When I was in college in Ithaca New York, I experienced my first energy crisis. The 1970s energy crisis was actually two overlapping crises, each triggered by geopolitical upheaval in the Middle East. The first oil shock (1973–1974) began in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel, starting the Yom Kippur War. The U.S. airlifted weapons to Israel to prevent its defeat. In retaliation, the Arab members of OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), led by Saudi Arabia, imposed an oil embargo on the United States, the Netherlands, and other Western supporters of Israel. The effects were dramatic. The price of crude oil quadrupled from about $3 to nearly $12 per barrel. Within months, gasoline shortages caused mile-long lines at American service stations and they put in place an odd/even rationing system where drivers could only fill up based on whether their license plate ended in an odd or even number. I remember the long lines at the five corners gas station in Cayuga Heights where I used to regularly fill up the tank on my tank, a 1968 gold Ford Torino. That was also when the U.S. imposed a national speed limit of 55 mph to conserve fuel, striking at the heart of the primary freedom of Americana, the ability to drive fast and kill yourself on the highway. that was also when daylight saving time was extended year-round as an energy measure.
The embargo was lifted in March 1974, but the price shock had permanently reshaped global energy markets. The second oil shock occurred in 1979 triggered by the Iranian Revolution. The fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when Iran was a major oil producer friendly to the West, and the chaos of revolutionary transition caused Iranian oil output to collapse. Shortly after, the Iran-Iraq War (beginning 1980) knocked both countries’ exports offline simultaneously. Oil prices doubled again, reaching around $35/barrel. In the U.S., the crisis was worsened by federal price controls on domestic oil, which created artificial shortages and exacerbated the panic. President Carter declared the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war.” Imagine the form of phrase in 2026 in the context of Donald Trump trying to skate around the issue of whether he is waging war on Iran or not.
The broader consequences of these oil crises has been a combination of economic, political and ecological. On the economic front, both shocks contributed to stagflation, the toxic combination of high inflation and high unemployment that plagued Western economies throughout the decade. The term “misery index” (inflation + unemployment rates) entered the economic/political vocabulary. In the political front, the crises exposed Western vulnerability to OPEC’s leverage and accelerated the decline of American confidence after the double-whammy of Vietnam and Watergate. The 1979 crisis contributed significantly to Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, and we all know what that has led to…don’t get me started because I helped contribute to that unraveling. Governments scrambled to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil by developing the North Sea (UK and Norway) and Alaska’s North Slope, building nuclear power plants at an accelerated pace, funding research into solar, wind, and synthetic fuels, mandating fuel economy standards for automobiles (CAFE standards, 1975) and creating the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (1975)…which was then mimicked eventually by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which created its own reserves. And finally, in terms of conservation, we got better insulation, double-pane windows, and smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, all of which became mainstream. Japan’s auto industry, which was already building smaller, efficient cars, gained enormous ground on Detroit. So, the legacy of those days was that the 1970s crises permanently ended the era of cheap oil that had underpinned postwar prosperity. They gave birth to the modern energy security framework, elevated OPEC to enormous global political power (at least temporarily), and planted the seeds for the energy-efficiency movement. When oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s, some of the urgency faded, but the structural lessons about supply concentration risk have never fully disappeared.
Historically, the world has always had energy crises in one way or another. In ancient & pre-industrial times it was about wood shortages. Long before fossil fuels, deforestation crises struck repeatedly across civilizations. By the 13th century, England faced a severe timber shortage as forests were cleared for agriculture and charcoal production (for iron smelting). This drove a gradual, painful shift toward coal, not by choice, but necessity. Similar wood famines hit Mediterranean civilizations (Greece, Rome) and parts of China centuries earlier. By the 1600s, London was already heavily dependent on “sea coal” shipped from Newcastle. Supply disruptions from storms, labor disputes, and war could leave the city of London cold and unable to brew beer or fire kilns. The phrase “sending coals to Newcastle” reflects how central this supply chain had become. Early coal shortages were genuine crises for urban populations.
By the 1840s–1850s, whale populations had been hunted so severely for whale oil that sperm whale oil, the dominant lamp fuel, became scarce and expensive. Prices spiked dramatically. This created urgent demand for an alternative fuel, directly spurring the American petroleum industry. Edwin Drake’s 1859 Pennsylvania oil well wasn’t an accident of curiosity, it was a response to an energy supply emergency. In 1902 there was the anthracite coal strike in the U.S., perhaps the first true modern energy crisis. Some 140,000 Pennsylvania miners walked off the job in May and stayed out until October. Anthracite coal heated homes across the Northeastern U.S.. As winter approached, panic spread, prices tripled, schools and hospitals faced shutdowns, and President Teddy Roosevelt was forced to intervene directly, the first time a U.S. president mediated a labor dispute as a matter of national energy security. It ended with a government arbitration commission and a partial victory for miners. Later coal strikes in 1919 and 1943 (during WWII) created similar disruptions, with wartime rationing adding urgency.
WWI was the first truly petroleum-shaped war. The shift from coal-powered navies to oil-powered ones (Churchill converted the Royal Navy just before the war) meant secure oil supply became a strategic imperative. Germany, lacking oil, faced crippling fuel shortages by 1917–18 that hampered its military operations. Britain scrambled to secure Middle Eastern supplies. Lord Curzon famously remarked after the Allied victory that it had “floated to victory on a wave of oil.” And then the World War II Rationing (1942–1945) followed by the Suez Crisis (1956–1957) arguably became the direct predecessors to 1973. It was a stark preview of how dependent Western economies had become on a geopolitically fragile oil supply chain.
The through-line across all of these is that each crisis drove substitution, efficiency, new technology, or geopolitical realignment and each left institutions (regulatory bodies, strategic reserves concepts, international agreements) that shaped what came next. The obvious observation in today’s Iran War crisis and the blockage of the Straits of Hormuz show us that the stranglehold of energy, particularly in the ever-fragile and volatile Middle East, are still very much with us. The big question we should all be asking ourselves for the sake of our children and their children is what new technology and geopolitical realignment will result from this newly self-inflicted crisis by the Trump Administration.