Americans are capable of dramatically changing their energy use. And our political leaders can take decisive, bipartisan action on global environmental problems. This is not just wishful thinking. We know this because they have done so before – in response to the 1970s oil crisis.

Before the crisis, the federal government had no real energy policy. Decades of cheap oil helped fuel the economic boom after the second world war. Until the early 1970s, few policymakers believed this would change. But between October 1973 and March 1974 the price of oil quadrupled, thanks to the October war between Israel and her neighbors, the rising power of Opec and the boycott organized by a group of Arab states.

Suddenly political leaders scrambled to find solutions to what became defined as “the energy crisis”. Americans agreed to turn off their Christmas lights and cope with gasoline rationing. The public went from assuming that oil would remain cheap forever to fearing it would soon run out.

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The energy policies that followed the oil shock had two remarkable qualities. They were overwhelmingly bipartisan: an otherwise-hostile democratic Congress quickly passed Richard Nixon’s emergency conservation measures, including a nationwide 55mph speed limit; the next democratic Congress adopted the Ford administration’s 1975 energy bill establishing mandatory fuel economy standards. Over the next 13 years, average automotive fuel economy rose 81%.



There was also bipartisan support for boosting energy and conservation research, leading to a seven-fold funding rise between 1973 and 1979. Some investments yielded little, including the billions of dollars that were sunk into synfuels and nuclear fission. But other projects paid off: the astonishing growth in shale gas production in the 2000s can be traced to federally-funded programs and subsidies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that led to breakthroughs in drilling, fracturing, mapping and shale gas recovery.



No one took energy policy more seriously than Jimmy Carter. Shortly after taking office in 1977 he declared in a televised address: “With the exception of preventing war, this (energy crisis) is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes.” Carter pushed for both conservation and price deregulation, and greater reliance on solar energy, coal and “synthetic” fuels made from coal and shale.



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But the second striking feature of these policies is that many were driven by a mistaken belief that the world was running out of oil. President Carter warned that oil wells “were drying up all over the world”. His secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, predicted “a major economic and political crisis in the 1980s as the world’s oil wells start to run dry”.



The energy policies of the 1970s were obviously not designed to reduce carbon emissions. Few policymakers took climate change seriously before the summer of 1988, when Senate hearings during a Washington heatwave created a media sensation. Some of the post-1973 policies – like the promotion of coal-fired power plants – probably boosted carbon emissions. Yet on balance, the policies triggered by the illusory fear of oil depletion have done more to curb carbon emissions than any post-1990 policies meant to address global climate change.



The level of decarbonization that the US achieved after the oil crisis is remarkable. In the decade before 1973, US carbon emissions rose an average of 4.1% a year; since 1973 emissions have grown just 0.2% a year. If we had continued on our pre-1973 “business as usual” trend, today the US would be emitting four times as much carbon pollution as it currently does.

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On a per capita basis, carbon emissions have dropped from 22.5 to about 17 metric tons per capita – which does not sound impressive until you learn that in the decade before 1973, per capita emissions were climbing 3.5% annually. While the move away from energy-intensive manufacturing was a big part of this change, this shift was in itself spurred, at least in part, by the energy crisis itself.

The year 1973 became the historic peak year of US per capita emissions: ever since then it has dropped. As a result, the response to the 1970s oil shocks gave the planet a life-saving head start in the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change.



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Was it merely good fortune that the energy policies of the 1970s helped address a threat that almost no one anticipated? Maybe. But even if environmentalists of the 1970s were wrong about oil depletion, they were right that unchecked growth in petroleum consumption could push planetary boundaries past dangerous thresholds.



Today we need a new round of deep decarbonization to forestall climate change. Americans rose to face a similar challenge 40 years ago; they must simply decide to do so again.