83. Understanding Energy Crises of the 1970s and Avoiding Problems Today

Understanding Energy Crises of the 1970s and Avoiding Problems Today. If you were alive and living in the U.S. during the 1970s, you probably remember waiting in long lines to fill your car with fuel. Yet, gasoline wasn’t the only item in short supply during the “Me Decade”—natural gas was seemingly running out and electricity demand was growing so much that new power plants were going up all over the country. “I would argue, and I think a lot of historians would agree with me, that the 1970s was the most important decade in U.S. energy history, and I say that because of the gasoline interruptions. We had three big crises in the Middle East that reduced our supplies of oil, and that got so bad that at one point, in some states, less than 50% of the stations had any gasoline to sell at all,” Jay Hakes, author of the forthcoming book Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “It was also a time where electric demand was expanding at a very rapid rate. There was a lot of optimism that nuclear would fill most of that void,” Hakes said. However, as fate would have it, the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in 1979 pretty much put an end to the nuclear power construction heyday. In addition to writing books, Hakes has served as the administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration during the Clinton administration and as director for Research and Policy for President Obama’s BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission. He was also the director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library for 13 years, and he has had access to some of President Carter’s personal diaries, giving him unique insight into the events that occurred during Carter’s presidency. “Jimmy Carter worked for Admiral Rickover when they developed the first nuclear submarine,” Hakes pointed out. “So, he actually knew the technology of nuclear reactors—obviously better than any president and better than some of the people that worked at the Atomic Energy Commission.” Carter had also spen