 1990/91 or 2001. There are good reasons for believing that, even at $100 a barrel and more than a £1 a litre at the pumps, this oil shock is unlikely to trigger recession. Even a significant slowdown is by no means certain. But some serious risks remain.

Not only are developed western economies, now dominated by service industries, less intensive users of energy than they were three decades back, when the oil price has spiked in the past, that energy-price inflation was typically accompanied by tightening monetary conditions. It was the combination of these forces - dearer energy, dearer money - which triggered recession. This time, by contrast, interest rates here and in the US are falling as the price of crude hits new highs.

We do not know how these two countervailing trends will play out from here. How much higher the oil price might go is down to many factors, including any further boost to production from Opec and other producers, and the scale and impact on future demand of the economic slowdown that is already under way in many parts of the world. How much further interest rates may fall depends ultimately on the mindset of rate-setters.

The current pattern could yet be disrupted if central bankers decide the inflationary consequences of dearer energy matter more to them meeting their monetary objectives than the risk of outright recession. But if they do decide to keep on cutting rates, even the US might escape the recession that former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan now puts at a 50:50 possibility.

There is another complication. The slowdown so far owes a lot to the global credit crunch that has followed the bursting of the sub-prime bubble in the United States. Until all the investment losses in fancy derivatives crystallise and the global financial services industry owns up to the costs of its latest bout of over-exuberant alchemy, until overheated housing markets cool down and highly-indebted consumers address their liabilities, we cannot tell the full extent of the damage done. But whether it's soaring oil or dodgy finance wot done it, Scotland cannot escape these consequences.

While it must be irresistible to go on bashing London over the great oil robbery, no politician in power will escape the flak if things economic do turn really nasty.