I have some experience with the politics of oil.
I was a service station attendant for two years during high school, which in those days required one to leave the warmth of the cabin where the cigarettes and sodas were housed and walk out onto the pavement where customers waited in their heated cars for you to fill their tanks.
Gas was about 65 cents a gallon back then (in the mid-1970s) and people complained about it constantly. One of my favorite laments came from an elderly man whose cranky disposition didn’t require inflation to get him going, but who never failed to share his opinion on the world oil market. “I remember when gas was 15 cents!” he would exclaim, as if I had never heard this before. “I could fill my tank for 3 dollars!” That assertion seemed dubious even to a naive high school kid given that his gas tank was roughly the size of an armchair. His car didn’t resemble a car so much as a boat, and was such a gas hog that by the time Mr. Unhappy drove off the lot he was already down a gallon.
But his attitude about cheap gas was common. It was an entitlement for Americans, a birthright almost. Ever since World War II ended, we had guzzled the stuff voraciously, like Vikings taking to mead, and transformed U.S. society from one of mass transport and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods to a suburbanized car country.
The first wake-up call had come with the 1973 oil embargo when OPEC nations shut off the spigot to the United States and European allies who had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war. The price of a gallon shot up about 20 cents and stayed there even after the embargo ended the next year.
The unreliability of foreign oil produced legislation designed to promote conservation. Congress passed a bill mandating speed limits of 55 miles per hour on the nation’s highways, and I can remember my dad, who taught a class titled Man and His Environment, telling us what a good thing this was. But I was 15 and had just received my learner’s permit. The 55 mph barrier was spoiling my fun. I had bought into the notion that we deserved our big rumbling cars, and plenty of open roads to run them fast. Just my luck, I thought, the gas runs out the minute I get my license.
Now I know better.
Sitting at the table with a panel of Stanford faculty recently, I realized again the hard lessons we should have learned a long time ago. Their analysis (see article) is both a primer on the geopolitical effects of oil and a dose of cold water on the idea that the United States can or should aspire to “energy independence.”
This is tough medicine to swallow. I love driving, and those beautiful Western highways still beckon seductively. But until I can afford a car that runs on electricity, or hydrogen, or leftover Pop Tarts, my appetites will adjust.
My bicycle never looked so good.
