Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little
When I questioned Colonel Walsh about the long-term viability of the fuel supply chain for the war in Iraq, he stressed the “unwavering commitment” within the military to keeping it running smoothly. “It’s as important to the survival of our soldiers as food itself—more so, even.” He told the famous World War II story of General Patton’s Third Army: when it was running low on fuel at the Meuse River during its race across France into Germany, having outrun its fuel supplies, the general ordered his men to drive until they ran out of gas and “then get out and walk.” “My men can eat their waist belts,” Patton told his friend and commanding general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, “but my tanks need gas.” Tragically, Patton couldn’t get new fuel supplies fast enough to penetrate Berlin. (This gave the Germans time to regroup, and it was the Russians who later took the city.) The general called this failure the “unforgiving minute”—the window of time in which he would have made his place in history had he been allocated the fuel.
Having recalled this story, Walsh summed up his team’s work securing fuel convoys in Iraq as “mission critical.” There’s no getting around the fact that “we are a hydrocarbon military,” he added. “Everything runs on oil.”
EMBARGOED
In the decades following World War II, in the hope of maintaining access to cheap and abundant oil supplies, the United States began offering ever bigger favors to its allies in the Middle East. It began to furnish the Saudis (and at times Iran and Iraq as well) with military aid, including state-of-the-art weaponry and combat planes, private security forces, and military training to protect American-friendly regimes. Despite these efforts, the United States eventually got a bitter taste of what it feels like to be oil-starved.
I have no memory of the Arab oil embargo; I was born in 1974, the year after it began. But when I asked my neighbor how it affected her family, she recalled bicycling to work so that there was enough gas in the car to get her kids to school. She also vividly remembered the shock of seeing lines for the first time at the gas pump. As the embargo crippled U.S. oil supplies, stations began limiting drivers to 10 gallons of fuel at each fill-up and shut off their pumps on Sundays. “To many Americans,” commented one journalist, “it was impossible to understand how their standard of living was now being held hostage to obscure border clashes in strange parts of the world.”
In 1973, Saudi Arabia and some of its partners in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) ordered a total embargo on oil exports to the United States. The reason for the embargo was precisely the conflict of interest that had been outlined decades earlier on the Quincy: the United States could not reconcile its strong alliances with both the Jewish and Muslim worlds. Israel’s longtime foes Egypt and Syria had launched a surprise attack on two fronts in Israel, the latest in an ongoing series of conflicts since Israel proclaimed statehood in 1948. It was the afternoon of October 6, 1973—Yom Kippur, the most sacred Jewish holiday. Israel was badly in need of aid, and the United States was faced with the hard decision of choosing between its allies. Nixon launched Operation Nickel Grass to secretly airlift supplies to Israel. “Send everything that can fly,” Nixon told his secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The supplies—more than 22,000 tons—were supposed to be airlifted under the cover of night, but a glitch caused some planes to arrive during the day for all to see. The Muslim world was infuriated by what it perceived as a blatant show of U.S. support for its enemy. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (a son of Ibn Saud, as have been all the kingdom’s rulers) had previously warned the United States that “America’s complete support for Zionism and against the Arabs makes it extremely difficult for us to continue to supply the United States with oil, or even to remain friends with the United States.” As a punishment, OPEC’s Middle Eastern members enacted the embargo on October 17.
The economic fallout that ensued transformed OPEC into “a household word—not just an obscure acronym” throughout the United States, noted one article, “and for the first time turned Western attention to the distant lands they unknowingly relied on.” Within months, the price of oil had jumped from under $3 a barrel to almost $12 a barrel. In turn, consumer prices soared, along with unemployment and inflation. Nixon’s hands were tied—there was the option of forcibly seizing Middle Eastern oil fields, but it would have been all but impossible to generate popular support for such tactics in the wake of the Vietnam war.
The government reluctantly made a necessary—but in ways distinctly un-American—move: it required consumers to curb their energy consumption. Though fuel conservation had been viewed as a patriotic sacrifice during World War II, Nixon’s action was a radical measure given the energy-lavish habits of the postwar boom decades. The president instructed home owners to dial back their thermostats, and companies shortened their working hours. Though the embargo was ended in March 1974, its ripple effects on world oil prices and inflation would continue to be felt throughout the decade.
During the late 1970s, the Carter administration set forth a doctrine that very clearly harked back to FDR’s original promise to King Saud. President Carter vowed that the United States would from that time on take the lead in defending the Gulf. Access to Persian Gulf oil is a vital national interest, he acknowledged, and to protect that interest the United States would be prepared to use “any means necessary, including military force.” This liberal president was spelling out in no uncertain terms the intimate ties between U.S. foreign policy and petroleum.
But Carter also tried to tackle the oil problem from a different, demand-side angle, offering a prophetic address to the American public calling for a substantial reduction in U.S. oil demands:
Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis…is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century…By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress…Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices. The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation…This difficult effort will be the “moral equivalent of war”—except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.
Carter was right about many things, including the fact that his proposals were unpopular from the get-go. He developed efficiency standards for appliances and buildings. He created a well-funded R & D program to promote the development of solar power, wind turbines, and electric cars—programs that led to the first commercial applications of these technologies. He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. He kept the thermostat low and gave his presidential addresses in a trademark wool cardigan that came to represent his persistent pleas to the American public to voluntarily curb energy use.
During the Carter era, America managed to reduce its daily petroleum consumption by 18 percent, thanks in part to strict new efficiency standards for cars. This achievement was soon to be reversed. By 1981, when President Reagan took office, the embargo was a fading memory; oil supplies were bountiful, and prices were sinking back to levels not seen for a decade. Reagan ordered the solar panels removed from the White House roof. Celebrating the restoration of cheap oil, Reagan promptly cut the funding for Carter’s alternative energy program and eased fuel economy standards. In doing so, he encouraged a trend of upward-climbing energy demand in America that deepened our dependence on the oil-rich Middle East. It also intensified U.S. military vigilance in the region, as any kind of volatility there could spell another oil shock.
STORMY DESERT
Trouble bubbled up again in the Middle East in the 1980s as combative neighbors Iran and Iraq fought out a long-running territorial skirmish in a costly and inconclusive war. At the war’s end, the regime of Saddam Hussein was heavily in debt and the country’s petroleum infrastructure was in disrepair. Saddam, who had assumed the presidency in 1979, saw an opportunity to erase his debt by seizing