Reply #88: What Kevin Phillips had to say about the 70s

[Tansy_Gold]

When I read this a couple of nights ago, I burst out laughing. Talk about "right on"!

from "American Theocracy: The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century", (c) 2006

p. 53-56

The larger point, of course, is that because the twenty-first-century United States has a pervasive oil and gas culture from its own earlier zenith -- with an intact cultural and psychological infrastructure -- it's no surprise that Americans cling to and defend an ingrained fuel habit. Many of the museums and exhibits date from the 1980s. The hardening of old attitudes and reaffirmation of the consumption ethic since those years may signal an inability to turn back.

The chance to do so came a quarter century ago. From the late seventies to the early eighties, oil consumption in the United States underwent a powerful reversal. Energy-using Americans had been scared. In 1976 the political combination of the Watergate scandal, the energy crisis, inflation, economic recession, and military collapse in South Vietnam (1975) dominated that year's election and cost Republicans the White House, albeit only by a thin margin. The new Democratic chief executive, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter -- by vocation a peanut grower and by religious belief a Sunday school-teaching Baptist -- had campaigned on a reformist vision. Even Texas gave him a narrow victory, casting its final twentieth-century vote for a Democratic president

Forswearing the trappings of the imperial presidency, Carter left his limousine to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day in January 1977. Weeks later he made an energy speech on television wearing a cardigan sweater. In mid-1979 the embattled president underscored the second OPEC oil crisis by asking for "the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun." Nixon, before being completely overwhelmed by Watergate, had taken a similar but less ambitious tack on energy independence. Soon thereafter Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which among other things mandated a doubling of passenger-car fuel economy by 1985. Carter went further in 1977, declaring "the moral equivalent of war."

The ideology and culture of the four Carter years were broadly anti-imperial, as they stressed energy conservation; peace (rather than arms sales) in the Middle East; skepticism of CIA clandestine operations and the overthrow of foreign governments; reduced conspicuous consumption; federal missionary work on behalf of solar power and renewable energy sources; smaller automobiles; and the enactment of a 55 mph federal speed limit. Carter also promoted government restraint in budgetary matters and a vague attempt to crystallize "less is more" and "smaller is better" viewpoints, both of these in opposition to earlier mandates to spend, build, produce, and consume.

Militarily the Carter White House spoke softly and also managed to carry a pretty small stick. After the revolutionary government of Iran in 1979 seized fifty-three Americans from the U.S. embassy, the air rescue mission Carter ordered in the spring of 1980 failed. With the helicopters down in the Iranian desert a symbol of his greater ineptitude, Carter lost the 1980 election and is remembered as a weak president.

The 1975-1985 revolution in energy efficiency, however, was a relative success. Together with spiking oil prices, a conservationist ethic tightened America's energy belt. Between 1977 and 1985 -- and in the face of an expanding economy -- oil demand fell by more than one-sixth. The percentage of oil consumed in the United States annually that had to be imported shrank from 46 percent to 30 percent. Inasmuch as two-thirds of the petroleum used in the United States went to keep automobiles on the road, the CAFE standards enacted in 1975 were a linchpin in this reduction. Where the average car in the United States got just fifteen miles per gallon that year, the figure by 1985 was twenty-five. California was in the forefront, having followed Governor Jerry Brown's call to move away from dependence on nonrenewable fossil fuels.

Nationally, new homes were often twice as energy efficient as similar-sized predecessors. Appliances made even bigger gains. New refrigerators, for example, used only one-quarter the power of pre-1970s models. As for the U.S. manufacturing sector as a whole, its energy efficiency improved by 30 percent between 1977 and 1986. The conservation "weapon," once fired, was probably at least as efficient as the military operation would have been.

. . . .

By the mid-1980s, support for energy conservation was ebbing. For one thing, the Reagan-Bush administration had been lukewarm to it, reducing spending on solar energy by two-thirds, deemphasizing efficiency, and moving the spotlight back to petroleum. . . .

Plummeting oil and gasoline prices soon put the ignition key back into the great American automobile culture. Further federal tightening of fuel-economy standards was rejected in 1985, adn Detroit also took advantage of the statute's permissive standards for light trucks by developing its soon-to-be bestsellers: sport-utility vehicles. For ten years, technological improvement had concentrated on fuel economy. Now automobile manufacturers returned to their pre-1973 priorities: powever, acceleration, and speed.


(emphasis in the original)



Phillips points out that both Reagan and Bush I -- and of course subsequently boooosh II and cheeeeney -- had deep roots in the oil bidness and were not likely to veer from a high-gasoline-demand philosophy. California has long been a major oil-producing state, as has Texas, so petroleum had a major impact on the economies of both states, not to mention the urban sprawl, lack of mass transit, etc., and concomitant automobile usage that distinguished both of those geographically large states.


Like many SMWer and DUers, I lived through those "interesting" times as an adult -- my daughter was born in 76, my son in 77. In 1979, we built an earth-sheltered house and got a huge tax credit for it. It was energy efficient enough that we heated the whole 2000-square-feet of it with a single wood-burning stove and about 1.5 cords of hardwood per northern Indiana winter. I don't miss Indiana, but I miss that house!

Almost got into an argument with BF the other night because he was saying the ONLY thing needed to turn the current situation around is for corporations to accept lower profits. I've learned not to waste my breath when he's got his mind made up on some simplistic resolution, but because I do remember the 70s and what we went through to survive them, I believe the general population needs to adapt to a different attitude. As we learned from Mother Earth News all those years ago, less IS more. Instead of dreading the arrival of the propane tanker that filled most of our friends' tanks to heat their homes through some of those bitter 70s and early 80s winters, we went out in the woods with the kids and selected a couple of trees to cut for the next winter's supply. We watched for squirrels and rabbits and deer and hawks. We hunted mushrooms. We marvelled at the spring's first violets (purple and yellow ones!), the redbud trees, the dogwood and sassafrass. We raked leaves, and the kids and dogs rolled in the piles before we took the leaves back to the woods to compost. We bought our soda in returnable bottles, not throw-away plastic. We remembered that we are part of the earth, not separate from it.

In some ways, the 70s weren't all that bad. Leisure suits, on the other hand. ..... eeeeeeiuw!


Tansy Gold