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1973 America, Do You Remember?

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.

1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 06:23:38

An interesting perspective with informative photo's for those who are too young to remember or for whom memories have faded. Lots of photos at link, just keep scrolling for page 2.

http://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/11/2 ... ed-states/

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Out of Gas: Photos from the 1973 Oil Crisis in the United States

In this day and age, resource scarcity is a topic of regular discussion.

A reason for this is the overuse of our natural resources as a result of continually growing human technological expansion.

People are more reliant on technology than ever, and it seems that everything being made just takes more and more of a toll on the finite natural resources.

One of the biggest sectors that do this is transportation. Many things that make up the transportation sector rely on fuels such as gas or oil to let them run properly, hence why prices are always fluctuating.

While people may think that supply and demand is in a frightening place now, it has been much worse. The 1973 oil crisis was an eye-opener, showing how reliant people were on oil and gas to get around and do normal activities.

It all started in 1970 when the production of oil in the United States of America began its precipitous decline.

The president at the time was Richard Nixon, who was quite shocked to learn that as a result of the embargo there was no spare capacity available and that production could only decrease with time.

Eventually, that crisis came, and it began in October of 1973.

The members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, or as many people know it OPEC, announced that they would begin an oil embargo.

As the embargo went on, all the way until March of 1974, the price of oil rose dramatically, starting off at just three dollars a barrel and getting as high as twelve dollars a barrel on a global level.

Shockingly enough, the prices in the United States of America were even higher.

This startling embargo had long lasting as well as short term effects globally, with politics and the economy being severely affected. The oil crisis of 1973 was sadly referred to as the first oil shock, with another occurring in 1979.

It is sobering to see pictures from that era showing the long lines of people waiting for hours to put gas in their vehicles so that they could get to work.

Many signs were erected warning people not to loot one another’s oil, or there would be repercussions.

People were desperate because they needed oil in order to continue living as they had become accustomed to, but there was simply not the supply available, and it was increasingly more and more expensive for many people, even if they could get the oil to use.

Many are probably wondering why the embargo even came about, to begin with, and if it was warranted given the international effects that it had. The embargo was, in fact, a response by the Arab nations to the United States’ involvement in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The United States purportedly supplied the nation of Israel and its fighters with arms to use against the Arab nation’s attacks, and as such, in response to this military move, the members of OPEC stated that they would begin an oil embargo against the United States, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom as well.

The crisis went on to, as previously discussed, have a significant international impact.

It even went as far as to create tension within NATO, as many of the countries around the world no longer wanted to be associated with the actions of the United States.

They did not want to be the recipients of this embargo which could truly be crippling to a nation’s economy.

Also startling is that this period of time was labeled one of the first times since the Great Depression that not only the nation, but the world, was plunged into a long-term persistent economic crisis.

The success of this embargo was evident with just how much it affected the entire world’s economy, and the way of life for many nations.

It was an effective way for OPEC, especially Saudi Arabia to display their economic power on a global scale.

One good thing that came out of this energy crisis was that it almost forced people to have a greater interest in discovering more about renewable energy, and how it can be used in modern society in a cost-effective and efficient way.

There was a significantly increased interest in the research around solar power and wind power.

Many nations learnt not to be so reliant on the Arab nations for their oil supplies, and to avoid costly fuel crisis on a global scale.

It is events such as this that make the importance of the environment clear, with it being very closely related to international markets and the day to day lives of people across the world.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby MD » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 06:32:16

I remember it very well! I was 15 years old, and the embargo delayed my driver's prermit! Odd/Even plate rules were in effect. (if you had an odd numbered license plate, you could only buy fuel on odd numbered days, etc).

Interestingly, the shortages weren't as bad where I grew up.

It was a great time to manufacture natural gas furnaces!
Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

Just think it through.
It's not hard to do.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Cog » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 09:08:49

I remember my father being outraged that gasoline had gone over 40 cents a gallon.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Paulo1 » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 11:05:36

2017

Move the Embassy to Jeruselum.

Insult a male latino president and tell his country to go pound sand.

Threaten Canada. Threaten China. Threaten NATO.

Bring back torture.

Iran issues?

