New Energies: A History of Energy Transitions in Europe and North America 0822947765, 9780822947769

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a New Energy History | Stephen G. Gross and Andrew Needham
Part I. The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention
1. The Oil from Our Soil: French Alcohol Fuel versus Foreign Oil, 1918–1957 | Joseph Bohling
2. The Politics of Creative Destruction: West German Hard Coal and the Postwar Oil Transition | Stephen G. Gross
3. Accounting the Dead: The Moral Economy of the Coal-Fired Social Contract | Trish Kahle
4. Hard Hat Cowboys: Energy Workers and Coalfield Capitalism in the Anthropocene | Ryan Driskell Tate
Part II. Oil Transition in Crisis: The 1970s
5. American Politics and Energy Transitions in the 1970s | Victor McFarland
6. The Decade of the “Energy Transition”: A Critical Review of the Global Energy Debates of the 1970s | Duccio Basosi
7. Reversing the Transition from Coal to Oil?: The International Energy Agency and the Western Industrialized Countries’ Restructuring of Energy Supply in the 1970s | Henning Türk
8. From State to Market: A Transition in the Economics of Energy Resource Conservation | Thomas Turnbull
Part III. A Stalled Transition? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possibilities
9. Nuclear Energy and the Dream of Independence: The Case of Eastern Europe | Sonja D. Schmid
10. Contamination without Representation: Fetal Citizenship and Atomic Power in the Postwar United States | Natasha Zaretsky
11. The Rise of Counterexpertise and the Anti–Nuclear Power Movement in West Germany | Dolores L. Augustine
Part IV. The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities
12. A Future Foreseen and Transition Delayed: Big Oil and Global Warming, 1959–1986 | Benjamin Franta
13. Renewable Energies in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1970s–1990s: Discourses, Contexts, and Policies | Eva Oberloskamp
Notes
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

NEW ENERGIES

NEW ENERGIES

A HISTORY OF ENERGY TRANSITIONS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA

Edited by STEPHEN G. GROSS & ANDREW NEEDHAM

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2023, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4776-9 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4776-5 Cover photo: People watch the demolition of four 113-meter-high (370 feet) cooling towers of a lignite-fired power station after a controlled detonation in the eastern German town of Boxberg, April 13, 2006. Photo © Reuters via Alamy Photo. Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

TO LUCY, DUNCAN, JACK, RAYMOND, AND CHILDREN EVERYWHERE ­m ay their bright futures have less carbon than our present.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Toward a New Energy History Stephen G. Gross and Andrew Needham 3

Part I. The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention 1. The Oil from Our Soil: French Alcohol Fuel versus Foreign Oil, 1918–1957 Joseph Bohling 33 2. The Politics of Creative Destruction: West German Hard Coal and the Postwar Oil Transition Stephen G. Gross 48 3. Accounting the Dead: The Moral Economy of the Coal-­Fired Social Contract Trish Kahle 62 4. Hard Hat Cowboys: Energy Workers and Coalfield Capitalism in the Anthropocene Ryan Driskell Tate 76

Part II. Oil Transition in Crisis: The 1970s 5. American Politics and Energy Transitions in the 1970s Victor McFarland 95 6. The Decade of the “Energy Transition”: A Critical Review of the Global Energy Debates of the 1970s Duccio Basosi 107

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7. Reversing the Transition from Coal to Oil?: The International Energy Agency and the Western Industrialized Countries’ Restructuring of Energy Supply in the 1970s Henning Türk 119 8. From State to Market: A Transition in the Economics of Energy Resource Conservation Thomas Turnbull 131

Part III. A Stalled Transition? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possibilities 9. Nuclear Energy and the Dream of Independence: The Case of Eastern Europe Sonja D. Schmid 157 10. Contamination without Representation: Fetal Citizenship and Atomic Power in the Postwar United States Natasha Zaretsky 168 11. The Rise of Counterexpertise and the Anti–Nuclear Power Movement in West Germany Dolores L. Augustine 182

Part IV. The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities 12. A Future Foreseen and Transition Delayed: Big Oil and Global Warming, 1959–1986 Benjamin Fr anta 203 13. Renewable Energies in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1970s–1990s: Discourses, Contexts, and Policies Eva Oberloskamp 220 Notes 235 Contributors 317 Index 321

Acknowledgments

This volume was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation of New York, which sponsored an international conference, “The New Energy History: Energy Transitions in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” held at New York University on November 1 and 2, 2018. The essays and ideas of this volume grew from that conference. In addition to the authors in Toward a New Energy History, we are grateful to the other conference participants who authored papers or chaired sessions. These include Zachary Cuyler, Giuliano Garavini, Carol Hager, Frank Laird, Matthew Shutzer, and Troy Vettese. We would also like to thank Alexander Maro, Margaret Miller, Samantha Dawn Paul, Tim O’Donnell, Guerline Semexant, and Christopher Van Demark for their outstanding assistance organizing the event or helping put this volume together. Anastasia Skyobedo and Mikhala Stein Kotlyar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University provided generous support throughout this entire project, from conference to volume. Lastly, we would like to thank Sandra Crooms and Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Varsha Venkatasubramanian for her work preparing the index, and the two anonymous reviewers for their help in improving our collection of essays. We hope these writing here provide some inspiration for thinking creatively about the history of energy transitions, and integrating energy into the bigger questions of European, North American, and global history.

NEW ENERGIES

Introduction

TOWARD A NEW ENERGY HISTORY Stephen G. Gross and Andrew Needham

In 1973 the Italian nuclear physicist Cesare Marchetti began formulating a “simple and predictive model describing energy markets for the last century.” Four years later he produced one of the most iconic pictures in energy history: a schematic graph depicting energy systems rising and falling like clockwork over time. The age of wood replaced by the age of coal, then oil, then natural gas, and then, so he predicted, nuclear energy and solar power. “It is as though the system,” Marchetti reflected, “had a schedule, a will, and a clock.” All it took was time, and the right price. His imagery of regular transitions, unfolding smoothly without interruption, free from outside forces like politics or values, gripped experts around the world as they strove to change their nation’s energy systems following the oil shock of 1973. Marchetti was working for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, a think tank founded to bridge the Cold War divide with cutting-­ edge models for global problems. IIASA’s ideas spread through Western Europe, North America, and the Eastern Bloc, and graphs strikingly similar in their assumptions informed policy across the Global North during the 1970s.1 A generation later, as global temperatures rise, sparking our glaciers to melt and our forests to burn, humanity stands before what could be the greatest collective challenge in history. In many respects, experts and politicians

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Figure I.1: Cesare Marchetti’s model “Historical Evolution of the Primary Energy Mix for the World.” 1850–2100. f = market fraction of an energy. Source: Cleaned image of Marchetti’s diagram from Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 84.

Figure I.2: Historical fuel shifts according to President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 National Energy Plan. 1860–1980. Source: Frank Laird, Solar Energy, Technology Policy and Institutional Values (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 114.

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Figure I.3: First scenario forecast for West Germany’s primary energy consumption, in the Social Democratic Party’s Energy Forum of 1977. 1950–2100. Million tons of hard coal equivalent. Kernenergie = nuclear power; Sonne, Wasser und Sonstiges = sun, water, and miscellaneous; Erdöl = oil; Erdgas = natural gas; Braunkohle = lignite coal; Steinkohle = hard coal. Source: SPD, Energie: Leitfaden zur Diskussion (Bonn: SPD, 1977), 52.

are approaching global warming with historical assumptions about energy that have changed little since the 1970s. One hopes for a transition toward renewable sources of power like the sun and the wind. But the models informing public debate today—­whether historical, digital, or cognitive—­bear an eerie

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resemblance to earlier ones. In his famous appeal to repower the United States in 2008, former vice president Al Gore claimed the United States could adopt a carbon-­free electricity network within decades. A year later Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, engineers writing in Scientific American, suggested the world could achieve 100 percent renewable energy in twenty years. Ten years on they remained firm in their timeline, illustrating it with smooth curves of rising renewables and falling fossil fuels.2 Many advocates of solar and wind claim this transition not only “mirrors” previous ones, but that the move from “fossil fuels to renewables has become inevitable” as costs fall. As Bruce Usher puts it, “Basic economic principles, primarily cost, are the main drivers of energy transitions. Cost is key.”3 This narrative of grand sweeping curves, where transitions are defined by efficiency and price, is comforting: if only we can lower the cost of solar or wind, we can solve global warming. Or at least be on our way. But energy shifts are far more complex, far more human, and in fact far more interesting than lines on a graph, efficiency ratios, or prices. Historians have unearthed this complexity; they have a long tradition of studying the human side of energy in its many facets, even if histories of energy have often been fragmented into different wings of the discipline, from environmental history to the history of technology or diplomacy.4 Despite this fragmentation, three points stand out in more nuanced histories of energy: (1) commercializing a new energy infrastructure involves protracted processes of political and economic change, (2) new energies almost never wholly replace old ones, and (3) the causes and effects of transitions reach far and wide, changing people’s lives in unexpected and profound ways. Since roughly 2010, diverse strands of historical study have been coalescing into a new field of energy history, a coalescence that motivated this volume. The chapters here explore the causes, courses, effects, and aftershocks of energy transitions in North America and Europe during the twentieth century. They not only historicize popular and economic notions of energy but also show how energy has reshaped everything from social life and economic organization to political governance. The volume draws on a range of historical approaches—­including intellectual and cultural history, labor history, and political economy—­to understand why some energy systems flourish while others do not, and to capture the cultural, intellectual, and political implications of new energy systems as they struggle to take shape. Over the past 250 years, energy transitions have occurred at a seemingly relentless pace—­the rise of coal in the nineteenth century, the explosion of oil in the twentieth century, the nuclear utopianism of the 1950s and 1960s, and today the expansion of renewable power. These transitions have been as revolutionary as any

Figure I.4: “Projected Power Supply & Demand, 139 Countries.” From Mark Z. Jacobson et al.’s “100 Percent Renewable Energy Roadmap for the World, 2017.” 2012–2050. Source: Mark Z. Jacobson et al., “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight All-­Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World,” Joule 1 (September 2017): 118.

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political or economic upheaval, but they have rarely featured in the grand narratives of twentieth-­century Europe and North America.5 Given the urgency of global warming, historians have a twofold task, which we hope to advance with this volume. We must do more to integrate a history of energy transitions into broader narratives of political, economic, or cultural change. And we must do more to bring our knowledge of the complexity and humanity of energy to the current debate—­shaped in large part by economists, engineers, and scientists—­over what could be the most monumental energy transition ever: the shift away from fossil fuels. In doing so, we aim to steer the public away from, on the one hand, doom-­saying narratives of the impossibility of meaningful transition and, on the other, stories of revolutionary technological fixes driven by heroic individual entrepreneurs. Only by attending to the socially complex and technologically messy histories of energy transitions as they occurred can we provide a past usable for the present moment.

