The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ the year 2030, they show industrial and food production peaking out and then collapsing.

      THAT SEVENTIES CLAUSTROPHOBIA

      Almost exactly a year after publication of The Limits to Growth, people in the United States found themselves in their first encounter with general scarcity since World War II. It wasn’t the beginning of the collapse portrayed in the book’s graphs, but it was a pretty good preview.

      In October 1973, an already alarming blast of inflation triggered largely by the prolonged U.S. war in Indochina was exacerbated when Arab nations belonging to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on Western countries. World oil prices leaped suddenly and dramatically, and gasoline prices in the United States spiraled to unheard-of heights. As inflation impacted the economy, it was perversely accompanied by recession, bringing a new word into the American lexicon: stagflation. President Nixon ordered that a World War II-style national allocation plan be put in place to ensure that every region had access to adequate fuel supplies. Once again, pleasure driving was discouraged. Nixon also announced cuts in deliveries of heating oil: 15 percent for homes, 25 percent for businesses, and 10 percent for manufacturers. Aviation fuel was cut 15 percent, and on the nation’s highways, the maximum speed limit was lowered to 55 miles per hour.⁵³

      Long lines at gas stations became an enduring symbol of the 1970s. A more alarming development, one illustrating the severe backlash that governments can face when they attempt to deal with resource limits, was the violent strike by independent truckers that first broke out in December 1973. To back their demands for reduced diesel fuel prices, abolition of the 55 mph speed limit, and general deregulation, the truckers not only stopped hauling but also tried to keep all trucks off the road. Many parked their semis in the middle of highways, while others resorted to throwing bricks, puncturing tires, and brandishing firearms. After the first two rounds of protests, one trucker told the press, “When the next shutdown comes around . . . I’m gonna take my goddamn truck and burn it on the goddamn White House lawn.”⁵⁴

      The end of the OPEC embargo in 1974 brought just enough relief from gasoline shortages to calm nerves and shorten gas lines, but what would become known as the “energy crisis” was far from over. Upon taking office following Nixon’s resignation, President Gerald Ford laid out a plan to reduce the country’s dependence on imported oil through taxes and tariffs, but it turned out to be a political disaster for him. And stagflation raged on. President Ford was among those who saw inflation becoming an even greater national threat than unemployment. At one point, he noted that unemployment was “the biggest concern of the 8.2 percent of American workers temporarily out of work,” but inflation was “the universal enemy of 100 percent of the people.”⁵⁵ Any attempt at New Deal–style stimulus to address the stagnation problem would have triggered even worse inflation. Nor was military spending a solution; after all, it was a big part of what had gotten America into its inflationary predicament in the first place.

      The oil crisis calmed for a while. But in 1979, the Iranian Revolution sent petroleum prices skyward again. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, a crowd of 1,500 gas rioters reportedly burned cars, destroyed gas pumps, and threw rocks and bottles at police. One officer responded to a question from a motorist by smashing his windshield, whacking the driver’s son with his club, and putting the man’s wife in a choke hold. In all, eighty-two people were injured, and almost two hundred were arrested. The U.S. media solemnly discussed the possibility of “civilizational breakdown.”⁵⁶ That summer, inflated diesel prices triggered a revival of the independent truckers’ strike. The historian Shane Hamilton described chaos that exceeded that of the 1973–74 strike:

      On June 5, 1979, a convoy of truckers arrived in Washington and circled the Capitol. [Strike leader] Mike Parkhurst seized the moment and called for a nationwide shutdown, not simply to demand lower fuel prices, but to abolish the Interstate Commerce Commission and open up regulated freight trucking to untrammeled competition. By the end of June, approximately seventy-five thousand truckers heeded Parkhurst’s call and stopped driving. Once again the protests were violent, as roving bands of truckers set fire to empty trucks and shot at the windshields of drivers who refused to stop. Nine states called out the National Guard. By the time the shutdown ended in early July, one driver had been shot and killed, dozens more injured.⁵⁷

      As enraged truckers were laying siege to Washington, President Carter, by then in his third year in office, prepared to deliver what was being billed as his most important speech yet. It would be his fifth address to the nation on energy policy, a sign of how that issue had so far dominated his presidency. (Four months later, the Iran hostage crisis would displace the energy crisis as his administration’s most pressing concern.)

      On July 15, 1979, Carter delivered his speech live on prime-time TV.⁵⁸ Right at the top, he declared that the threat everyone was calling an energy crisis was actually a crisis of confidence, of self-indulgence, of consumption. “Human identity,” he said, “is no longer defined by what one does but what one owns.” In an echo of today, he decried the “fragmentation and self-interest” that was roiling the nation. ABC’s Frank Reynolds would later characterize that portion of the speech as “almost a sermon.” To today’s ears, the proposals Carter rolled out in his speech sounded something like a Green New Deal, 1970s-style. He envisioned investing massively in alternative energy sources, restricting oil imports, creating an “Energy Mobilization Board,” establishing a “bold conservation program,” and making energy affordable to low-income Americans. He proposed spending an additional $10 billion on public transportation and asked Americans “to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.” He added, “Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense, I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”⁵⁹

      In 1979, the terms Carter used in naming his proposals didn’t mean quite what they might during today’s climate emergency. The Energy Mobilization Board’s (EMB) mission, for example, would expedite the regulatory process to put high-priority fossil-energy projects on the “fast track.” The top tier of projects for the EMB included oil and gas drilling on federal land, extracting oil from shale, coal gasification, coal liquefaction, and building new oil pipelines. Renewable energy and energy conservation projects would be treated as lower-priority initiatives. Less than two weeks after Carter pitched the EMB in his big energy speech, the House voted it down. Concerns, according to one observer, included perceived encroachment upon states’ rights, expansion of bureaucracy, and “reluctance by members of the Republican party to support a key element in the President’s energy program in an election year.”⁶⁰

      In his July 15 speech, Carter had also called on Congress to authorize one major energy conservation initiative: a standby plan for rationing gasoline.⁶¹ Although it took a while, Congress passed such a measure in 1980. Five billion ration coupons had been printed up during the Nixon years and were ready to go.⁶² Rationing would be triggered in the event of a 20 percent shortfall in the national gasoline supply, and household gasoline allowances would be fixed at 20 percent below normal consumption.⁶³

      In the end, rationing would not be needed. Oil supplies stabilized, economic stagnation suppressed fuel demand, and the resulting glut pushed world prices down. No future need for rationing was anticipated. Furthermore, the Army reportedly was concerned that if the coupons, which featured an image of George Washington, got out into circulation, change machines might mistake them for dollar bills. In June 1984, Nixon’s old coupons were pulled out of storage at the Pueblo Army Depot in Colorado, shredded, and buried.⁶⁴

      The energy claustrophobia of the 1970s was summed up by historian Jefferson Cowie:

      [T]he nation running out of energy was both a reality and a metaphor, and the problem of limits shaped the entire discussion. It haunted Richard Nixon, stymied Gerald Ford, all but destroyed СКАЧАТЬ