Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.
When I was younger, I remember families like mine who had to deal with the disastrous policies of the 1970s.
One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school - car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government's price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing.
With only 2 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil, we in the United States can pump until we are blue in the face and it will not change the fact that we need more diverse and more secure sources of energy.
After the oil crisis of 1973, many European countries tightened restrictions on immigrants. By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home.
BP CEO Tony Hayward said recently, 'No one wants this thing over more than I do. I'd like my life back.' Tony, I'm so sorry you had your summer disrupted. I'd buy you a drink, but you'd probably spill that too and make me clean it up.
The current oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of governmental mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.
Often I'll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn't have to for the '70s... I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.
We experienced similar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.
We don't have all the time in the world with oil. We have to use oil while it makes sense to do so.
It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.
My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered.
American dependence on oil has only gone up as we've gone through various crises and not invested in R&D.
With Iraq plunging into chaos and gas prices at record highs President Bush took time out this weekend for a ride on his bicycle, but unfortunately he fell off and sustained cuts to his face and hands. Apparently Bush was distracted by the enormous responsibilities of the presidency. I'm just kidding. He hit some gravel or something.
I think that's the fascinating thing about the '70s is that it turns out it was quite a dark decade. But, like, who knew?
The uncontrolled and rapacious exploitation of oil has led to unintended consequences, and if we continue on a similar trajectory with water, the oil crisis will seem like the trailer of some horrible disaster movie.
Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.
We shouldn't be so dependent on foreign oil.
When the 55 mph speed limit came in and the oil crisis caused fuel rationing, the truckers began to look like the last American cowboys.
An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking - and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels - which we possess in staggering abundance - that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.
A dramatic decrease in oil availability is not at all far-fetched.
Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.
The confusing thing, I thought, was that most of America already knew that we were overly reliant on oil, especially on foreign oil. But it was news that this administration had begun to at least acknowledge that problem.
The day we run out of petrol is the day Iran will be free.