Why Energy Now? Since the turn of the twenty-­first century, global warming has emerged as the world’s most pressing challenge. This wicked problem has led scholars to craft not only a new geological label but also a new category of analysis, the “Anthropocene,” a concept coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to describe how humans are becoming a force of nature in their ability to alter the environment. While there was a delay between the uptake of this term by the natural sciences and the humanities, with the publication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History” in 2010, the Anthropocene as a historical concept arrived. Chakrabarty’s work sparked a debate about the origins of the Anthropocene, with starting points ranging from humanity’s very nature as an extinctive species, to the Agricultural Revolution or Industrial Revolution, to the advent of the atomic age.6 Embedded within this debate are fundamental questions about how to understand human-­driven environmental transformations. Historians have a rich tradition of studying the environment. Until recently, however, energy existed at the relative margins of environmental history, often surpassed in importance by themes such as wilderness management, agriculture, urbanization, water use, and forestry.7 The urgency of the Anthropocene, however, has foregrounded the study of energy. For if the Anthropocene elevated global warming as the challenge of our century, it also illustrated the importance of studying fossil fuel energy systems, because these have accounted for 70 percent of all of the carbon humanity has emitted since 1870. At the heart of environmental degradation and climate change is the extraction, distribution, and consumption of energy.8

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The need to understand how energy-­ intensive, fossil fuel–centered, growth-­oriented societies came to dominate the world is thus more important now than ever before. As Stephen Gardiner presciently underscored, global warming is “seriously backloaded,” making it different from other historical events that diminish in importance the further they recede into the past. Carbon from human sources, by contrast, has flowed into the atmosphere in ever greater quantities since the Industrial Revolution, gaining transformative power as it intensifies in the atmosphere.9 Historians, in other words, can offer a unique perspective to help understand how and why global warming began, how it accelerated, and why it is proving so difficult to halt. A wave of recent studies, what one might call a “New Energy History,” have recognized this, placing energy extraction, production, transportation, distribution, ownership, and consumption at the center of their narratives.10 Energy has also gained new attention from historians for reasons entirely unrelated to climate change, like the renewed interest in capitalism and inequality. Even before the financial crisis of 2007–2008, historians returned to the economy to understand the formation of the great disparities of wealth that were becoming more apparent in the twenty-­first century. They strove to integrate a study of ideas, values, and identities with material life and interest groups.11 The financial crisis, the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression, lent urgency to this task of historicizing the economy, a sentiment captured by Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking study on capital and inequality. Historians working in similar veins have sought to understand how markets were constructed over time intellectually as well as institutionally or politically, and thus to learn why they have gone horribly awry as often as they have yielded positive benefits: disempowering labor and minorities, forcing millions into unemployment through periodic crises, or polluting nature as much as they have lifted people out of poverty or stimulated technological advances.12 Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx superseded Adam Smith as the channel through which historians approached capitalism, inspiring critical studies about the changing form of economic governance throughout the twentieth century—­from classic liberal capitalism to Keynesian or social democratic capitalism to neoliberal capitalism.13 All varieties of twentieth-­ century capitalism, however, required vast amounts of energy. One does not have to be an energeticist like Frederick Soddy or Lewis Mumford—­early twentieth-­century thinkers who saw energy as the root of all value—­to appreciate that capitalism has historically excelled at organizing different technologies, institutions, resources, and laborers to convert energy into economic work. The consumption of energy is, in fact, deeply correlated with wealth, and one of the most powerful markers of global in-

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equality. Great Britain’s pioneering transition to sustained economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hinged on the exploitation of coal on a new, mass scale. The United States’ hegemonic position in the global capitalist order after World War II involved its astounding lead in energy consumption per capita: more than twice as much as its nearest rivals. In 2019 the average US resident consumed nearly eighty thousand kilowatt hours a year; those in Germany and France roughly forty thousand; those in Chad, Niger, Mali, or South Sudan less than one thousand. The reasons for such incredible disparities in energy consumption, of course, have a history.14 The perceived decline of the nation-­state, meanwhile, encouraged historians to turn their attention to the new captains of globalization: corporations.15 In American historiography, financial corporations often took center stage in this new history of capitalism.16 Yet in many ways energy corporations, not banks, have been the largest, most influential, and most globalized companies of the twentieth century. Take ExxonMobil, itself a descendant of Standard Oil, one of the world’s most powerful corporations before it was broken apart in 1911. Today, ExxonMobil has a market capitalization of over $300 billion, conducts business in dozens of countries, and builds infrastructure in dozens more.17 It, and other energy multinationals, have constructed business models designed to shield operations from social control on the local level while obscuring profits from state control through interlocking “offshore” subsidiaries.18 In the words of the oil industry’s leading chronicler, firms like these belong to the “world’s biggest and most pervasive business.” In 2018 six of the world’s ten largest corporations were energy firms, while two more were automobile manufacturers whose business models are unthinkable without gasoline. The production of energy stands as much at the heart of capitalism as does the flow of money: indeed, coal and oil have been called, with only a little hyperbole, the “mainspring of modern material civilization” or the “lifeblood” of modern economies. As historians have returned to capitalism as a subject, studies about energy production, distribution, and consumption, and the firms that control these channels have multiplied, yielding new insights about growth, inequality, class identity, and the geography of markets.19 From still a different angle, the history of commodities and the supply chains that bring them into shopping centers and homes has changed the way we think about global connections. Histories of salt, cod, pepper, coffee, paper, sugar, cotton, or even the T-­shirt have lifted the hood of the engine of globalization to reveal intricate networks of production, distribution, and marketing. These studies have illustrated how the labor forms and the institutions used to produce and distribute a given commodity vary immensely depending on their position in a global supply chain, promoting democracy and wealth

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and protecting nature in one region while undermining polities, impoverishing people, and damaging the environment in another.20 This approach of following the flow of a commodity from start to finish reveals the points at which different actors can insert themselves in order to reap economic gain, achieve leverage over people or resources, and even shape the evolution of states and societies.21 Many of the commodities studied in these histories are raw materials, taken from the earth and used in products and processes that we take for granted. In many ways, energy is the raw material par excellence because it is so essential to modern life, both industrial and postindustrial. It lends itself to spatial analysis as a variety of recent histories have illustrated, which trace the supply chains that render particular forms of energy useable, and which connect points in space or historical processes that have traditionally been considered in isolation.22

Toward a New History of Energy Transitions Together, global warming and the Anthropocene, the new history of capitalism, and the study of commodities have turned energy into a dynamic historical field. Fortunately, historians today have much to build upon, for there is a long precedent in showing how energy shaped human affairs. Already in the 1930s John Nef authored a two-­volume study unsurpassed in its detail of showing how coal influenced everything from capitalism and political power to the ecology of forests in early modern Great Britain.23 In 1983 Thomas Hughes traced the rise of massive new technological systems that brought electricity into the households and urban centers of North America and Europe. Understanding these energy networks, he hoped, would do nothing less than help scholars tackle the big questions of history, about “the ordering, integrating, coordinating, and systematizing nature of modern human societies.”24 And since the 1990s and 2000s, our understanding of the Industrial Revolution, or what many scholars now call the Great Divergence, has hinged not only on questions of imperialism, slavery, institutions, and trade, but also on coal.25 Yet “energy” as such was often not the object of these earlier, discerning studies. Instead, they focused on discrete forms of energy, like anthracite or wood, or on particular technologies or organizations that delivered energy, like multinational oil companies or electrical utilities. These earlier authors, in other words, were less interested in energy as a historical category or how contemporaries conceptualized energy than in exploring individual energy forms and using them to answer questions about other topics such as industrial development, the interconnectivity of “socio-­technical arrangements,” or economic institutions.26 Toward the end of the twentieth century, energy became its own catego-

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ry of analysis, but with a few important exceptions it fell under the purview of economists.27 After the oil crisis of 1973, economists revived frameworks for understanding the nature of exhaustible resources, and economics as a profession began including energy in their models alongside labor, capital, and land.28 Quantitative economic historians followed this trend and began looking to the past for empirical evidence of how energy related to economic growth, the totem of post–1945 economic theory.29 They put moments of transition between fuel sources at the center of their analysis about energy’s causal role in historical changee. For the Industrial Revolution, arguably the seminal event of energy history in European and American historiography, the work of E. A. Wrigley, Robert Allen, Peter J. G. Pearson, and Roger Fouquet from the mid-­1990s on defined a paradigm that placed price, scarcity, and technology at the heart of the story. Through the painstaking reconstruction of long-­run data sets on population, gross domestic product (GDP), and the prices of wood, charcoal, and coal, they mapped the contours of British economic history in minute detail. In their hands, the Industrial Revolution was redefined as an energy transition, one of the most momentous in history, from an organic society fueled by wood, grain, and the muscles of animals to an inorganic economy driven by coal. And the mechanisms of change were straightforward. As population and the economy grew, wood and land—­t he dominant sources of energy before the eighteenth century—­became scarce. Their prices rose, encouraging the substitution of new energies through new technologies. In Britain, so this argument went, rising wood and land prices induced producers and consumers to turn to coal on a grand scale.30 The crucial breakthrough came when engineers, driven by price incentives, improved the steam engine so they could use coal not only for heat but also for mechanical power to run factories and power railroads. In the words of Robert Allen, “High wages and cheap energy were the distinctive features of the British economy during the Industrial Revolution . . . creating a demand for technology that substituted capital and energy for labour.”31 Expanding scope beyond Britain only seemed to confirm economic historians in their paradigm. In a lead editorial for the journal Energy Policy, for instance, Fouquet and Pearson could write that “a review of 14 past transitions indicated that, for a new energy source to become dominant, the energy services . . . it provided had been cheaper than the incumbent energy source.”32 Price and efficiency, in their hands, were the kings of transitions, and technology the queen. Yet in the process of unearthing amazing statistical series that yielded new insights, these historians of transitions veered too far into the macro and the structural. The drama was gone. The human agency or conflict fell out of view in the face of impersonal forces. When these economic historians spoke of

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lock-­in—­how energy systems once in place built their own momentum—­t hey rarely discussed the producers, consumer groups, or businesses that lost out or reinvented themselves because they backed the “wrong” system.33 When they traced the rise of new fuel sources, they rarely had a place for geopolitics, labor struggles, cultural shifts, or even states, which do “not seem to have played a highly proactive role in previous transitions.”34 At the most extreme, a picture emerged of an almost steady progression through virtuous feedback loops toward ever more efficient fuels driving ever more energy-­hungry societies: a stagism devoid of contingency. In 2012 a special issue on energy transitions in the leading journal for energy policy could even posit a historical pattern: “New technological combinations enabled entirely new, or vastly improved traditional services, at greater energy efficiency and ever falling costs in a virtual, self-­reinforcing positive feedback loop.”35 The spirit of Cesare Marchetti, it seemed, was alive. So it should not be surprising that advocates of renewable power today who follow this paradigm place their hope in sending the right “price signal,” that they speak of climate change as “fundamentally a technological challenge,” or that they argue moving to wind, solar, and biomass will benefit everyone and generate little resistance.36 “Increased deployment of clean energy technologies . . .” so the International Renewable Energy Council argues, “translates to increased economic opportunities. And everyone can find a way to support that.”37 Even ExxonMobil? These accounts, however much they have expanded our understanding of past transitions, paint a narrow historical picture. This is, after all, the nature of models that aspire to aid policy for the future: they strive for simplification. But where is the conflict in energy transitions? Where are the politics? Where is the human agency—­for or against transition? Where is the knowledge of energy—­as a social category, a scientific object, or an instrument of power? These are all burning questions that historians have posed with ever more urgency since 2010, against the backdrop of global warming and financial crisis. Indeed, a range of new monographs written by historians in history departments, or by unorthodox social scientists, have challenged the narrative that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, pointing the way toward a new approach to energy history that foregrounds struggle, ideology, class, knowledge, geopolitics, culture, and geography. New monographs that combine a history of capitalism with the environment around the theme of energy have forced us to rethink everything from Britain and the United States’ industrialization, to the Cold War experience with nuclear power, to the very foundation of democracy itself.38 New studies about struggles over labor, over language, or over political economy have helped turn “energy” into a category of analysis that

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can bring together historians of various ilk to reopen some of the most basic questions about change in society, about the nation-­state, globalization, politics, capitalism, and identity.39 As even Pearson, a pioneer of the data-­driven studies of the 1990s and 2000s, himself now writes, social scientists have come to appreciate the “multifaceted nature” of energy transitions. Past transitions cannot be explained by price alone; they have “co-­evolved or been entangled with other broader socio-­economic, demographic, technological and environmental changes and processes.”40

What Is an Energy Transition? But what do we even mean by an “energy transition”? The concept itself evokes images of a linear shift from one stage to another. In fact, this was how it was first used and politicized in the 1970s. As a concept that initially related to the pure chemical transformation of one energy into another, energy transition was popularized by the technocratic response to the oil shock of 1973. Experts hoped to defend North America and Western Europe from the “oil weapon” deployed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by facilitating an energy transition. President Jimmy Carter, the Trilateral Commission, and the European Economic Community (EEC) all used the language of transition to develop more hydrocarbons outside of OPEC territory.41 But this is hardly the type of transition one hopes for in the age of global warming, and the term itself harbors the danger of obscuring the messiness of new energy systems by suggesting transitions can be rationally managed, or that they proceed in a linear or straightforward manner. In fact, some doubt the concept can fully capture the complexity of changing infrastructural, technopolitical, or knowledge systems around energy. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, for instance, argue that “if history teaches us one thing, it is that there never has been an energy transition . . . rather a successive addition of new sources of primary energy.” Using transition as a concept, in their view, obscures the extent to which the old remains and the new merely brings forth ever more consumption of energy.42 Nevertheless, many historians use transition with care, and remain keenly aware that older systems never wither, and instead often adapt and expand.43 Transition, moreover, is not merely a cover for some form of crisis—­in an extant energy system or in society more broadly—­as Bonneuil and Fressoz suggest, since in many cases societies incorporate new forms of energy and build new infrastructure during periods of stability. Natural gas is the most telling example, which much of Western Europe first began using before the shocks of the 1970s, and which the continent only fully integrated well after the effects of those shocks had passed, during the 1980s and 1990s.

