What The 1970s Oil Shock Can Tell Us About Today
It feels a lot like the 1970s. Fuel prices are rising, the Third World is writhing, and Silk Sonic is vibing in bell bottoms again. War in Ukraine has blown up energy prices like the 1973 Israel War, with the West somehow sanctioning itself this time. As Miss Shirley Bassey said, “it’s just a little bit of history repeating.”
So let’s read some history (Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis And Its Economic Legacy, edited by Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero).
The 1970s Oil Crisis
According to Fiona Venn, “the energy crisis of 1973 consisted of two ‘distinct but interrelated crises’, one ‘political’, the other ‘economic’.”
The political crisis was the oil embargo declared by Arab members of OPEC in 1973. But they were only even able to do this because oil-producing countries had already been nationalizing their natural resources for years.
As Christopher R.W. Dietrich wrote, “OPEC had waged a protracted and highly publicized campaign to wrest pricing and production control…
