Crisis and Continuity in U.S. Oil Politics, 1965-1980

Abstract

June 2012 The Journal of American History 177 The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has faded rapidly as a focus of public attention, leaving in its wake an important question about energy politics in the United States: What role do crises play in bringing change to the American energy system? This essay considers the relationship between crisis and continuity by examining halting and incomplete efforts to sever the link between oil consumption and American economic growth between 1965 and 1980. In recent years, commentators have looked back to the 1970s and seen in that decade lost opportunities to change the nation’s energy path. Yet those opportunities, upon closer examination, appear fewer and smaller than they seemed at the time and are sometimes described today. To be sure, Congress passed a great deal of legislation and three successive presidents made energy policy a priority of their administrations. New pollution laws, offshore drilling restrictions, financial reforms, and efficiency measures represented significant breaks from the past. At the same time, however, underlying obstacles, including a national commitment to low oil prices and the enduring conflict between energy producers and consumers, blocked more substantial changes. The political context of the 1970s also diluted and distorted national policy making. The rise of a national environmental movement absorbed anger about oil pollution into a broader set of environmental initiatives, reducing the focus on oil. Public fears about national security resulted in policies, such as promoting new domestic production, that targeted dependence on oil from foreign countries only, rather than petroleum dependency more generally. While striving to reduce imports, the United States simultaneously secured inexpensive oil from overseas by deploying its military in the Middle East. As a result of these contradictory impulses, national political leaders only modestly changed the lockstep relationship between oil and the American economy during the 1970s. Assessing the significance of 1970s energy reforms from the vantage point of more than thirty years later risks applying an unrealistically high standard for change. Yet understanding the significant limitations of 1970s reforms still helps illuminate why U.S. energy policy has remained stalled and why crises such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are likely insufficient catalysts for large-scale change in energy and climate policy. To Crisis and Continuity in U.S. Oil Politics, 1965–1980