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More generally, the concept of energy transition adds value if one understands transition less as a discrete, punctuated shift from one stage or system or fuel to another, but rather—­to draw from the new histories of capitalism—­a layering and an “ongoing transformation” that leads to new and “hybrid” forms of energy provision, energy services, and energy consumption, a transformation that can reshape society in the process.44 Much as transitions to capitalism or the nation-­state have all been deconstructed, to show how elements of older systems persist, adapt, and become crucial to newer ones, so too should historians work to expose the less visible transformations that arise out of transitions, whether they be new economic geographies, new political values or morals, new knowledge systems or discourses, or even new temporal or mental frameworks.45 All of this complexity is obscured if one abstracts energy transition into a line on a chart or a price for a fuel. Using this broader approach, our volume emphasizes five pivotal themes of energy transitions, some of which have often been overlooked by earlier literature. Most fundamentally, energy on the scale required by modern societies has historically come through systems of vast complexity, a fact that informs most chapters in this volume. Energy production and consumption can be understood as a socio-­technical system that includes humans, materials, technologies, and ideas, as well as the particular energy itself. The infrastructure needed to extract, refine, and transform energy into something usable—­the networks of ships, roads, trucks, and pipelines that move energy from the point of extraction to the point of consumption—­forms an interconnected system worth trillions of dollars of investments built up over decades. But beyond its physical presence, energy systems also shape how people “work, play, eat, and socialize, . . . how industries cluster, how cities and economies grow, and how nations conduct their foreign affairs.”46 The components of energy systems are so interlinked, moreover, that change in one often ripples through and affects other elements and participants, and crucially, other energy systems. As Clark Miller and others have underscored, the key decisions to study are often political, social, or cultural as much as they are technological or economic.47 Second, this volume shows how prices and technological efficiency, or producer and consumer desires alone, cannot fully explain why one energy rises, another falls, and another reinvents itself, as chapters by Joseph Bohling, Stephen Gross, Victor McFarland, Eva Oberloskamp, Sonja Schmid, and Benjamin Franta demonstrate. Energy systems are embedded in a broader political economy of interest groups that have their own networks and agendas, whether seeking profit, preserving the environment, or attaining geopolitical security. Energy transitions, put differently, are profoundly shaped by competition

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between various groups to mobilize the levers of power at their disposal to advance one energy or restrict another, or to change the extant system. Price and profit are important to the success of any new energy, to be sure, since modern transitions have unfolded through a global capitalism in which energy providers must earn a return on their investments. Yet price and profit are never everything, for states, consumers, workers, experts, and environmental groups all use politics to reshape the economic playing field, and to pursue agendas that make little sense in the logic of the market. States in particular have interests that range from geopolitics to social security and prestige. These interests often overlap with the quest for inexpensive energy, but not always. Governments have historically favored geopolitically secure energy sources, sources that generate domestic employment and social stability, or sources that are considered part of the national culture, even when their costs are high. In any case, what is cheap and what is expensive is rarely determined by supply and demand alone, as markets are political constructs that require state-­made rules to function, that are shaped by incentives created by states, and that are embedded in larger global markets. Who has access to the levers of government, or who has arguments that resonate with the voting public, thus matter immensely. Energy transitions cannot be understood apart from the constant ebb and flow among interest groups and political parties to shape energy policy. Third, these chapters illustrate the staying power of older energy systems, showing how these have historically been reinvented in any number of ways to remain a vital part of modern societies, as chapters by Ryan Driskoll Tate, Trish Kahle, and Henning Türk show. This is so above all for coal. Merely looking at a different sort of graph than those used by Marchetti—­graphs that display the total volume of energy consumed rather than their relative shares—­one sees how voluminous the consumption of coal has been throughout the twentieth century. Even after oil became the dominant energy, coal retained a place at the heart of the industrial societies of Europe and North America, rising in absolute levels in the final quarter of the century. More coal was consumed on these continents in 2000 than in the 1960s.48 Coal survived because firms, workers, governments, consumers, labor leaders, and international organizations reinvented it as an energy: shifting its geographical locus, revolutionizing the technologies used to produce it, changing people’s attitudes toward it, reimagining its place in an evolving geopolitical landscape, and even altering the very nature of coal consumption. Coal’s importance as a fuel for transportation or chemistry diminished in the face of oil’s rise, but nevertheless it remained an essential part of the foundation of the high energy consumer society that emerged after World War II. Huge new coal-­fired pow-

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Figure I.5: World Commercial Energy Production. 1800–2000. Source: Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 6.

er plants located far from city centers facilitated mass electrification while at the same time making the production of energy, and much of the ecological degradation that came with it, seem invisible to many urban consumers. Novel machinery permitted the rise of new coal regions and eroded the power that labor organizations derived from coal, altering the very nature of coal’s politics. Indeed, twentieth-­century coal is an outstanding example of why we need a more capacious understanding of energy transitions, one that captures how old and new energy systems often exist side by side, and how their interaction can lead to mutual intensification and transformation.49 Fourth, energy transitions change the way we think, not just about energy itself but also about larger issues such as political representation, knowledge, and even time, as chapters by Trish Kahle, Natasha Zaretsky, Duccio Basosi, Thomas Turnbull, and Dolores Augustine demonstrate. Because energy transitions are contested processes, with winners and losers, the tensions they generate lead people to reevaluate long-­standing assumptions that govern society. Entirely new costs associated with emergent forms of energy became apparent during transitions, costs that go beyond economic measures to include human life itself, or the lives of future generations, or the lives of people living in other political spaces in other parts of the world. How should representative democracies handle these spatial and temporal questions, given that only citizens who are currently alive have the right to vote? How should politics handle an energy like nuclear power, which has the potential to threaten not only individual lives but humanity as a species—­a threat that first appeared with the atomic bomb in 1945? How should the concerns that emerged about

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the danger nuclear power posed to the future shape our understandings of the future of global warming? Who, moreover, can be entrusted to provide the knowledge to guide such social decisions, given that established science has itself been one of the forces pushing fossil energy and nuclear power in the first place? These questions have defied easy answer, and the process of trying to answer them has historically transformed the nature of representation and expertise in Europe and North America. Finally, energy transitions can transform the very political and economic geography of a nation or even the world, as chapters by Tate and Schmid demonstrate. Fossil fuels come from the earth, and thus the discovery of new sources can shift the center of production and transform the flow of these commodities as new networks arise to bring supplies to the consumer. Changes in energy geography, however, can affect more than just prices—­t hey can lead to new political alliances, new ways of conceptualizing politics, new relations of dependency or influence, and new secondary effects that outlive the primary reason an energy source was tapped in the first place. The geographical relocation and technological transformation of mining in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, transformed the politics of coal as the mining workforce migrated from the political Left to the Right. Nuclear energy promised to liberate states from previous forms of foreign influence, but in fact, it just as often created new channels of dependency after crucial parts of this complex technology were monopolized by powerful actors like the United States or the Soviet Union. The concept of energy transition, in other words, if broadened to mean more than just the rise of a new fuel source, can capture the evolving way humans use energy to achieve their many goals. How this evolution fundamentally changes the nature of society, from the distribution of wealth, power, and inequality, to the way politics, time, and geography are imagined, lies at the heart of this book.

Transitions in North America and Europe Geographically, this volume focuses on North America and Europe. We chose these regions partly because they reflect the expertise of the two editors—­one an Europeanist, the other an Americanist—­and because we hoped to emphasize depth over breadth of coverage. Energy transitions in the twentieth century is an enormous topic, and by limiting the geographical scope we hoped to find energy stories that spoke to and built on one another. This constraint allows the volume to focus on questions of political economy, culture, and ideology in the high energy, consumer societies of the Global North, and on issues of labor mobilization related to the procurement and distribution of domestic

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energy sources such as coal. Unfortunately, our geographical focus does rule out other important lines of inquiry that research into energy transitions can open up, above all about transnational entanglements and the flow of energy across space. There is a developing literature on the movement of hydrocarbons from the Middle East or Russia to Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, for instance, which traces how the transition to a high energy society in one region shaped extraction, labor relations, or the environment in another. More recently, understanding carbon outsourcing from North America and Europe to the most important energy region in the twenty-­first century, China, has become increasingly urgent. Both sorts of flows—­oil to Europe, energy-­intensive manufacturing out of China—­represent outstanding topics for future research that this volume set aside in its focus on political economy, culture, and ideas in Europe and North America.50 North America and Europe, though, share certain commonalities as the first regions to transform into energy-­intensive consumer societies—­what David Nye has called “high energy societies.” There is a certain logic, in other words, for uniting histories of these two regions into a single volume on energy transitions. These two regions were the first to experience the energy transitions studied in this volume. Many of the new technologies driving these shifts, from thermal cracking of oil to controlled nuclear fission, were developed in either Europe or North America. More generally, these two continents have been at the forefront of energy consumption. At the turn of the twentieth century, North Americans and Europeans already used far more energy per capita than consumers in Asia, Africa, or South America. This gap only widened over the first two-­thirds of the century as the economies of North America and Europe and their wealth per capita expanded dramatically, as they began burning oil in huge volumes, and as their consumer lifestyles and industrial systems came to depend on ever more energy. By the 1970s, these continents together accounted for over half of global GDP, and their GDP per capita was eight to ten times higher than much of Africa or Asia. These differences between the Global North and Global South appear even starker when examined through the lens of energy. As North America and Europe passed through an unprecedented phase of growth between 1950 and 1973—­ the so-­called Great Acceleration that saw dramatic increase in many measures, from welfare to life expectancy to fertilizer usage to pollution—­they widened the gap with other continents. By the 1970s, North Americans and Europeans consumed three-­quarters of all energy produced in the world, even though they numbered less than a quarter of global population. And energy consumption corresponded closely with carbon emissions. Precisely because North America and Europe became the world’s first high-­energy, oil-­soaked

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societies, they also sparked the onset of global warming. By 1990, when scientists began to reach a consensus that fossil fuel use was warming the planet, North America and Europe together were responsible for three-­quarters of the cumulative human-­generated carbon in the atmosphere.51 These continents developed such massive carbon footprints because they followed a trajectory of growth that had been energy-­intensive for two hundred years. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new technologies of mining and the steam engine permitted the states of Europe and North America to tap energy on a grand scale that had had previously been converted by geological forces from organic matter into anthracite, bitumen, and lignite.52 In the twentieth century, North America and Europe deepened this path of energy-­intensive growth as they led some of the most important energy transitions: the rise of oil at mid-­century and the concomitant transformation of coal, the technological revolution and state development that led to nuclear power, and after the 1980s the dispersion of new forms of decentralized, renewable power that potentially challenged fossil fuels. These three twentieth-­century transitions, plus the shock to the global oil network in the 1970s, are the organizing pillars of New Energies. These two continents, however, channeled energy transitions through different social, political, and cultural institutions, and herein lies part of the novelty of this volume—­comparing the path and effects of energy shifts across space as well as time Part I, “The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal: Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention,” explores the interaction between energy systems that were based on coal and oil, through an arc of time that stretches from the 1920s to the 1970s. Oil had been used as a fuel throughout history, but during the twentieth century it penetrated into vast new areas of consumer society. With the growth of the lamp oil industry in Burma in the 1800s, and the gusher of crude that exploded near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, entrepreneurs had started to commercialize oil on a grand scale. At first oil filled tertiary needs created by the coal-­fired industrial order of the late nineteenth century—­lubricating mining machinery, for instance, or providing lighting for cities heated by coal. But by the twentieth century oil began moving out of secondary markets that complemented coal to become a rival to many of coal’s core markets—­in industry, heating, and chemistry, but above all in transportation with the emergence of inexpensive, gasoline-­powered automobiles.53 By the middle of the twentieth century, the oil industry would grow to encompass the entire world with massive multinational petroleum corporations, what contemporaries dubbed the “oil majors,” spreading their networks

