Welcome to the party you enviromental bitches.
Forever changed the nation?
Actually, no. What a broad overstatement
Panic?
No. Just anger.
Then Nixon showed what a moron he was by slapping us with the idiotic 55 mph limit nation wide.
Which morphed from “we’re just doing it to save gas” to “it’s for safety” so they could inflict it on us for longer.
Only time I remember being really desperate I was up in Detroit on a Sunday (from my hometown of Cleveland). All the stations were closed but I was able to get a partial fill on the Ohio Turnpike and make it home for work Monday.
One of my work mates was a 6-4 /270lb guy who impulsively traded his Buick Electra 225 for a Chevy Vega and instantly regretted it.
Half a century ago, a series of oil crises caused widespread panic and led to profound shifts in U.S. culture
No no no!
It is resultantations of a stolen election and the catastropical repercusioning that thus resulted from the stupidity installed and foisted upon us.
Riding high in April
Shot down in November 2020
That’s due some recompense.
Where we lived, Tulsa OK, and later in Farmington NM, when the Arab Oil Embargo was in place still had plenty of gas. No lines, but the price had not quite doubled. Regular, which was 25 cents now cost 40 cents. Ethyl, which was 35 was over fifty cents.
We bought several 5 gal gas cans to take with us on trips, just in case.
All the fights in gas lines seemed to occur on the West Coast.
The article was written in crayon and editing approved by a 3rd grader...
I just remember it being a huge inconvenience. Panic? Heck no.
At the time, it was popular to say a location was "freeway minutes" away on the assumption of an average 60 MPH (1 mile per minute). The 55 MPH limit certainly goobered up that practice.
So.... those “shortages”... for those who were around then, we remember (or should) were the product of what?
(Hint: there are some parallels to today)
Smithsonian vomits its (now usual) hogwash BS historical revisionism...
I don’t remember any “mayhem”, just people waiting in lines for gas. Imagine what that would be like today, especially in a civilized place like California.
In Berzeerkeley there was one gas station on San Pablo Ave open. None of us minded it coz there were dozens of coeds waiting in line.
Ping
It’s a complete myth that the Embargo caused the ‘73 “Oil Crisis”. It worsened a preexisting, government-created crisis.
Gasoline and heating oil shortages had started a year before. The combination of federal quotas on imported oil (imposed following the ‘56 Suez Canal crisis), domestic production quotas, federal price controls and lack of refining capacity all combined to create severe heating oil shortages over the winter of ‘72 and of a gasoline into ‘73.
Several states started imposing lower speed limits in the May of ‘73 — five months before the Octopber embargo. That June (again, before the embargo), a quarter of gas stations across the nation had cut operating hours, and about 7% were rationing sales per customer.
When the embargo hit, unlike in ‘56/57, when the closure of the Suez Canal far more severely impacted international oil shipments, but, since the US oil market was far more efficient and competitive than in the ‘70s, did not create a domestic US “crisis” (Europe got burned; France intensified its nuclear power generation program as a result), the US was already into a supply spiral. The “Crisis” became the “Arab Oil Crisis” — convenient excuse and not the cause.
I remember that in the early 1970s work on the Alaska Pipeline had been shut down by the enviros.
I said that if there is ever a gasoline shortage it would be completed. By 1980 it was completed.
During that time oil companies were not allowed to sell their oil at the higher rate after the embargo.
Only NEW WELLS drilled after the embargo could sell oil at the higher rate. So the oil companies shut down their old wells, drilled NEW WELLS right beside them and then were able to get the higher price for their oil.
I had oil field workers from SE New Mexico and Wyoming say the same thing.