A certain 16-year-old made quite a splash recently lecturing the UN on the choices they had been making over the last 50 years. This fall I have trailed Greta Thunberg from Scandinavia to NYC to, most recently, Edmonton, where both sides of the environmental argument were out in force to cheer/jeer her on. I was in Edmonton the next day, but the protestors had all gone home for hot cocoa.
This caused me to write down a list of things I firmly believed when I was a 16-year-old. That 16th year – just as I was getting my driver’s permit – the so-called Arab Oil Embargo collided with my desire to freely drive the streets of Tulsa in my parents’ blue Buick station wagon. Imagine my disgust with the invisible powers that be when my God-given right to buy 35 cent leaded regular was thwarted.
So here’s a partial list of my grievances from my own 16th year:
How dare the Saudis take oil off the market, driving my gasoline costs to the moon and causing me to wait in blocks-long gas lines!
How dare my dad not cave to my fears of perpetual fuel shortages and build an underground gas tank in our backyard next to the septic tank!
How dare the government not immediately adopt the economy-saving plan to reduce speed limits to 55 mph on the major interstates!
How dare they resist converting the entire country to daylight saving time in order to save electricity!
How dare they make us buy gas to keep us dependent on foreign oil!
If my angry mug had been captured with these “how dare you” attitudes from 1973, I’d be cringing today. Here’s why… in order of my above-stated grievances:
History has shown that the Saudis didn’t actually remove much, if any, oil from the market… they just threatened to embargo oil, and it was the FEAR of the embargo that caused Americans to race to the gas stations and drain a perfectly adequate supply of fuel overnight. It took the better part of a year to replenish this inventory flip.
Since my dad had lived through actual shortages and was knee deep in the oil industry, he knew that fuel shortages would end with time; and if we spent ALL our family’s money building a defensive gasoline bunker in the backyard, we’d eventually have a lovely fuel tank buried in our backyard that we didn’t actually need. Plus, we’d be broke.
The 55 mph speed limit caused cars to be bumper to bumper on the highways because, instead of it taking 7 hours to drive from Tulsa to Houston it now took almost 10 hours to make the drive. This increased the number of cars per linear mile by almost 50%, causing an increase in collisions and wrecks due to driver fatigue.
What insanity is this thing Daylight Saving Time? We simply shifted our energy demand forward by one hour and, 6 months later, backward by one hour.
With higher energy costs, the free market went to work and found alternatives all over the planet, eventually relegating the OPEC states to a fairly minor position in the global oil market. Today, demand for oil is twice as high and the price is a quite agreeable $55 per barrel.
We made some poor decisions in the ‘Seventies as a result of the fear of the unknown. I can’t imagine things are so different today. We can be sure that it all becomes so clear in retrospect.