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across the Middle East, South America, sub-­Saharan Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia.54 By mid-­century, if not earlier, North America and Europe consumed oil on a larger scale than anywhere else, apart from particular oil-­producing countries like Mexico or Saudi Arabia, and economies with entire ecosystems of industry, transportation, and consumer products that revolved around oil first took root. In the process, this new hydrocarbon network reshaped coal systems by putting them under stress. Chapters 1–4 dive into key problematics stemming from this energy transition and interaction between oil and coal, exploring the political economy of interest groups that navigated the rise of oil in France, Germany, and the United States, and tracing how coal producers and workers reacted to the onslaught of this cheap new energy. At first, crude oil had to contend with other rivals to fuel the internal combustion engine, above all biofuels, as Joseph Bohling illustrates in chapter 1. As oil use spread, in some instances coal as an energy system actually declined, as Stephen G. Gross describes in the case of hard coal mining in Germany’s Ruhr in chapter 2. In many other instances, however, coal evolved in response to the new energy landscape, changing in terms of its geography, its uses, and even in how it was extracted and imagined, as Trish Kahle and Ryan Driskell Tate recount in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. And in important respects, coal thrived: as oil brought more growth and accelerated the rise of a high energy society, coal powered the expanding grid that supported new consumer lifestyles. High energy society, in fact, revolved around two icons—­one rooted in oil; the other in coal—­t he car and electricity. Part II, “Oil Transition in Crisis: The 1970s,” follows how the high energy societies of North America and Europe navigated an unprecedented peacetime shock to their energy systems. By the early 1970s, both continents had come to depend on oil for roughly half their total primary energy needs. This fuel facilitated the incredible growth experienced by both sides of the Atlantic after World War II. And by the 1970s, much of this oil came from the Middle East and North Africa: production there influenced prices around the world and provided most of the petroleum consumed in Western Europe. But in the fall of 1973, the foundation of this system was put into question when countries in the Middle East and elsewhere used their newfound market power vis-­à-­v is international corporations to raise the price at which they sold crude on the global market fourfold, advancing a bid to wrest back sovereign control over this resource found in their own territory. Chapters 5–8 explore how North Americans and Europeans responded to this “oil shock,” the shadow of which lasted into the 1980s.55 For the crisis posed not only economic and geo-

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political challenges to the states of these continents, as Victor McFarland and Henning Türk illustrate in chapters 5 and 7, respectively. It also opened a window of opportunity for these societies to imagine and conceptualize a transition away from fossil fuel–centered, energy-­intensive growth, as recounted by Duccio Basosi and Thomas Turnbull in chapters 6 and 8, respectively. While this window closed before such a shift could occur, developments in the 1970s nevertheless laid the foundation for later efforts to build a post-­petroleum world. Part III, “A Stalled Transition? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possibilities,” explores a twentieth-­century energy transition that was never fully realized: the turn toward nuclear power. As with the spread of oil and the transformation of coal, North America and Europe commenced a nuclear energy transition before other regions, by crafting the scientific networks, political institutions, and infrastructure to commercialize this new source of electricity. American and European scientists first theorized about splitting the atom before World War II; they weaponized these ideas with the atomic bomb during the war; and after 1945 they, along with the Japanese, first linked nuclear reactors to the grid. As a result, these societies were some of the first to grapple with the unprecedented nature of atomic power, which posed an existential threat to humankind while at the same time offering hope of radically improving life, satisfying the world’s energy needs at all times, and opening pathways for resource-­poor states to achieve geopolitical autonomy from the fossil fuel networks that had emerged over the preceding century. The contributions by Sonja D. Schmid, Natasha Zaretsky, and Dolores L. Augustine in chapters 9, 10, and 11, respectively, explore the contradictions generated by this new energy, following the rise of nuclear utopianism in the 1950s, the vast plans for nuclear expansion in the wake of the oil shock, and the erosion of that momentum as a result of cost problems, safety issues, and grassroots movements. These chapters provide a counterview to conventional narratives by illustrating how atomic power generated new anxieties that revolved around human reproduction, and focusing on issues often left unexplored in traditional energy histories, such as political representation, gender, the nature of expertise, and the path dependencies generated by technological transfers. Part IV, “The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities,” completes the volume by discussing the origins and challenges of what could be the next great energy transition, the shift off fossil fuels toward renewables. Even though solar and wind power have histories that began well before the twentieth century, environmental historians often portray the 1970s as the decade of origin for modern renewable energy.56 The dramatic spike in oil prices,

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the fears of resource exhaustion, and the surging environmental movement led certain groups to seek salvation in new sources of energy that could be replenished. But as chapters 12 and 13 illustrate, this process was far more complex and less linear than most narratives suggest, and here again, questions of price and efficiency are only part of the story. In fact, the 1980s and the 1990s emerge as crucial decades in the history of renewables and their relationship with fossil fuels. For the initial desire to cultivate wind and solar in the 1970s came more from fears that the world would run out of hydrocarbons, not that burning hydrocarbons would generate catastrophic climate change from too much fossil fuels. When a wave of new oil discoveries shattered the market power of OPEC in the early 1980s, causing oil prices to plummet, this initial raison d’être for renewables disintegrated. But, as Benjamin Franta recounts in chapter 12, well before this moment the oil industry realized global warming was a likely outcome of their business model, and they began generating knowledge to counteract the moment when climate change would become politicized. That moment came in the 1980s with the consolidation of scientific knowledge that showed fossil fuel–induced global warming was real. Only in the 1990s, however, with the emergence of social movements, political institutions, and interest groups to support renewables, as these Eva Oberloskamp illustrates in chapter 13, did the transition toward solar and wind gain momentum. This story is still being written, with its most pivotal chapter yet to come, since fossil fuel consumption in much of North America and Europe, and the world for that matter, remains undiminished by solar and wind. Indeed, what distinguishes the hoped-­for transition to renewables from most previous transitions is that to actually address global warming, the new system must not just transform, but radically dismantle the old energy system. This has few precedents in history. Overall, the aim of New Energies is to move beyond a narrow and linear conception of energy transitions. We hope to show how energy transitions are a rich, multifaceted line of inquiry that can bring different types of history together, and how those studying contemporary energy affairs can benefit from a more detailed understanding the complex, nonlinear, and highly contested nature of energy transitions from the past. This volume illustrates how transitions are long affairs that take decades to unfold, rarely have finite starting and ending points, and are characterized by advances as well as backtracking and changes in entirely unpredictable directions. It underscores the persisting influence of older energy forms, like coal, whose supporters have historically found ways to overcome challenges and adapt to new circumstances. It shows how important interest groups, coalitions, counter-­experts, states, and grassroots actors have been to the success of new energy systems—­that

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all does not hinge on technology and price. It shows how particular moments or constellations of circumstances have emerged to create the opportunity for change, and how quickly those moments can vanish. Lastly, it highlights just how profoundly our experience with energy shapes almost every facet of life, from democratic governance to the environment that surrounds us to even how we think about human reproduction.

Part I THE RISE OF OIL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF COAL Creation, Destruction, and Reinvention

The first energy transition in twentieth-­century Europe and the United States was also the most profound. Globally, oil use experienced a meteoric expansion that rivaled in its astounding pace the rise of coal during the preceding century. Oil’s share of total global energy first crested 5 percent in 1915, and within just sixty years it hit 40 percent.1 After engineers and corporations wedded the internal combustion engine to gasoline, a process that was far from inevitable, oil producers found a ravenous new market for their product in the form of the car industry. New uses for petroleum soon followed, including fuel oil to heat homes and run machinery, synthetic fertilizers for large-­scale agriculture, and raw materials for the chemical industry. Automobiles threatened public transportation that ran on coal, while other applications for petroleum encroached on a variety of markets once fueled by hard coal and lignite. On both sides of the Atlantic, coal and oil found themselves locked in an intense contest that not only led to wrenching social transformations, but that would change the politics, the moral economy, and the economic geography of these two continents. This contest played out at very different tempos and resulted in very different outcomes in North America and Western Europe, illustrating how this energy transition was far from inevitable and hinged on much more than just 25

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prices. Though some scholars point to price as the key factor leading to petroleum’s rise, the question of when the price of oil fell below that of coal is still unsettled and differs by region. In British thermal units (BTU), the price of coal actually remained lower than crude through much of the 1950s. Most price comparisons, however, do little to explore the cost of distribution and transportation, which began to favor oil with the construction of pipeline networks at midcentury. In Europe, by 1958 at the latest, when the first major coal crisis erupted, the price of using fuel oil had fallen below that of coal. In the United States, that tipping point came sooner.2 Energy prices in North America and Europe during the middle of the twentieth century, however, were hardly determined by market forces alone. Coal’s challenges, in other words, had little to do with scarcity: in the twentieth century, more coal was mined than ever before. In the United States, informal and formal quotas on foreign oil combined with domestic regulation to keep oil prices higher than they otherwise would have been. Europe, meanwhile, had different oil regimes in nearly every nation, ranging from state-­ controlled pricing in France to relatively free prices in postwar West Germany. But even here, in what contemporaries called the most liberal energy market in the world, prices were free relative to France, but not compared to any model of a competitive market economy, as Stephen G. Gross points out in chapter 2. In any case, the international oil companies that delivered crude to Europe determined their prices through negotiation with the producer countries and through offtake agreements with each other. From 1930 until 1973, the international price of crude followed a remarkably straight line, indicating how little market forces held sway. As a pioneering study on American energy history concluded, using language that could equally apply to Europe, “Rarely since 1945 have producers, consumers, or their political representatives been willing to rely on price for the restoration of equilibrium.”3 Throughout this period, in fact, the price of energy was determined as much by politics or interest groups as by supply and demand. Nation-­states had very good reason to advance oil, beginning with war. World War I illustrated the geopolitical benefits of mobility that could be gained from supporting militaries by trucks and gasoline instead of rail and coal, and securing oil became a major strategic aim of the conflict. Meanwhile, between 1916 and 1922, the coal industry experienced some of the most strained labor relations in its history, as miners across Europe and the United States clamored for better conditions like the eight-­hour workday and higher pay. War underscored just how different the production structures of coal and oil were, and how the latter could more easily be controlled by capital and the state. Where coal production required mass labor that could leverage key choke points in the

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extraction process, oil production at this moment was capital-­intensive, and at least in North America and Europe, its workers were relatively well-­paid.4 After 1918, geopolitics and the quest for economic and social stability led to a scramble for what would become the world’s largest source of crude, the Middle East. While British, French, and Dutch companies initially held the upper hand, American companies gained access to this new center of global oil with the Red Line Agreement in 1928. But they succeeded only with extensive support from their government, including diplomatic pressure applied by the Department of State on America’s allies, and a depletion allowance that allowed firms to deduct the entire market value of oil properties from their tax bill. State support for oil accelerated during and after the World War II, above all in the United States, which boasted five of the world’s seven largest oil companies. In 1943 the US government cooperated with private companies in building the world’s longest oil pipeline, linking Texas to the Northeast. In 1947 the United States waived its antitrust laws to allow its largest oil firms to merge into ARAMCO to exploit the huge fields of Saudi Arabia. That same year President Harry S. Truman established a security umbrella in Turkey and Greece that cordoned the Middle East off from Soviet encroachment. Oil’s rise, in other words, was an affair of the state as much as it was one of private enterprise.5 Even before 1945, the fortunes of oil in the United States and Europe diverged. In the former, the transition to oil took off in the 1920s with the gasoline-­powered internal combustion engine. Despite its high energy density, gasoline was never preordained to fuel the automobile, as Joseph Bohling illustrates in chapter 1. Electric engines were cleaner and quieter; steam-­ powered ones more reliable. Gasoline-­powered cars, meanwhile, suffered from a range of technical problems and had to compete with biofuels. Despite the European origins of early automobile innovations, it was the American Henry Ford, an organizational genius and anti-­Semite, who unleashed the automobile revolution when he fit the internal combustion engine into a car that middle-­class consumers could afford. In his new assembly line plants, powered by electricity, he began producing more automobiles than all other carmakers combined. Between 1914 and 1920, the number of registered cars in the United States exploded from 1.8 million to 9.2 million. In Ford’s licensed dealerships, consumers encountered industrial abundance along with the Dearborn Independent, the Ford-­owned newspaper warning of global Jewish conspiracy that dealers were required to distribute. As with oil exploration, infrastructure for the gasoline-­powered car depended on the state. In the midst of World War I, the United States unveiled its first federal highway funding act, devoting millions of dollars to connect