What could possible go wrong? The US is going from rhyming history to rapping out an ear-splitting version of it. Good luck. Good time to sell your stocks.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Cog » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 12:09:29

Canada will bend the knee just like all the rest.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby efarmer » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 12:57:45

My bet is Trump will go Oklahoma ala Randy Terrill's bill to tax all out of state money transfers. The basic wrinkle is you tax all out of state money transfers and then forgive the tax on your income tax return at the end of the year, if you keep all the records. Of course if you are an illegal alien and don't file, the money is income for the state. Applying this as a Federal policy means you tax all money transfers going out of the country along the same guidlines as Oklahoma. Most undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin America send their money home to support parents and family as there isn't any Social Security equivalent in place in those nations. Estimates are a 5% tax by the Feds would extract $1.2 Billion a year from the money Mexicans are sending home. Thus, illegal aliens from Mexico and elsewhere "pay off the note" on Trump's wall. If you throw them all out somehow, this scenario falls on it's bum. I suppose to make this money rake have more tines, they have to ding money orders from the US cashed in Mexico and Central America as well. I do not know if the Federal swamp has the gators in place to do this or if they will have to add some.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby evilgenius » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 13:30:55

The conspiracy theorists and Joe Six Pack blamed the oil companies, as I recall. There wasn't much talk about Saudi Arabia and Sheik Yamani trying to get the US to change its ways over Israel, anger at the US resupplying Israel during the war, on the nightly news. All you heard about were the lines, and endless stories of people complaining and suffering. Of course, I was ten. William F. Buckley may have been talking about it, but I hadn't discovered him yet. Which is to say, the ways we hear and discuss things today are probably more on the level that I understood things when I was ten than when I got older and began to seek more and better sources of information. That's kinda sad, really.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby yportne » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 13:38:09

I had a big Ford and a used Cadillac. Both got about 10 miles per gallon. The removal of lead from gasoline had caused some temporary problems. If memory serves oil was about $2 per barrel.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby MD » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 13:50:42

Some of you have gone off topic. Skip the current rhetoric and go back to the main topic, please. We have a crapload of other threads assigned to your responses already.
Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

Just think it through.
It's not hard to do.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby efarmer » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 14:12:24

I do remember 1973, my father ran a country store and filling station side by side. I worked in them both, and the rural valley we lived in had dwellings and structures mostly heated via distributed propane tanks. There was a WWII POW camp left on the edge of the huge okra and spinach fields and Mexican migrant workers lived there free and bought food and money orders from me to send home every week. We often couldn't get gasoline deliveries and the propane became rationed in the winter going into 1974. My friend's Dad had pull in the petroleum distribution business and scored several tankers with locally pooled private and business money to go around and fill tanks the contracted firms could not. I began to study electronics and still worked the cash register and stocked shelves and marvelled at how gasoline was now over a dollar a gallon.
People began to share rides to St. Louis jobs, and farm people shared rides with other families to come and shop. I moved into St. Louis close to the University District later in 1974, and gasoline prices abated and my theory was that Disco danced the Arab Oil Embargo to death, a theory I abandoned after a very brief analysis of it's underpinnings.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby yportne » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 15:29:15

I vaguely recall feuds between Texans and those living in the New York area. Some Texans wanted to restrict importation of cheap Middle East oil. This led to expressions such as "Burn America First", "Strength Thru Exhaustion" and "Let the @#$%^&* freeze in the dark". I bought a Buick with a 25 gallon gas tank. In the interest of conservation GM made it grossly underpowered and somewhat dangerous for freeway entrance. Eventually the auto makers solved the engineering problems associated with the removal of tetraethyllead.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Subjectivist » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 15:36:41

I remember because were were a farm my dad was able to add a second in ground fuel tank for gasoline. He used it for his commute to work car, but by avoiding the state and federal taxes in his old Ford he had more money to support the family. Nowadays they dye farm fuel and if they catch you using it in a road vehicle you get a big fine. Things were a bit looser in 1973!
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Subjectivist » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 15:45:18

yportne wrote:I vaguely recall feuds between Texans and those living in the New York area. Some Texans wanted to restrict importation of cheap Middle East oil. This led to expressions such as "Burn America First", "Strength Thru Exhaustion" and "Let the @#$%^&* freeze in the dark". I bought a Buick with a 25 gallon gas tank. In the interest of conservation GM made it grossly underpowered and somewhat dangerous for freeway entrance. Eventually the auto makers solved the engineering problems associated with the removal of tetraethyllead.


