This year, Modern Family espouses gay marriage and Miley "twerking" Cyrus' Wrecking Ball sells big. But on energy, the U.S. still relies on imports for the same share of its petroleum use: 35%.
How different are we? While the nation's social and economic fiber has changed dramatically, including a recent surge in energy production, could the oil shock of 40 years ago happen again? Today's continuing dependence suggests, yes, unfortunately, it could.
On Oct. 20, 1973, as U.S. oil production stood near its 1970 peak, Arab countries banned oil exports to the United States in retaliation for its support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The five-month embargo quadrupled energy prices and pummeled the U.S. economy, causing consumers to wait hours in long lines at gas stations.
The embargo helped launched a U.S. energy revolution as President Nixon, and every successor since, called for "energy independence." Conservation measures ensued, including a doubling of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, a national 55 mile-per-hour speed limit, pleas for fewer Christmas lights and a "Don't be Fuelish" ad campaign. Renewable energy got a boost during President Carter's term, when solar panels were installed on the White House roof.
Some of these efforts petered out in the 1980s and 1990s, as Americans recovered from the oil shock, but others held. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the Department of Energy were established in the mid-1970s, when U.S. funding increased for alternate drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) that are expected soon to make the U.S. the world's largest energy producer.
"We've come a long way," Leon Panetta, President Obama's Defense secretary from July 2011 to February 2013, tells USA TODAY, citing a push to! diversify the U.S. energy portfolio.
Henry Kissinger, who was President Nixon's secretary of State during the 1973 oil crisis, agrees. "We're better prepared now, by far," he told an energy conference last week in Washington, D.C. If Saudi Arabia cut its production and exports, he said the U.S. could buy elsewhere, adding: "They've lost the opportunity to blackmail us."
Yet not all has changed.
"We remain very vulnerable," Panetta says, adding it wouldn't take much for members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) — which launched the 1973 embargo — or terrorist groups like al-Qaeda to disrupt supplies. He says the U.S. is using less oil per capita than decades ago and relying on the Middle East for a smaller share of its imports, but those shifts almost don't matter.
World oil prices, which largely determine what Americans pay at the pump, remain high, because developing countries including China and India are driving up demand. With global oil supplies so tight as a result, even a small disruption rattles the markets and causes price spikes.
That's why, despite a 50% increase in U.S. oil production since 2008, the price for a regular gallon of gas remains so high. It costs, in inflation-adjusted dollars, twice as much as 40 years ago.
"We're still part of a global oil market," says Daniel Yergin oil historian and author of The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. He notes petroleum imports have fallen since their peak in 2005, when they accounted for 60% of what Americans used. But they've simply retreated to the same share of consumption as in 1973.
The Department of Energy expects imports will continue to fall as U.S. oil production increases because of fracking. This controversial drilling process blasts huge quantities of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, underground to break apart shale formations and release oil as well as natural gas.
"We won't become energy independent, but we'll become les! s energy ! dependent," Yergin says.
That's not enough to inoculate the U.S. from future oil shocks. "Despite the domestic oil boom, America's oil security is only middle-of-the-road," Robbie Diamond of Securing America's Future Energy (SAFE), a non-partisan group aimed at reducing U.S. dependency, said this month in releasing a ranking of 13 countries' oil security. The United States ranked fifth best, after Japan (No. 1), United Kingdom, Canada and Germany.
The report says the U.S. is making strides, including Obama's plan to nearly double the fuel efficiency of new cars and light trucks — to 54 miles per gallon — by model year 2025. Still, regardless of efficiency gains, it says Americans use more oil than China, Japan and Russia combined, accounting for 20% of global consumption.
"Our nation's oil dependence leaves the economy dangerously exposed to high and volatile oil prices," says Diamond, the group's chief executive officer.
While an oil shock may rock the economy and influence U.S foreign policy, a parallel threat to the environment has emerged since the 1973 embargo: climate change.
"That was not yet apparent," Kissinger said at the SAFE-organized conference, adding that even administration critics didn't voice concerns about oil use's environmental impacts in the 1970s.
In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen warned a Senate panel about the climate dangers posed by the heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of oil, gas and coal. Hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies have since shown that rising temperatures are increasing the risk and severity of heat waves, downpours, drought and wildfire.
The United States can't go it alone any more on climate change than it can on the intertwined issue of oil. Case in point: Its carbon emissions are barely rising in recent years, but global emissions — largely because of China and India's use of oil and coal — are soaring.
Panetta says climate change adds to the reasons why the United ! States sh! ould lead world efforts to reduce reliance on oil. He says such dependence can "influence" decisions such as whether to wage war in the Persian Gulf, adding the U.S. would probably have imposed sanctions on Iran earlier if it weren't concerned about the impact on oil supplies.
Yergin expects future energy disruptions, noting the Middle East is still in turmoil. He says although Saudi Arabia — the center of the 1973 embargo — is now America's strongest Arab ally, Iran is now an adversary. Forty years ago, Iran didn't participate in the embargo, because it was one of the strongest U.S. allies in the Middle East.
"Americans have a short memory," Panetta says, adding they need to be reminded of the myriad costs and lingering risks associated with oil dependence — as shown by the 1973 oil embargo.
1973 OIL EMBARGO AND 1970S AFTERMATH
1973: Libya, Saudi Arabia and other members of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) stop oil shipments to the United States in response to U.S. support of Israel. Oil prices quadruple, gas lines form across the U.S. and President Nixon calls for "energy independence."
1974: U.S. approves a national maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour through the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act. Year-round daylight saving time began in Jan. 1974, but because of protests that children were leaving for school in the dark, pre-existing daylight savings rules were restored in 1976.
1975: U.S. establishes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. President Ford signs bill creating first fuel efficiency standards, requiring auto companies to double fleet-wide averages by 1985.
1977: President Carter called the energy crisis the "moral equivalent of war" and established the U.S. Department of Energy.
1979: Second oil crisis hits when Shah of Iran is overthrown and Iranian revolution begins. An encircling of the U.S. Capitol by 3,000 tractors (tractorcade) calls for U.S. commitment to ethanol. Three Mile Island nuclear plant ac! cident di! ms U.S. support for nuclear power. Carter install solar panels on the roof of the White House.
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