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rural regions with cities. At nearly the same time, California set off on its path of becoming the world icon for suburban sprawl by pursuing a road-­building project financed by user fees. Thus even before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, the United States had become home to the oil-­car nexus.6 In Europe, oil and the car spread much more slowly. In the 1920s, no less than 80 percent of the world’s automobiles existed in the United States. Gasoline use and automobile ownership were held back in Europe by a number of structural forces, including a lower standard of living, the Great Depression, and powerful interest groups advocating other automotive fuels, as Bohling demonstrates in chapter 1. After 1945, Europe began following America’s energy trajectory. The Marshall Plan, which devoted funds toward oil use and refinery construction, stimulated this trajectory. But it was only after the thirty years of incredible postwar growth had already commenced, in the late 1950s and 1960s, that Western Europe built the pipeline, refinery, and road network that transformed oil into a mass consumer fuel, spurred by an activist state in even the most liberal of economies, as Gross illustrates in chapter 2.7 The oil-­car nexus, however, brought upheaval alongside welfare and mobility as cars undercut coal-­based rail and public transport. Soon fuel oil, once a byproduct of the process that made gasoline, became a commodity of its own that challenged markets hitherto dominated by coal. This energy rivalry unfolded in the United States earlier than in Europe, but on both continents it overlapped with dynamics internal to the production of coal to precipitate a transformation in how this solid fossil fuel was mined and used. The process began in World War I, which drove American coal mines to overexpand and begin to mechanize and electrify production with mechanical cutters and underground conveyor belts. Over the coming decades the mechanization of coal mining would dramatically raise the output per worker. Miners fought the introduction of these new techniques because mechanization threatened to reduce the workforce but also because of the danger it imposed on the workplace through noise, harmful dust, and the heightened risk of cave-­ins. Nevertheless, during the 1920s and 1930s, the mechanization of subterranean mines advanced dramatically across the United States and much of Europe: in the former over 90 percent of mines were mechanized by the eve of World War II; in the latter roughly half were. After 1918, the return to peacetime production, the Great Depression, and the gradual conversion of shipping from coal to diesel oil—­the first oceangoing diesel liners appeared in 1912—­hurt demand for coal even as mechanization allowed more coal to come from fewer workers. The result was a dramatic collapse in the mining workforce that hit the United States first, then later Europe. By 1939, only 530,000 people worked

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in America’s mines, down from a postwar peak of 860,000. After 1945, decline turned into collapse, as strikes increased the political volatility of this energy, as mechanization of open-­pit strip mines advanced, and as oil eroded more of the traditional markets for coal when railways began converting to diesel motors. When coal employment finally stabilized shortly after 1960 fewer than 200,000 Americans worked in the mines, less than a quarter of the peak workforce thirty-­five years earlier. Similar trends emerged in Europe, though largely after 1945.8 Coal, however, reinvented itself during the 1960s and 1970s, illustrating how energy transitions involve the transformation of old systems as well as the rise of new ones. The sector passed through a technological, geographical, and labor transformation that entirely changed coal’s politics, as Trish Kahle and Ryan Driskell Tate illustrate in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. By the 1960s, the United States had become a high energy society, as industry expanded and as a welter of new consumer products became affordable to the middle class. Many of these new household items ran on electricity, such as refrigerators, toasters, washers, driers, and televisions. Industry, too, used ever more electricity as mechanized production and assembly line techniques spread, and with them the need for power. Between 1950 and 1970 the United States’ demand for electricity more than quadrupled, and utilities became the largest industry by capital assets in the United States, generating as much power as the Soviet Union, Japan, West Germany, and Canada combined. Electricity consumption provided a huge market for coal even as its traditional ones were drying up. Coal, in other words, became primarily a source of electrical power: in the 1960s roughly half of all coal went to fuel power plants; by 2000 that figure had risen to over nine-­tenths.9 As electricity became the “lifeblood” of the nation, Kahle shows in chapter 3, miners were able to stake new claims about safety and moral economy, claims that cemented coal as an indispensable component of the nation’s energy between 1969 and 1972. Accelerating the reinvention of American coal were novel, mechanized strip-­mining techniques that opened up entirely new areas of exploitation and shifted the geographical heart of coal country from Appalachia to the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. With guidance from corporate leaders, as Tate illustrates in chapter 4, this new technology forged a nonunionized workforce that was imbued with an entirely different identity and politics than miners in the Appalachian Mountains. In the United States, coal became more like oil as formerly labor-­intensive operations gave way to capital-­intensive ones that disassociated mining from the organized, East Coast workforce, and shifted miners politically to the Right. Where coal reinvented itself in the United States during the 1960s and

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1970s, in Europe during these same years the oil transition generated social effects that were as wrenching as what came with the oil shock of 1973. Certain types of coal production collapsed entirely, while other types flourished, as Gross illustrates in chapter 2 through a narrative the collapse of hard coal mining Germany’s industrial heartland of the Ruhr. Hard coal there and in Belgium and northern France was becoming increasingly expensive as miners had to dig shafts ever deeper to tap new seams. Meanwhile, with the development of Middle East oil fields just several hundred miles from the shores of southern Europe, international petroleum companies were awash with cheap crude and in search of an outlet. The result was an astounding decline in European hard coal production that shattered what had been a main branch of employment for nearly a century. Massive government intervention avoided social catastrophe. But this came with a huge price tag for taxpayers. In the United States, Wyoming and Montana had accessible hard coal near the surface. Europe had no such easy access hard coal seams. Instead, as domestic hard coal collapsed parts of Europe embraced the surface mining of soft lignite, the most sulfurous form of coal. With the application of the largest machines in the world—­bucket-­wheel excavators that scoop out thousands of tons of topsoil a day—­lignite mines in Germany and Poland expanded to provide a stable share of Central Europe’s growing demand for electricity since the 1970s and 1980s. With this expansion came more carbon emissions as well as other forms of particulate pollution with significant consequences for local environments and public health. Together, the chapters in this section suggest new ways of understanding our current transition toward renewables. In chapter 1 Bohling illustrates just how important coalitions, political struggles, and policy linkages are for propelling or stalling the rise of a new energy. If a diverse alliance of winegrowers, farmers, engineers, and state officials could hinder the onslaught of gasoline in interwar France by raising concerns of energy dependency, what coalitions could be rallied in the name of reducing oil and coal use today, and to what other political goals can a green transition be linked? Gross illustrates how states can guide the collapse of an energy system. The sunk capital in West Germany’s hard coal sector in the 1960s resembles the issue of stranded assets that is arising in the fossil fuel industry today as renewable power makes sufficient headway. The West German state forged a type of bad bank to take on these failing assets at great public expense, but this maneuver deflated resistance from mineowners and gave government officials a say over what mines to shut down and when. Would a similar framework work today on a global scale for hydrocarbons? In chapter 3 Kahle, through an examination of the suffering endured by Appalachian miners, reminds us of the disparity

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between the human cost of producing fossil fuels and the social and economic benefits that have rested on their consumption. Those advocating for a transition to renewables might find success by highlighting not only the ecological but also the moral failings of fossil energy, and by seeking a just transition to an energy system that no longer hinges on the endangerment of human life. In chapter 4, finally, Tate shows how particular energies can become linked to identities, and it follows that phasing out an energy will be challenging precisely because this might put the identity of entire communities at risk. In Wyoming’s coal fields, mineowners associated coal to white working-­class, rural culture, a bond that remains to this day. Any effort to end coal must consequently grapple with this hard question of losing or changing a community’s identity.

one

THE OIL FROM OUR SOIL French Alcohol Fuel versus Foreign Oil, 1918–1957

Joseph Bohling

At the close of World War I, Henry Bérenger, head of the French government’s Petroleum Committee, went before an international group of industrialists, bureaucrats, and politicians to share his prediction that “as oil had been the blood of war, so it would be the blood of peace . . . At this hour, at the beginning of the peace, our civilian populations, our businesses, our commerce, our agriculture demand more oil, always more oil—more gasoline, always more gasoline.”1 Bérenger had good reason to make such an appeal, for he was all too aware of France’s lack of oil. The French army had faced severe oil shortages late in a war whose outcome was largely determined by the ability of a nation to fuel its fleet of airplanes, ships, trucks, and tanks. Bérenger knew that victory had depended less on French blood and valor than on American oil. This scene reinforces the conventional narrative that World War I ushered in the “century of oil,” for France as for other industrialized countries, because it raised awareness about the need to secure oil supplies to fuel modern armies, economies, and state power.2 This narrative, however, is compelling only in retrospect. Over the last couple of decades, scholars have restored conflict to analyses of the global oil transition, focusing especially on the battle that was waged between oil and coal.3 Yet arguably less attention has been devoted to another of oil’s early competitors, biofuels like ethanol and other

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alcohol fuels, in propelling the newly invented internal combustion engine.4 Scholars have assumed that the motor vehicle revolution inevitably led to the oil transition.5 The consequence of this assumption has been to dismiss biofuels, either explicitly or implicitly, as impractical, without understanding how they came to be seen as such. Against the standard narrative, then, this article contends that gasoline’s journey to becoming the most viable energy source for fueling engines was neither predetermined nor inevitable. Among the countries where the gasoline-biofuel debate was especially intense was France, one of the industrialized world’s smallest oil-producing countries and the largest alcohol-producing country. Until the mid-1950s, oil was found in small quantities in places like Pechelbronn in northeastern France and was still largely undiscovered in the French colonies. France’s international oil infrastructure was still in its early stages of development. Within the metropole, French refineries employed approximately twelve thousand persons.6 Alcohol, on the other hand, was found in large quantities throughout the countryside and the colonies. In a country with a metropolitan population of forty-two million in the 1930s, an astonishing seven million were reportedly either directly or indirectly employed in the alcohol industry.7 Those with a stake in the alcohol fuel included especially the powerful beet cultivators and winegrowers. Frequent surplus crises gripped this well-organized community. In their search for new outlets for these surpluses, beet and wine producers proposed the creation of an alcohol fuel that would also limit France’s foreign oil dependency. This chapter examines the motor fuel debate at two critical moments in France’s transition to gasoline-powered vehicles: the interwar years and the immediate post–World War II years. After each war, a range of groups—engineers; scientists; economists; political scientists; farmers; the oil industry; the automobile, trucking, and tourism industries; and politicians and bureaucrats—debated the pros and cons of foreign oil dependency. While in the interwar years, the alcohol fuel was seen as a viable alternative to imported oil, after World War II, it was marginalized and then nearly entirely removed from the fuel mix. Why was alcohol adopted as a fuel, then marginalized? After 1945, scientific reports on energy choices concluded that alcohol fuel was inefficient and uneconomical. Yet these reports elided the sociopolitical context in which such choices were embedded. While gasoline would come to have certain technical and economic advantages over alcohol fuel, these were not seen as advantages until a particular political constellation made them so. New ideas, interests, and alliances operating in a new context ultimately rendered alcohol fuel less efficient and less economical than gasoline. The question of whether to include alcohol in the fuel mix, then, was

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never simply a technical question about its compatibility with engines or an economic question about its cost, even if decisions about engine design and calculations about cost would ultimately open up some fuel possibilities and close down others. The outcome of the motor fuel debate was determined by political struggles over who had the right to shape energy policy: politicians who were bound to their constituencies, or technocrats who claimed to speak more objectively on behalf of the “national interest”? Each group, based on its own assumptions, interests, and vision of future France, had different ways of defining fuel “cost.” The fuel debate thus ran deeper still, as it was shaped by but also helped change France’s economic orientation and political institutions as the country urbanized, motorized, and sought greater centralized control over its energy supplies.