I remember my dad taking the 4 barrel carberator off my moms car and switching the engine over to a 1 barrel carberator. It was okay for cruising along, but accelleration was terribly slow. Fortunately she only drove it for grocery shopping about once a week. That was when I learned about working on car engines and all the tricks and tweaks of adjusting the timing, and setting the fuel flow screw on the carberator. I seem to recall he was able to lock two of the four barrels on his carberator making it functionally a 2 barrel.

The last car I had I could work on like that was made around 1985, now the engines have computer spagetti wiring all over and making adjustments means having a computer that can plug into the car computer and adjusting the programming.
II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby Cog » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 15:51:49

Subjectivist wrote:I remember because were were a farm my dad was able to add a second in ground fuel tank for gasoline. He used it for his commute to work car, but by avoiding the state and federal taxes in his old Ford he had more money to support the family. Nowadays they dye farm fuel and if they catch you using it in a road vehicle you get a big fine. Things were a bit looser in 1973!


Yep we had a 200 gallon tank on the farm, that in theory was for farm equipment. We filled the cars with it all the time.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 16:26:31

1973: the begining of a huge change in the US oil patch. That was my first year at Texas A&M working on my masters in geology. The biggest news: one grad that spring didn't just a job with Big Oil but started at $800 PER MONTH!!! Up untl then not many job offers. If real lucky got one of the handful of new jobs at the USGS for around $450 per month.

But that was nothing: a year later companies were flying us all over the Gulf Coast for interviews. Essential if you didn't take a crap on the reception area floor you got a job offer. LOL. And forget $800/math...now $1,200/mth. And between accepting the Mobil Oil offer and starting that summer got I bumped to $1,350/mth. And that was just the start: within 5 year I became the head Division development geologist for a big independent...a good 5 years less then the typical experience level. And getting $58k/year. And then a few years later many of us not only couldn't get a job but couldn't even get an interview.

Mentioned it before: folks think we just went thru an unprecedented drilling boom with almost 2,000 rigs turning to the right. By the late 70's the rig count was 4,500+. The big diffence between that boom and recent one: those 4,500+ rigs drilling didn't increase US oil production even close to what we just experienced. The late 70's boom was likely the most uneconomical effort by the US hydrocarbon extraction industrty in the history of the country.

An amazing contrast to where we began just a few years earlier in 1973.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 17:14:50

1973 I graduated from high school and registered for the draft. Assigned class 1H holding as they had stopped drafting anybody or having the lottery.
Drinking age was 18 and the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. Local bar next to a college full of pretty nursing students charged a $3.00 cover charge to get in when a rock band such as "Spoonfeather" was playing. Draft beer was $0.25 a mug until the band started playing at 9:00 and then went up to $0.50. Two to four of us would go to the bar and buy a bucks worth at 8:45 and hide the extras under the table and a coat as you could only have one each on the table at a time. I started tech school in the fall and didn't have a car for most of the first year. College cost $2200. a year.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 17:31:05

vt - Yeah, forgot college cost: LSU in New Orleans in 1969...first fall semester: $48 for 17 hours of courses. Not any scholarship or discount...what it cost anyone. The big shocker I had to overcome: books cost almost $150. Almost ended college before it started.

Was raised to be career military...a marine. But back enjury killed that. Tried to sneak in thru the draft (low number) but the army also ejected me. I suspect you get the irony: 1969 and CAN'T get drafted. LOL. Like they say: be careful what you wish for...you might get it. Not a particularly found memory: two neighborhood buddies made it in and didn't make it back. But for us it was the best shot at escaping the neighborhood.
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Re: 1973 America, Do You Remember?

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Thu 26 Jan 2017, 18:01:50

ROCKMAN wrote:vt - Yeah, forgot college cost: LSU in New Orleans in 1969...first fall semester: $48 for 17 hours of courses. Not any scholarship or discount...what it cost anyone. The big shocker I had to overcome: books cost almost $150. Almost ended college before it started.

Was raised to be career military...a marine. But back enjury killed that. Tried to sneak in thru the draft (low number) but the army also ejected me. I suspect you get the irony: 1969 and CAN'T get drafted. LOL. Like they say: be careful what you wish for...you might get it. Not a particularly found memory: two neighborhood buddies made it in and didn't make it back. But for us it was the best shot at escaping the neighborhood.

My father was drafted into WW1, my older half brother was drafted into Korea and served two hitches. They both told me never to volunteer. So I didn't. Now one of my daughters is a veteran of the second gulf war so I'm like the odd man out in the family. I do get pissed whenever I hear of a Vet having to look for charity because the VA hasn't done their job.
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