This chronicle returns to a strange past, one in which, suddenly, no more than suddenly, the most prosperous country in the world found itself faced with the possibility of having freezing cold houses in winter or suffocating houses in summer, cars stalling due to lack of fuel, factories without manufacturing.
This occurred in 1973, when OPEC leaders [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] – especially the Arab countries – decided to impose an embargo on the export of their crude oil.
The event was classified, by an advisor to President Nixon, as a new Pearl Harbor, an allusion to the surprise attack by the Japanese, decisive for the Americans' entry into World War II.
The general public was taken by surprise not only by the fact itself, but by a more traumatizing revelation. Until then, most Americans were simply unaware that fuel imports were decisive for everything in their daily lives, despite the fact that the USA is still the largest producer in the world.
A book by Meg Jacobs portrays the drama - Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (ed. Hill and Wang). As can be seen from the title, the immediate panic is joined by a longer-term side effect, the transformation of the North American political environment.
The Arab embargo shockingly highlighted the vulnerability of the USA and reinforced the belief in the decline of the great power, already shaken by the humiliating defeat in Vietnam and the emergence of Japan as a competitor for industrial leader.
As we said, there was a collateral result of the crisis and, mainly, of successive failures in confronting it, on the part of Washington – a transformation that would reshape the trends of opinion in American society. Distrust (later certainty) would be established that “the politicians” and “the government” were unreliable and incapable of solving national problems. At the end of the decade, Reagan would synthesize this idea into an important formula for his climb towards the White House: government is not the solution, it is part of the problem.
Anyone faced with Reagan's phrase should, however, remember this progressive preparation of the public to accept it. It should also be remembered that in 1973, in his inauguration speech (second term), Nixon had already put things forward: “We have lived too long with the consequences of placing all power and responsibility in Washington. (...) Let us ask not only what the government does for me, but what I can do for myself.”
There is no exaggeration, however, in saying that the oil shocks (1973 and 1979) were decisive in reconditioning public perceptions regarding the presence of the State in economic regulation. And this is what Jacobs' book refers to.
In the end, the surprise attack of the embargo and the threat of an energy blackout showed something reasonably predictable for anyone who had memory and knew how to put the dots together. And, pAdoxically, the announced disaster was the son of a success, portrayed, with optimism and self-confidence, in a cover article in the magazine Fortune, already in 1955. The episode is summarized in another revealing book about the same period, by Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (Yale University Press, 2010):
“In 1955, the magazine Fortune, an early observer of trends, declared that abundance is enriching the average man, by the standards of fifty years ago, rapidly eliminating poverty and suffering, conquering disease, prolonging life, undermining obsolete institutions, replacing them with newer ones. useful, helping other nations navigate the difficult and often disappointing road to efficiency, creating more and more leisure, and rapidly and radically changing the tastes and habits of people around the world. Perhaps nothing has changed the world more in the entire history of Western civilization than the increase in American productivity over the last half century.”
It all seemed to make sense, in those golden years.
In 1950, Americans owned 40 million cars, one per family. Kennedy took over saying he intended to put a second car in each of those garages. By Nixon's time the number had already surpassed 100 million. The roads were full of families enjoying vacations and long weekends. Between 1945 and 1959, fuel production grew by more than 50%, but consumption grew by 80%. Import quotas, set by the Eisenhower administration, became obsolete and were relaxed. North Americans represented 6% of the world's population. But they consumed 1/3 of the energy produced by the planet. They used more energy than the USSR, Great Britain, West Germany and Japan combined.
To make matters worse, consumption was also growing in those countries. In Western Europe, reconstruction led to consumption 15 times greater. In Japan it was even more overwhelming, as Stein's book records. Coal gave way to oil – and this came, above all, from the same Middle East, that land of Sheikhs and Shahs, tribes and gunfights, with countries created and uncreated by the Western powers and their oil companies.
We said that the problem was the result of a success: the incorporation of a huge mass into the wonderful world of the goods and services market. After 1945, the country rapidly suburbanized. In 1976, the population of the garden periphery was already larger than in city centers or rural areas. In the Greater Boston region, for example, 83% lived in the suburbs. Other cities followed this ratio: 81% in Pittsburgh, about 70% in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles.
This rapid and original migration was made possible by increased income, stable employment opportunities, and government policies, such as roads, mortgage and business credit, access to higher education, and so on. The country of cars was vibrant, but also of washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, TVs, stereo sound systems and many other energy-consuming gadgets.
Where did the oil that made such an effusion come from? With this increase in consumption, he increasingly depended on supplies from the Middle East. Saudi Arabia was the jewel in the new crown: deposits almost on the surface, super concentrated, easy to extract. The seven sisters (five Americans, one Dutch, one English) constituted a network of power – fields, refining, distribution. But... not everything is so simple. In 1960, Iran, the Arabs and Venezuela created OPEC, an exporters' cartel. In 1967, a war between Arab countries and Israel turned on the yellow light. In 1973 things got worse. Very.
It was the “surprise attack”, the embargo. Taps closed. Panic in American cities, in front of the lines of cars, surrounding the gas stations... dry. Posters like this one multiplied: “Sorry, no gasoline”. Truck drivers blocked roads, crazed consumers slapped each other in the streets, fighting over a gallon of fluid.
Government spokespeople didn't know how to answer an aggressive question: how could the richest country in the world live with the idea of freezing houses in winter, empty tanks on weekends and work days, air conditioning turned off? on hot days?
The gasoline crisis shook the government more than Watergate, corruption, and even defeat and deaths in Vietnam. Research after research showed this. Some twenty years before Clinton's famous phrase, a parody of it reigned: it's the energy, stupid.
Meg Jacobs describes the panic, but highlights the theme of the book's subtitle: a substantial change would occur in the American political scene.
All this in the “pivotal decade”, the 1970s, a turning point in post-war American history. Until then, capitalism had experienced its “golden age” – accumulation of capital, dominance of world markets, relative reduction of inequalities. The era of the American dream. The 1970s were the decade of the perfect storm. The literature of declinism announced the end of the dream and the arrival of the barbarians, now not only red, the outsiders, since they were external to capitalism, but also yellow, Japan, the capitalist country that the United States destroyed and later helped to resurrect. Conservative business has resumed the offensive, energizing think tanks, churches and the media. The Democratic Party was losing ground to the Republicans. And the Republican Party was beginning to be captured by an insatiable extremist wing.
The energy crisis has come to a halt. But it left consequences and did not eliminate a propensity. North Americans continued to consume half of the world's oil. And half of what they consumed would still come from the same political swamps. Every now and then one of these corners needed to receive the right message to continue supplying fuel. This is what we saw in 1990, in Kuwait.
Bush Sr. retook Kuwait, reassuring the gas stations. And in the following years, consumption rose like never before. Americans bought utility cars with four-wheel drive, air conditioning and whatever else they could think of. They wasted fuel. In 1975, these cars, SUVs, accounted for less than 2% of the market, by 1987 this had tripled. In 2002, SUVs of this type made up 25% of the domestic car market. Drinking gasoline like the famous pagodeiro drinks beer.
Americans drove three times more miles than the average in the 1970s, imports of crude oil sometimes accounted for almost two-thirds of the total consumed.
Meg looks at these signs and concludes, desolately: Today's energy crisis is not another Pearl Harbor, taking us by surprise. It will be? Panic at the Bombs II seems on the way?