The Interwar Motor Fuel Debate Conventional wisdom says that the battlefields of World War I laid the groundwork for oil’s global preeminence. At that time, motor vehicles overtook horses and trains in waging war. This narrative, polished by hindsight, is not so neat when seen from the perspective of policy debates at the time. It is true that during the war, French policymakers became aware that both the army and the economy were growing increasingly reliant on the internal combustion engine to move machines, men, and material. Consequently, they grew anxious about how to fuel these engines. How to fuel them, however, was still very much open to debate throughout the interwar years. Obstacles stood in the way of a full-scale shift to oil in France. First, neither metropolitan France nor its colonies were known to contain much oil. Most attempts at prospecting for oil had failed. In 1918 metropolitan oil amounted to only 12 percent of France’s fuel needs; in 1938, once the motor vehicle revolution had begun to accelerate, domestic supply covered only 1 percent of those needs.8 Oil exploration intensified in the colonies during the interwar period, but the Great Depression and World War II hindered major discoveries.9 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, France depended on oil that came from the Middle East, Romania, and the United States, and whose supplies were largely controlled by American, British, and Dutch oil companies, the so-called majors.10 Second, policymakers expressed concern about French dependency on foreign companies like Standard Oil and Royal Dutch/Shell for both security and economic reasons. Oil shortages and reliance on American supplies during World War I haunted interwar thinking. After 1918, these multinational companies abandoned their role as mere oil suppliers and moved into the retail field by buying up French companies, making them subsidiaries, and investing

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substantial sums of money in France. They had close contacts in the French government and influenced public opinion through newspapers.11 France paid these companies two to three billion francs per year, thus adversely affecting France’s balance of payments, a problem that became especially acute during the Great Depression.12 This dependency induced anxieties about economic stagnation, national defense, and the erosion of state sovereignty, and incited policymakers to devise a national fuel strategy and look for alternatives to oil. To check the influence of the majors and protect state sovereignty, a young generation emerged that fought to build a national oil industry. These “new men,” as they have been retrospectively dubbed (as opposed to the “old men” who opposed oil), included influential economic strategists, men with such varied political outlooks as Francis Delaisi, Ernest Mercier, and Louis Loucheur. In 1924 the French government encouraged the creation of the partly state-owned French Oil Company (CFP).13 In 1925 state officials created the National Office of Combustible Fuels, which was responsible primarily for supervising the oil industry but also for researching engine technology. Through legislation, especially a 1928 law, state officials aimed to curtail the “Anglo-Saxon trusts” by developing the French share of Romanian and Middle East oil, by prospecting for oil in the colonies, and by building a refining industry on French soil.14 State control of the oil market extended to authorizing the opening of new gas stations, which allowed state agents to monitor the kinds of gasoline on sale.15 These measures indicated that state officials and businessmen were starting to take an interest in building an oil industry, even if their commitment to it was hesitant and would pale in comparison to that of the post-1945 years. Significantly, oil activists like Delaisi, Mercier, and Loucheur tended to see the development of a national oil industry as contingent upon a larger restructuring of the country’s economic and political system. Many of these activists participated in the technocratic movement that emerged in the interwar years, a movement that was highly critical of parliamentary lawmaking. In their view, Parliament failed to take decisive action against the economic and social turmoil of the period. These oil activists and technocrats attacked the overall “Malthusian” mindset of France’s business and political class that was reluctant to venture further into creating an oil industry that would help liberate France from foreign oil companies.16 Moreover, the Budget Department of the Ministry of Finance refused to fund oil exploration.17 For these “new men,” the sluggish development of a national oil industry was a sign of state weakness. The third obstacle to the oil transition in France was the inability of engineers and scientists to arrive at a consensus on gasoline’s compatibility with

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motors. Across the industrialized world, they continued to experiment with different fuels, and gasoline did not always produce the best results. At the time, gasoline was often low octane and led to engine knock, an unpleasant noise that occurs when fuel is improperly ignited and that can damage the engine. Moreover, at a high compression, gasoline could cause engines to explode. Nevertheless, in the United States, engine design slowly began to solidify around gasoline due to a combination of scientific developments and oil lobbying.18 While American automobile engineers had tested different engine prototypes with alcohol, diesel, and steam, these engines were being built with low compression ratios in order to accommodate low-octane gasoline. The growing preference for gasoline had little to do with its superiority to alcohol fuel; rather, it hinged on the fact that in order to work with either fuel, early vehicles had to be designed to consume the less powerful of the two, which was gasoline. Over the long term, this ultimately worked against alcohol fuel. Given that they had been designed for gasoline, lower-compression engines did not perform as well when run on alcohol.19 Changes in American gasoline manufacture in the 1920s would give further advantages to gasoline. Improvements in thermal-cracking technology were beginning to help refiners produce greater gasoline yields, and the introduction of tetraethyl lead, a relatively cheap way to combat engine knock, nullified the octane-boosting advantages of alcohol.20 In France, however, engineers were slow to follow American developments because few businesses or state officials wished to invest in the new technology, because scientists showed concern about lead’s noxious fumes,21 and because France lacked domestic oil. Engine design in France did not solidify around any one fuel configuration in the interwar years, thus further obstructing the oil transition. The geopolitical, economic, and technical uncertainties surrounding gasoline led engineers and scientists to experiment with alternative fuels like alcohol. Already at the turn of the twentieth century, they had conducted the first tests with alcohol fuel and had concluded in favor of it.22 More experiments were conducted after World War I. In 1921 the French government created the Scientific Committee of National Fuels, which comprised France’s scientific elite. The committee ran trials and weighed alcohol fuel’s weaknesses, such as its relatively low energy density and its tendency to clog fuel lines and carburetors, against its strengths, such as its anti-knock and high-octane properties that were missing in gasoline. The committee concluded that “the alcohol-gasoline blend could be employed without any inconvenience in all the automobile motors built for being fueled by gasoline alone.”23 Despite the imperfections of both alcohol fuel and gasoline, most scientists agreed that a 50 percent alcohol–50 percent gasoline blend, what its proponents called a

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“national fuel,” was the optimal blend because it corrected each fuel’s flaws.24 In 1935, as the United States was turning away from ethanol, the liberal economists at L’économiste français, who were otherwise critical of agricultural protectionism, called the alcohol-gasoline mixture “perfect.”25 Finally, in 1938, at a time when military officials were once again growing concerned about secure energy supplies, another prominent fuel specialist observed that oil importers, who had previously been opposed to alcohol fuel, now appreciated its nonexplosive and high-octane properties.26 Technical conclusions were clouded by political concerns. Alcohol fuel also seemed to serve long-term security and economic interests. Numerous geological reports suggested that in twenty years worldwide oil production would no longer be able to assure the gasoline necessary to fuel the rapidly increasing fleet of motor vehicles.27 In the United States, the Federal Oil Conservation Board issued a report in 1932 that expected the depletion of known oil reserves within ten to twelve years and argued that alcohol was an essential renewable fuel source.28 A French oil expert declared that “three generations will suffice to see oil rise and fall.”29 Another French observer wondered “if gasoline really is exhausted and if the large trusts will refuse to deliver it, we’ll either have to pay an exorbitant price or replace it with alcohol.”30 Given the fear that the industrialized world would quickly exhaust the earth’s oil supplies, officials looked to alternatives like alcohol fuel. Given these security concerns, and especially the support that it would bring to farmers, Parliament incrementally set up an agency (here called the state alcohol agency) between World War I and 1935 that was based at the Ministry of Finance and that purchased alcohol surpluses and found outlets for them. The alcohol-gasoline–based national fuel was among those outlets. The French government sold the national fuel for thirty francs less per hectoliter than gasoline, even though government calculations showed that it cost thirty-five francs more than gasoline to make.31 Alcohol tended to be expensive to produce because it required an organized labor force and large amounts of fertilizer and because the distilleries burned coal imported from neighboring countries like Great Britain and Germany. The government surtaxed oil and alcoholic beverages to make up for the losses it incurred on alcohol fuel.32 As we will see, after World War II, these surtaxes on oil and drinks would mobilize consumer groups against alcohol fuel. Significantly, interwar calculations of the cost of both alcohol and oil included the long-term security factor and reflected the important place of farmers in French economic and social life. Alcohol’s value did not simply reflect an objective understanding of its

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fuel potential; rather, its value was shaped by the structure of political power, which in the Third Republic (1870–1940) was dominated by Parliament, where agricultural interests were well entrenched. Alcohol producers were tightly organized, had support across the political spectrum, and had a disproportionate amount of influence in Parliament. State officials were aware that when alcohol producers could not find enough buyers, producers took to the streets. In 1907, for instance, five hundred thousand strong had descended on Montpellier, the heartland of wine production. Protests erupted episodically throughout the 1920s and 1930s, causing regional economic paralysis and thus political problems in Paris. It should come as no surprise, then, that interwar research on alcohol fuel was led by Édouard Barthe, a socialist parliamentarian from wine country. Immediately after the war, Barthe was named the state’s fuel commissioner. The fact that state officials nominated Barthe suggests just how much power the alcohol industry possessed and how much interest the political elite had in alcohol fuel as a way to curb foreign oil dependency. Even Bérenger, France’s most prominent oil activist of the 1920s, and someone who was far removed from agricultural politics, did not see oil and alcohol as antagonistic.33 One commentator believed that the oil industry could help make alcohol fuel a viable option: French oil industrialists “are as wealthy as anyone in capital, in factories, and in laboratories to experiment with [fuel] blends and motors.”34 Barthe and his allies, then, carried much influence over how alcohol fuel was perceived given the large number of citizens with a stake in the alcohol industry and their power over Parliament. To win over policymakers and the wider public to their plight, Barthe and his followers evoked a potent image: that of the “Anglo-Saxon trusts” threatening the French peasantry. Fear of the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race was a long-standing trope in French political culture.35 In deploying this rhetoric, alcohol producers mobilized a number of different and sometimes antagonistic groups. Other raucous and powerful agricultural interest groups that hoped to obtain similar protection threw their support behind the state alcohol agency. Since the 1920s, Barthe had claimed that alcohol fuel would help France “escape the hegemony of the great worldwide trusts” and “increase the financial and economic strength of the nation by the limitless development of the richness of its soil.” A deputy from the northern beet-growing region thanked Barthe for “the fine fight he had waged for twenty years on behalf of industrial alcohol.” The main farm lobby called alcohol protection an “enormous advance for all French agriculture.” Finally, the minister of finance claimed that alcohol fuel boosted “France’s domestic finances and her foreign-exchange balance.”36 Alcohol fuel thus rallied various agricultural

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sectors and those responsible for the national economy, making it all the more viable as an energy source. Belief in the technical and economic merits of alcohol fuel, plus the specter of the Anglo-American trusts, mobilized automobile clubs and consumer organizations in support of farmers. Between 1926 and 1935, automobile clubs organized nine major rallies for national fuels like alcohol. Their aim was to “popularize the idea that one can find on the national territory fuels that were more economical than gasoline, and as practical.” Consumer organizations backed the farmers as well.37 Even one observer who believed that alcohol fuel was an economic burden on the state noted that alcohol fuel “demands sacrifices and contributions from the entire collectivity,” and interwar consumers were apparently willing to pay the price.38 Given the ability of farmers to influence Parliament and garner widespread public support, a series of laws privileged alcohol in the fuel mix. A 1920 law taxed oil circulating in France excepting those importers who mixed alcohol into their gasoline blends.39 A 1923 law required oil importers to purchase the domestic alcohol fuel at a quantity equivalent to 10 percent of however much oil they imported, and obliged them to put an alcohol-gasoline fuel blend on the market. A 1931 law required oil importers to blend between twenty-five and thirty-five liters of alcohol into each one hundred liters of gasoline as a condition for obtaining an importing license, excepting fuels going to automobile drivers.40 Trucks and public buses became the main consumers of alcohol fuel. A 1934 decree gave a tax break to heavy truck fuels containing 25 percent alcohol.41 The quantities of alcohol devoted to fuel consequently jumped from 22,000 hectoliters in 1920–1921 to 4,138,000 in 1935–1936.42 A series of laws thus legitimated alcohol as a fuel and worked to limit foreign oil imports. In the interwar years, then, French policymakers did not move headlong into the oil-powered age. Why would they? Many engineers and scientists saw an alcohol-gasoline blend as the most effective fuel and as a way to limit dependency on foreign oil. Neither alcohol nor gasoline on its own worked perfectly with engines at the time, nor had French engine design solidified around any one energy source. Given state subsidies to alcohol fuel, the price difference between alcohol and gasoline for consumers tended to be negligible.43 Alcohol fuel’s success can also be explained by the fact that Parliament was the main site of policymaking, and Parliament was dominated by agricultural interests. For these reasons, the future remained open to either fuel to power the motor vehicle revolution underway.

