White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Lessons of ’70s Energy Crisis Have Meaning in Today’s Climate Crisis

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I’ve been here before. I’ve heard this din at another time. I’m writing about the cacophony of opinions about global warming and climate change.

In the winter of 1973, the Arab oil embargo unleashed a global energy crisis. Times were grim. The predictions were grimmer: We’d never again lead the lives we had led — energy shortage would be the permanent lot of the world.

The Economist said the Saudi Arabian oil minister, Sheik Ahmad Zaki Yamani, was the most important man in the world. It was right: Saudi Arabia sat on the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Then as now, everyone had an answer. The 1974 World Energy Congress in Detroit, organized by the U.S. Energy Association, and addressed by President Gerald Ford, was the equivalent in its day to COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference which has just concluded in Glasgow, Scotland.

Everyone had an answer, instant expertise flowered. The Aspen Institute, at one of its meetings, held in Maryland instead of Colorado to save energy, contemplated how the United States would survive with a negative growth rate of 23 percent. Civilization, as we had known it, was going to fail. Sound familiar?

The finger-pointing was on an industrial scale: Motor City was to blame and the oil companies were to blame; they had misled us. The government was to blame in every way.

Conspiracy theories abounded. Ralph Nader told me there was plenty of energy, and the oil companies knew where it was. Many believed that there were phantom tankers offshore, waiting for the price to rise.

Across America, there were lines at gas stations. London was on a three-day work week with candles and lanterns in shops.

In February 1973, I had started what became The Energy Daily and was in the thick of it: the madness, the panic — and the solutions.

What we were faced with back then was what appeared to be a limited resource base which the world was burning up at a frightening rate. Oil would run out and natural gas, we were told, was already a depleted resource. Finished.

The energy crisis was real, but so was the nonsense — limitless, in fact.

It took two decades, but economic incentive in the form of new oil drilling, especially in the southern hemisphere, good policy, like deregulating natural gas, and technology, much of it coming from the national laboratories, unleashed an era of plenty. The big breakthrough was horizontal drilling which led to fracking and abundance.

I suspect if we can get it right, a similar combination of good economics, sound policy, and technology will deliver us and the world from the impending climate disaster.

The beginning isn’t auspicious, but neither was it back in the energy crisis. The Department of Energy is going through what I think of as scattering fairy dust on every supplicant who says he or she can help. On Nov. 1, DOE issued a press release which pretty well explains fairy dusting: a little money to a lot of entities, from great industrial companies to universities. Never enough money to really do anything, but enough to keep the beavers beavering.

That isn’t the way out.

The way out, based on what we have on the drawing board today, is for the government to get behind a few options. These are storage, which would make wind and solar more useful; capture and storage of carbon released during combustion; and a robust turn to nuclear power.

All this would come together efficiently and quickly with a no-exceptions carbon tax. Republicans will diss this tax, but it is the equitable thing to do.

Nuclear power deserves a caveat. It is unique in its relation to the government, which should acknowledge this and act accordingly.

The government is responsible for nuclear safety, nonproliferation, and waste disposal. It might as well have the vendors build a series of reactors at government sites, sell the power to the electric utilities, and eventually transfer plant ownership to them.

The government has some things that it alone is able to do. Reviving nuclear power is one.

The energy crisis was solved because it had to be solved. The climate-change crisis, too, must be solved.

Can King Coal Be Helped back onto His Throne?

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Forty years on from the Arab oil embargo of 1973, which triggered decades of turbulence in the energy markets, there is a sense of plenty at last. There also is a sense, says Barry Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, that “technology came through.”
 
And it has. Windmills are producing more and more electricity around the globe; the cost of solar energy, particularly rooftop collectors is falling; and there is, above all, enough natural gas and oil to keep a voracious world supplied.
 
In oil and gas there is real technology triumph; the culmination of decades of effort between the government and private enterprise to develop better ways of mapping reserves with 3-D seismic surveys, horizontal drilling, and finally the development and deployment of geological fracturing, known as “fracking.”
 
With this technology, a well is drilled vertically and then two horizontal wells shoot off from the mother well; one for breaking up the rock with sand, water and chemicals, and another for transporting the oil or gas, which has been loosened from shale formations. This technology has revolutionized oil production made the United States — which has abundant oil and gas-bearing shale — a potential gas exporter, and possibly self-sufficient in oil.
 
Forty years ago the energy picture was pretty bleak, and it remained bleak through the decades. The United States was resigned to the reality that it could not be self-sufficient in energy. Natural gas, according to the then Deputy Secretary of Energy Jack O'Leary was a “depleted resource” not worth worrying about. Oil production was declining and consumption was climbing.
 
Coal was the great hope because there was a lot of it and it could burned, made into a gas, and turned into a liquid for transportation. With coal and nuclear — then still a cutting-edge technology — electricity would be the only safe bet.
 
In 1973 climate change was phrase yet to enter the language, and only in obscure academic settings was the possibility of global warming hinted. The rage of what was a relatively new environmental movement was directed toward coal and nuclear. But, for social and political reasons, it settled on a course of hostility — bordering on the psychopathic– to nuclear, which stumbled first in public esteem and then in the marketplace, mostly from costs driven up by delay occasioned by environmental litigation.
 
The world oil picture was changed by technology as well. Not only was extraction better and cheaper and, therefore, could take place in increasingly hostile environments and in very deep water off shore, but oil was discovered in the Southern Hemisphere, where old-line geology had declared it would not exist.
 
The challenge now, as seen by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, is to make the burning of fossil fuels more environmentally benign; to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Moniz was at a ministerial conference in Washington on Nov. 7 to push for the capture of carbon from coal plants, the most intense emitters. This embryonic technology, known as “carbon capture and storage,” removes the carbon dioxide from the effluent streams chemically. Then it is compressed to a liquid and pumped into geological formation for storage. In time, scientists believe it will eventually harden and become part of the earth that hosts it.
 
Twenty-three nations were in Washington for the meeting and to hear Moniz spur them on to greater effort; to catch the wave of technological euphoria and to see if King Coal, now under attack by environmentalists and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, can be helped back onto his throne.
 
Since 2009, according to Moniz, the United States has committed $6 billion to carbon capture and eight large demonstration projects are underway. China, often dismissed as an environmental renegade, is working on carbon capture.
 
“It is wrong to think that China doesn't care about the environment,” said Sarah Forbes of the World Resources Institute, which has an office in China and is working with the Chinese.
 
There are more questions than answers about whether carbon can be captured from utility chimneys cheaply, and whether enough of it can be kept out of the atmosphere to make the effort worthwhile. But the effort is underway.
 
Remember, it took 40 years to beat back the energy crisis. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate