Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [74]
In October of 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel of oil-rich nations, asserted its global economic might by cutting off oil supplies to the United States. Although American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War served as the immediate spark for the embargo, the crisis simply revealed the realities of the brittle American energy system.
Though few believed it, American domestic crude oil production had peaked in 1970 and was headed for a long, slow decline, despite the onrush of production from Alaskan oil fields. In the three years leading up to 1973, oil imports doubled to over six million barrels a day. A country that had gotten rich selling oil to other countries began importing vast quantities of the stuff from state-owned oil enterprises that were not afraid to use their mineral resources to achieve political ends.1
The reaction in the United States was swift. People were horrified. For the first time since World War II, Americans could not have as much fuel as they wanted when they wanted it. Rationing ensued. Frustration abounded. America could not control its own destiny. The civic and productive systems that we had built when oil cost less than water were far-flung, low-density, and energy-intensive. Muscle cars cost just a tiny bit more to drive than VW Bugs. How had America built its castle on a resource that seemed more like sand than rock? What had gone wrong?2
At the same time, a new movement was spreading across America. Spurred by the increasing recognition that human beings were destroying ecosystems and their own suburban backyards, modern environmentalism rounded into rough shape. “The residents of post-war suburbs lived in the midst of one of the most profound environmental transformations in the nation’s history,” historian Adam Rome wrote. “Every year, a territory roughly the size of Rhode Island was bulldozed for urban development.”3 The environmental problems caused by the sprawl became suburbanites’ local touchpoints for the abstract notions of ecosystems and carrying capacities.
Tract homes were built as cheaply as possible, often beyond the reach of city services. Instead of paying for extensions of sewer systems, developers put in poorly designed and executed septic systems with predictably poor results. “In the late 1950s, for example, suds began to pour out of the faucets of thousands of suburban homes—the residue of nonbiodegradable detergents in septic tanks had contaminated drinking wells—and the resulting outcry helped make water pollution a national concern,” Rome argued. In short, “The desire to preserve wilderness was the tip of an iceberg, the most visible part of a much larger concern about the destructive sprawl of urban civilization.”4
Ecology, the science of studying networks of organisms, was exploding in popularity. As a result, many ecologists became prominent political figures. The conclusions of the time were unequivocal: “Do not disturb the balance of nature.”5 In the late ’60s this information began to filter into the mainstream consciousness. In 1968 the New York Times ran an editorial by a local environmentalist under the headline “An Ecosystem Is a Partnership.” The author wrote that
unfortunately, unless we heed the warnings of ecologists, and stop upsetting the precious balance of nature upon which this planet’s web of life depends, all of us may be forced to live under giant astrodomes with the same kind of environmental controls developed for space travel. The meaning of an ecosystem will then be clear to everyone.6
The first environmental television series, Our Vanishing Wilderness, ran on National Education Television in October of 1970, a few months after Earth Day brought twenty million people together to celebrate a new environmental consciousness. The