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Postwar Closure After World War II, French farmers continued to make a case for including alcohol in a fuel blend by playing on the same anxieties that had arisen after World War I: France needed secure energy supplies to fuel motor vehicles or else remain largely dependent on foreign oil. What made alcohol fuel potentially appealing after 1945, however, was less the rhetoric about national security than the imperative of achieving a positive balance of payments. This was the era of reconstruction and state-directed plans. The first plan emphasized the need to exploit national energy sources.44 Although by “national” energy, state officials meant above all coal and hydroelectricity, the call to harness domestic energy provided an opportunity for the farm lobbies to restate their case for employing alcohol in the fuel mix.45 French farmers had a vested interest in advocating for alcohol fuel. The German occupation had been one of the driest in France’s modern history, as the Nazis had requisitioned alcohol supplies. After the war, farmers boosted production to satisfy pent-up demand for drinks and recover wartime financial losses. Production outpaced consumption. By the early 1950s, the wine industry alone had a surplus of approximately twenty million hectoliters.46 The surplus problems of the interwar years had returned. Consequently, farmers poured into the streets in protest, once again imploring the government to purchase their surpluses and find outlets for them. As before the war, French farmers couched their argument for alcohol fuel in terms of the economic and security interests of the nation. They continued to frame the motor fuel debate as one between the international trusts and the French peasantry.47 A socialist deputy from wine-producing Bordeaux scoffed at those who criticized the state alcohol agency: “The essential and primordial problem of alcohol, it’s the problem of French agriculture. When . . . the state alcohol agency is called into question, it’s the entire balance of our agriculture that’s at stake.”48 Such arguments elicited the sympathy of the farm unions at a time when farmers shared a deep anxiety about being sacrificed on the altar of modernization. The farmers’ rhetoric continued to find institutional support. The newly established Fourth Republic (1946–1958) restored Parliament. Despite attempts in 1945 to find a solution to the 1930s problem of parliamentary paralysis by empowering experts in the executive branch, France’s political leaders quickly moved away from executive authority given its ties to the Vichy regime. The agricultural lobbies were quick to exploit this development. Through Parliament, their politicians continued to influence policymaking and frame how

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alcohol fuel was perceived.49 The state alcohol agency consequently went back to work lobbying for alcohol fuel. Yet several developments between 1945 and the early 1950s converged to gradually alter perceptions of alcohol fuel, transforming it from a virtue into a vice. New ideas, technologies, interests, and alliances operating in a new context mobilized new representations of alcohol in a bid to eliminate it from the fuel mix. By 1950, the geopolitical and economic context was dramatically different from that of the interwar period. The United States was now the guardian of Western Europe. Through the Marshall Plan, dollars flowed into reconstruction and subsidized the construction of refineries in France and oil imports from the Middle East.50 At the same time, French policymakers poured money into a war in Indochina and tried to shore up their teetering empire. By the time the First Indochina War came to an end in 1954, war broke out in French Algeria. In 1955 French economists started arguing that these colonial wars were a drain on the country’s ability to finance rapid economic modernization,51 which included a restructuring of French agriculture to make it more competitive on international markets. While anxieties about economic stagnation and American influence provided an opportunity for French farmers to redeploy their rhetoric about national security and economic protection, these anxieties also justified the technocrats’ call for a controversial modernization of agriculture. Prominent technocrats ranging from the economist Alfred Sauvy, to the agronomist René Dumont, to the energy czar Pierre Guillaumat, took up the problem of alcohol surpluses, seeing them as a cause of the state’s declining economic and geopolitical status and as exemplary of the Malthusianism of the interwar years. These technocrats aired their views in state agencies like the Ministry of Finance and the Economic Council, a corporative assembly of the country’s economic and social interests. It was no coincidence that Gabriel Taïx, a member of the Corps des Mines, delivered two different reports to the Economic Council in the early 1950s—one on the need to reduce alcohol production; the other on the need to conserve France’s supply of coal and hydroelectricity and convert France to oil.52 Going against mainstream interwar thinking, Taïx and other technocrats argued that alcohol was technically and economically inferior to oil. The corollary was that their expertise, free of parliamentary obstacles, was required to restore French power. Changing technologies and a developing oil infrastructure, two factors whose basic framework had been set in the interwar years, were solidified after 1945. Engines were increasingly configured to run on gasoline to meet international standards largely shaped by American engine design.53 Automobile lobbyists confirmed that “automobile manufacturers cannot make cars that

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are different for abroad than for the metropole.”54 One of France’s most popular automobile magazines feared that “alcohol fuel would effectively place the automobile industry in a difficult position,” and “risk . . . losing customers abroad who consume a normal oil fuel and . . . considerably worsening the crisis of which we’re beginning to feel the first effects.”55 Indeed, after World War II, the automobile industry became more export-oriented, earning as much as twenty billion francs a year from exports.56 This argument resonated at a time when France desperately sought export earnings. Just as engine design favored gasoline over alcohol, France’s oil bureaucracy and infrastructure rapidly expanded. New state agencies such as the Bureau of Oil Prospecting (BRP) were tasked with supplying expertise about the international petroleum economy and oil in the colonies. In 1956 French geologists made important oil discoveries in the Sahara and Gabon. France went from being the European country with the largest energy deficit to a major oil producer,57 which weakened the alcohol industry’s arguments about how alcohol fuel would limit foreign oil dependency. At the same time, French refining capacity jumped from eight metric tons in 1938 to thirty metric tons in 1955,58 which contributed to France’s growing oil independence. The new optimism for oil made its way into the energy-related press. The Revue française de l’énergie wrote scathing critiques of alcohol fuel and directly followed them with articles about the success of oil prospecting in the colonies.59 Given the growing use of oil and France’s expanding oil bureaucracy and infrastructure, the appeal of alcohol fuel diminished. By the early 1950s, experts at the Ministry of Finance and various socioeconomic groups at the Economic Council made a strong economic argument against the continued use of alcohol fuel, even while acknowledging its technical strengths. Given the labor and energy requirements involved in alcohol production, alcohol reportedly cost about eighty-five francs per liter to produce, whereas gasoline cost twelve francs.60 It was estimated that the state lost about twenty-one billion francs per year on alcohol fuel.61 The Ministry of Finance complained that subsidizing alcohol fuel drained state funds devoted to oil prospecting in the empire.62 Sauvy reminded the public that consumers paid for the losses incurred by subsidizing alcohol fuel by accepting taxes on the beverage market, on alcohol that went to the perfume and pharmaceutical companies, and on oil.63 For this reason, consumer groups and the automobile industry increasingly opposed alcohol fuel. The economic “problems” stemming from alcohol fuel were presented as an objective fact when instead they were political calculations about what the state should and should not subsidize. At a time when geologists were discovering oil in the colonies and when technocrats were seeking to dramatically

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reduce the agricultural labor force and integrate agriculture into international markets, oil seemed like a wiser venture than protecting France’s numerous alcohol producers. Moreover, private investment in oil continued to be slow; thus the state and taxpayers footed a large part of the bill for building the country’s oil bureaucracy and infrastructure.64 Responding to widespread critiques that alcohol fuel was too costly, a beet lobbyist asked: “Why not also take into consideration the enormous investments required by the construction of cracking factories, oil research, etc.?”65 A member of the Economic Council pointed out that as French refiners were attempting to implement expensive thermal-cracking technology, the oil industry would need to be “free of any competition,” by which he meant alcohol fuel that had boosted octane levels and obviated the need for the technology.66 That alcohol was now seen to be more costly for the nation had much to do with how state officials chose to calculate the costs. A particular set of political and economic forces was making state investment in oil seem like a wiser option than alcohol fuel. Given how oil activists framed the alcohol fuel problem, they were able to strike alliances with other groups that had no direct interest in oil but that had their own grievances against agricultural policy and another source of energy—the calorie. After World War II, agronomists, economists, and demographers blamed the state’s alcohol policy for contributing to the global maldistribution of food supply. Sauvy, who coined the term Third World, attacked French agriculture for overproducing alcohol and malnourishing colonial subjects. He and his colleagues pushed farmers and distillers to use their beets to produce sugar instead of alcohol.67 Around 1950 as well, doctors and other public health activists came to a new understanding of French alcoholism, seeing it less as an individual moral problem and more as a problem of the state alcohol agency. They showed that because the state lost money on alcohol fuel, it had resorted to cajoling consumers to drink more, thus leading to a rapid rise in cases of alcoholism and alcohol-related driving accidents. In their view, alcohol poisoned both cars and consumers. A surprising set of interest groups—the automobile, trucking, and tourism industries—became avidly concerned about curbing alcoholism as a way to take the high ground in their campaign against alcohol fuel.68 This moral condemnation of not just alcohol fuel but also alcohol in general helped justify a transfer of power from Parliament, which was increasingly seen as responsible for the country’s economic backwardness and malnutrition in both the metropole and the colonies, to experts who could resolve these related problems. Yet given that France was a parliamentary democracy, technocrats could not attack the alcohol lobbies without mobilizing public

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opinion and gaining popular consent. To this end, they used the mass media, which was usually supportive of the alcohol industry because it received advertising revenue from it, to represent alcohol as burdening consumers through taxation, alcoholism, and a low standard of living. Sauvy demonstrated that alcohol fuel cost the state fifteen billion francs, “the equivalent of ten thousand new homes every year, or rather a city the size of Cherbourg.”69 Le Monde echoed Sauvy’s concern: “If the government hesitates to protect interests that have between them no common interest, if it does not choose for the good of the country, we demand a referendum: ‘A roof for each family or a drink for each French person?’”70 According to these portrayals, alcohol subsidies undermined the “general interest” and deprived citizens of basic needs and services at a time when the working classes demanded a greater stake in the consumer society. This demonization of the alcohol industry in the mass media mobilized a range of groups against the continued use of alcohol fuel. Public opinion was receptive to the way that the media was now framing the alcohol problem. If, in the interwar years, public opinion supported alcohol fuel, that changed by the early 1950s. In a poll conducted in September 1954, 54 percent of public opinion opposed alcohol subsidies; just a few months later, after a major anti-alcohol campaign, 81 percent of public opinion opposed such subsidies.71 After hearing that if the state quit subsidizing alcohol fuel, “the state could build 15,000 working-class houses,” consumer organizations and the trade unions allied with oil activists to ensure that their constituencies would reap the benefits of the incipient mass consumer society.72 Foreign tourists also loathed alcohol fuel. One Belgian tourist to France wrote a letter to a French automobile magazine: “In 1949, I blew two valves and the same bad joke happened the next year because of the bad quality of the fuel. So I decided, if the quality of French fuel isn’t improved, I’ll no longer spend my vacations in France.” The magazine responded to his letter: “Tourists attracted to France in part by the reputations of our wines, will they be chased away by the alcohol in our gasoline?”73 The coming of mass consumer society brought with it new expectations to be able to buy a house and a car; the activists behind the oil transition successfully framed alcohol as a major impediment to realizing that dream. With such a wide-ranging alliance now blaming alcohol for causing France’s economic and political problems, and public opinion supporting this alliance, a series of reform-minded governments used emergency decrees to reform agriculture. Decrees in 1953–1954 reduced alcohol production; then, in 1957, the French government legally removed the alcohol fuel from the gasoline mix.74 These measures not only helped entrench oil in the French en-

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ergy system but also empowered technocrats over this process. In 1958 the parliamentary Fourth Republic fell, giving way to the executive-based Fifth Republic, where technocrats had free rein over the oil transition.75 While a major wine newspaper condemned this “dictatorship of the decree-laws,”76 the beet lobby complained that “the alcohol producer had become the scapegoat who is responsible for all the wounds of the Fourth Republic.”77 By 1957–1958, “democracy” was on the side of the technocrats who governed over the oil transition.

•   •   • World War I may have marked the beginning of “the century of oil,” but it was a precarious beginning at best. Between 1918 and the mid-1950s, policymakers searched for ways to limit foreign oil dependency. Farmers, prominent engineers and scientists, and state officials proposed alcohol fuel, not only to curb oil imports but also to help sustain farmers amid periodic gluts. By raising the specter of the Anglo-American trusts that threatened to make France more energy dependent, and by demonstrating the technical and economic merits of alcohol as a fuel, the alcohol lobbies mobilized Parliament and gained widespread popular consent to create and sell a “national gasoline.” After World War II, however, various economic and political forces converged to eliminate alcohol as a fuel option. American protection, money, and influence; new economic imperatives; and the discovery of oil in French Algeria facilitated an ongoing process of engine design closure, oil path dependence, and the transfer of power from politicians in Parliament to experts in the executive. The conversion of the French economy to oil was thus more than a technical alteration to the energy mix—it also reflected and helped spark a transition in the structure of political power and in the economic orientation of the country. The motor fuel debate would resurface at other moments of energy insecurity, notably in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s. During these later crises, French farmers argued that national wealth and security could best be drawn from “the oil from our soil.”78 And in the 1970s, too, concerns over energy insecurity would serve as a pretext for modifying the structure of power, as different groups interpreted the oil crises as a general crisis of sovereignty and jockeyed to shape energy policy. This time, farmers were aligned with a broader-based renewable energy movement that criticized technocrats and the multinational energy companies and that wished to decentralize the energy system. Nevertheless, the movement failed.79 Understanding how alter-

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natives like the French alcohol fuel were excluded from the energy mix helps restore conflict to the historiography on the oil transition, thereby politicizing oil’s current hegemony in the global energy system.

