Moral from 1970s energy crisis forgotten today

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 21, 2001

The energy crisis of the 1970s shocked Americans and changed our culture.

A consumer nation that always had everything it wanted suddenly had to stand in line for rationed gasoline. Whether you could buy gas depended on whether your license tag ended with an odd or even number.

President Carter went on television to tell us that we should be using less energy. He wore cardigan sweaters and told us to keep the house colder in winter and hotter in summer.

The psychological effect was as important as the physical. Pessimism crept into our collective consciousness. In the 1970s, we talked a lot about running out of things -- coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Food. Water. Even room on the planet. A whole genre of films like Soylent Green (1973) played on those fears.

The environmental movement grafted itself on top of 1960s protests and became the activism of the 1970s. It was a decade of whole-earth-ness, and of compost piles. It gave us recycling and Earth Day.

We put more money (not tons, but more) into solar power. We built windmills. We re-engineered our buildings, our automobiles, and even our gasoline. Clever farmers in Iowa pushed an extra use for their corn and we got gasohol. Ex-hippies built homes half-buried in the ground for coolness or well-windowed for warmth.

This was a quarter-century ago.

Here is a striking comparison. Our last "energy crisis" is as far ago in the past as the end of World War II was when the 1970s opened. Tell your kids or grandkids today about having to stand in gas lines, and you are sounding just like your Depression-era parents or grandparents telling hard-times stories to you.

After the 1970s, we retained some of the energy-crisis values. We at least paid lip service to good gas mileage (until the advent of SUVs, anyway). We valued energy efficiency in buildings, if only for the practical reason that it gave us cheaper bills.

We remain more likely to recycle. We are less likely to throw entire bags of garbage out the car window. We have switched entirely to unleaded gas.

But for the most part, we have forgotten the moral of the story.

The energy "crisis" of the 1970s turned out to be basically a mismatch between demand and supply. Afterward we found plenty more fossil-fuel reserves. The sense of urgency of the 1970s began to fade away. So did money for solar and wind power.

Today, we are relying on pretty much the same energy sources as always: We dig or pump things out of the ground, and we burn them.

Now energy is returning to the news. Once again, short-term problems (electric generation in California and higher gasoline prices nationwide) take on the appearance of a systemic "crisis" that needs to be addressed.

But this time, our answer is different. Politicians of both parties are taking great pains to avoid any mention of sacrifice or hardship or even changing our personal habits.

Last week, President Bush and Vice President Cheney unveiled a new national energy policy with more than 100 recommendations. The overall thrust of the policy is yet more reliance on fossil fuels. Conservation and alternative energy sources get lip service, with no specific goals at all.

Cheney made no bones about the administration's philosophy when he recently called conservation a mere "personal virtue," and said no serious person could consider conservation to be the main thrust of an energy policy.

Maybe not. But there is zero doubt in my mind that one day our descendants will consider us as just backward because of our use of fossil fuels as we consider those "doctors" who used leeches and bloodletting in the Middle Ages.

- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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