What were those people thinking?
My son turns 25 today. Naturally my mind moves back a quarter of a century, to 1980.
Jimmy Carter was still in the White House then, still trying to get the country to realize that the energy crisis was real and not contrived. He, like his predecessor, would be defeated for re-election at least partly because the public blamed him for economic problems that were really caused by drastic increases in the price of oil.
We know, today (though it wasn’t in the news then), that the United States had passed its peak oil production in 1970. The two drastic oil-related economic shocks – the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and the drastic price hikes of 1979 – would not have happened if the United States had still had enough domestic oil to merely open the taps wider. Once you become a net importer instead of a net exporter, you’ve lost control of the game.