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THE POLITICS OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION West German Hard Coal and the Postwar Oil Transition

Stephen G. Gross

In the two decades after 1950, Western Europe experienced one of the most profound energy transitions in history, as a flood of oil swept in from the Middle East to displace hard coal as the continent’s primary source of energy. Historically, new energy forms have rarely forced out old ones so directly. Instead, they often layer atop existing energies to create hybrid frameworks. Even the vast expansion of coal use in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, often portrayed as the archetypical energy transition, overlapped with an expansion of animal muscle and wood use, not a contraction. But Western Europe during the Economic Miracle and Les Trente Glorieuses represents a remarkable exception. Between 1950 and 1973 oil not only rose meteorically as a proportion of total energy used among the six founding countries of the European Community—­from 10 to 50 percent—­it actually forced down the total volume of coal consumed by roughly a third.1 Incredibly, coal’s decline took place during a period of unprecedented growth in the economy and unprecedented rise in total energy consumption. These were the years of what J. R. McNeill has called Great Acceleration, when energy use, population, gross domestic product (GDP), agricultural production, and a host of other indicators exploded upward. Western Europe, as it recovered from depression, war, and genocide, nearly tripled its GDP and doubled its en-

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ergy consumption between 1950 and 1975. That coal consumption diminished during a period of expansion speaks volumes about the radical nature of the postwar oil transition. 2 No European country participated more powerfully in this transition than West Germany. Since the late nineteenth century, German mines contributed to industrialization across the continent. In the twentieth century, two world wars underscored just how crucial coal was for both expansion and destruction, so after 1945 the nation’s hard coal heartland in the Ruhr was placed under international control by the Allies, then later by the first institution of European integration, the European Coal and Steel Community. Despite intense international oversight it was here in the Ruhr that the tension between coal and oil played out in its rawest form. After 1945, West Germany’s energy structure changed more rapidly than any other European country, as the new nation transformed from the continent’s largest consumer of coal into its largest consumer of oil. The United States’ Marshall Plan, the American security umbrella in the Middle East, and American tax incentives for US companies prospecting abroad sparked a flood of oil to Europe. Ludwig Erhard of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the architect of West Germany’s economy, greeted this flood with a policy of accepting and cultivating cheap energy.3 The shift toward oil underwrote two decades of rapid growth in the Federal Republic, helping the nation join the ranks of the world’s richest countries, transform into a high-­wage consumer society, and forge a new identity based on its reputation as an export powerhouse.4 Yet this shift was also deeply traumatic, imprinting on policymakers a lasting anxiety over the source and the price of their energy. For the new hydrocarbon network that brought oil from the Middle East damaged what had been the energetic foundation of the nation’s economy: hard coal. This chapter deals with hard coal—­anthracite, or more commonly bituminous coal—­a relatively clean burning type of coal found deep beneath the earth and in great abundance in the Ruhr. Soft lignite coal, by contrast, which is mined near the surface, was less important to the economy during the Economic Miracle, experienced a very mild expansion during these decades, and is still mined in Germany today. But during the 1950s and 1960s, Ruhr hard coal mining operations, which directly employed nearly half a million people, descended into two wrenching crises that threatened to shatter the social fabric of the nation and pushed politics to its limits. As hard coal collapsed, it threatened to bring down with it an immense amount of capital and drive tens of thousands of people into unemployment.5 How to manage this transition, and whether to accelerate it, slow it, or merely mitigate its side effects became one of the leading challenges for politicians of

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both major political parties in the Federal Republic: the CDU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The price of energy became less a way to balance supply and demand than a channel for distributional conflict contested by a welter of interest groups, from international oil corporations, coal producers, and unions, to the Economics Ministry itself. For contemporaries, this transition raised questions that struck at the very core of West Germany’s political economy. Should the state apply market principles to the sphere of energy, and make competition, low prices, and efficiency the sole criteria of policy? Or should it pursue different priorities by embedding energy in a broader social framework and treating it as something other than a commodity? How should society balance the countervailing interests affected by the rise of a new energy? And who, ultimately, should bear the burden of a transition from an older to a newer system? For historians, this postwar moment raises questions about the nature of energy, and its entanglement with other social, political, and economic structures. Mines and collieries, just like oil refineries and pipelines or offshore wind farms, can be immense capital projects with decades-­long lifespans. Investments in these material artifacts takes years to recoup. When new energy systems reshape the economy or capture markets controlled by older ones, they erode the value of capital already in place, threatening the economic base of powerful actors as well as those employed or dependent upon the old.6 Energy transitions, in other words, even those unfolding more gradually than the postwar oil wave, have historically brought disruption. During such moments energy itself becomes deeply politicized, revealing how energy markets are profoundly shaped by the state and those who influence policy. An energy’s abundance or scarcity, its price, and its accessibility is, as often as not, made by politics and interest group struggles as by the technology of the moment, the material nature of a fuel, or the resource endowment of a nation.7 For historians of Europe, foregrounding the politicization of energy exposes the myth of West Germany’s Social Market Economy, which has all too often been portrayed as a success story of market forces alone.8 For those concerned with climate change today, the conflict between hard coal and oil in Western Europe offers a valuable historical lens to help understand the nature of, and the challenges facing, the energy transition so many are hoping for: the rise of renewables at the expense of fossil fuels. For as many climate analysts are now pointing out, it is incredibly important to know when fossil fuel industries will start “losing significant value,” and to start thinking about what happens once this commences. In the words of Bill McKibbon, “This may turn out to be the most important economic and political question of the first half of this century.”9

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Energy at What Price? After years of racial dictatorship, war, aerial bombing, and postwar inflation, by the mid-­1950s, West Germany’s hard coal heartland in the Ruhr—­a region that provided the nation with almost two-­thirds of its energy—­had all but recovered. On the surface, these years seemed halcyon: the housing stock rebuilt, the mining workforce revived, and output back to levels not seen since the 1930s. A flood of public investment unlocked by the Korean War was helping the industry modernize, and the employment coming directly from hard coal mining topped a half a million—­8 percent of the total industrial workforce. For the first time since the 1930s, Ruhr mines entered the profit zone, just barely. Meanwhile, a range of forecasts predicted Europe would soon face a looming energy shortfall, sparking mineowners to dig new shafts. The old power of Ruhr hard coal, which during the nineteenth century had driven an entire development bloc of railroads and steel, seemed poised to return, and with it a heavily organized industrial order comprised of cartels and interlocking investment networks.10 But the industry still faced challenges. Mineowners had no control over the price at which they sold their final good. Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard’s decision to liberalize prices in 1948—­the moment used by many historians to mark the beginning of the twenty-­five years of astounding growth known as the Economic Miracle—­did not, in fact, extend to all sectors. Some spheres Erhard deemed too important to risk reintroducing market pricing, fearing that price rises in these sectors might precipitate general inflation, the demon he had been fighting since 1945. In agreeing on the need for low energy prices to ensure growth, first Erhard’s Administration for the Economy then later the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) capped the price of coal. This infuriated West Germany’s mineowners, since 1953 organized into the Business Association for Ruhr Mining (Unternehmensverband Ruhrbergbau, UvRb), who saw price as a “matter of existence,” and who claimed they could never generate the investment needed to expand output without determining the price of their own good. This conflict was exacerbated by the question of industrial organization, since Erhard thought mining epitomized the “unsocial concentrations of market power” that had helped the Nazi Party seize power in 1933.11 Yet the most challenging, though still unrecognized, problem for hard coal in the mid-­1950s was the rise of a new fuel. Since the late 1940s, the American occupation authorities and West Germany’s Economics Ministry had been trying to bring oil to the Federal Republic, which before 1939 had run largely on coal. Over 10 percent of Marshall Plan aid went toward purchasing oil and

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building refineries, while the Economic Cooperation Administration, which dispersed these funds, pressured global oil corporations like ESSO-­Exxon, British Petroleum (BP), and Shell to keep prices low to facilitate reconstruction. Beginning in 1950, the Economics Ministry cultivated cooperative ventures between domestic companies and American oil firms to acquire technical know-­how, and it provided tax rebates, low-­interest loans, and priority access to foreign currency to encourage refinery construction. Oil companies eagerly responded to these subsidies, above all the majors—­companies of vast size and global reach—­by building new refineries along the estuaries of Western Europe’s major rivers.12 In 1956 these tensions erupted into an intense debate about energy following three major policy changes. In response to a booming economy that seemed poised to consume ever more energy, Erhard eased the way for more coal imports from the United States. He also changed his tune on pricing. Following the return of sovereignty to the Federal Republic in 1955, the ECSC signaled that Bonn could have the final say over the price of hard coal. With encouragement from his liberal advisors, Erhard ended state control over hard coal prices. Though he hailed this as “a decisive step towards integrating hard coal into the market,” in fact he never wanted the coal price to be determined entirely by supply and demand. As he noted in internal energy deliberations, “even if one wants to grant a market price, one must still have the right to influence the market.” German welfare, in Erhard’s mind, depended on high productivity and exports, which in turn meant that “a plentiful supply of the cheapest possible energy is becoming ever more important.” Erhard thus struck a gentleman’s agreement with coal producers, who pledged not to raise prices without first consulting the Economics Ministry.13 Lastly, Erhard removed the tariff on imported fuel oil, making West Germany the least protected oil market in Europe. Fuel oil, a derivative of the process that made gasoline, had been a minor by-­product in the 1930s. But by the 1950s it was becoming more prevalent across Europe as demand for gasoline exploded with the rise of the automobile society. Fuel oil directly rivaled hard coal in many of the latter’s iconic applications: shippers, railroads, and industry all began turning to it, and even many power plants. As Erhard explained to the European Council, his policies belonged to a cohesive strategy to “introduce as quickly as possible an all-­embracing competition between [West Germany’s] individual energy suppliers. Toward this end we are trying to strengthen the competitive position of American coal vis-­a-­v is Ruhr coal, and to promote the consumption of oil products.”14 Erhard’s policy changes thoroughly demoralized hard coal producers and

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unions, leading them to critique the very nature of how a market economy should function, or at least how Erhard presented the market to the public. Leaders of the UvRb estimated the fixed price of hard coal had cost Ruhr producers billions of deutschemarks before 1955, and that this—­a political decision to cap coal prices—­was the root of their problems. They demanded “a true price” for coal. Yet their idea of “true” differed dramatically from Erhard’s: it should be the Ruhr cartel that determined prices, and these should cover the costs of production as well as the new investment demanded by the rest of the economy.15 Union leader Heinz Gutermuth captured this sentiment when he argued that the market itself was a “fiction”: “In Bonn, one immediately raises both hands if people even utter the word ‘planning.’ They think immediately of the controlled economy before the currency reform or the centrally managed economies of the Eastern Bloc. But they forget that, in the end, all business is planned. Even the huge corporations have to plan, as must each and every small-­and medium-­sized business.”16 Confident from recent energy forecasts, in 1957 the UvRb revolted against its tacit agreement with Erhard by exercising its new legal power and unilaterally raising the price of hard coal. The price hike, coming days after West Germany’s third national election in which the CDU had promised stable prices, outraged Erhard who saw this as a declaration of war. In denouncing the increase he argued that questions of equity had no place in Bonn’s energy framework, only competition. In a detailed discussion at the European Council of Ministers, Erhard claimed the ideas of the UvRb in no way “conformed to the principles of a free economy.” Either we “align the coal price to meet production expenses so that mining firms can always expect to cover their entire costs—­but who in this case verifies the costs? Or [we] follow a market price.” For Erhard, these two positions were irreconcilable, since nothing, he believed, gives producers “a legal and moral claim to recover, at all times, their costs.” 17

Coal Crisis 1958 These debates created a charged atmosphere that tipped into political warfare when West Germany descended into a crisis of surplus energy. Two warm winters, a mild cyclical downturn, and unexpected efficiency gains brought down total energy consumption. Hard coal producers, meanwhile, had raised the price of their product just as more American coal began crossing the Atlantic, and just as the price of fuel oil began plummeting, more rapidly in the Federal Republic than anywhere else in Europe. By the end of 1958, fuel oil in West Germany became, for the first time ever, cheaper in thermal equivalent

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units than hard coal. The results were astounding as unsold coal piled up at the pits. In February 1958 Ruhr mines sent eighteen thousand workers home without pay. More work halts and unpaid leave followed, and in 1959 the first major mines closed. As West Germany’s leading magazine proclaimed, “the death of the mines” had begun.18 In response, in early 1959 the Industrial Mining and Energy Union (Industriegewerkschaft Bergbau und Energie, IGBE) organized the largest public demonstration since the founding of the Federal Republic. Eighty thousand miners marched through the iconic coal town of Bochum, to show how the miner’s “living standards were being sacrificed on the altar of liberal market principles.”19 At first the demonstrations had little effect on Erhard and his ministry, who saw the crisis as an opportunity to drive through his liberalization agenda. Stagnation in Ruhr coal, he hoped, would “act as a brake on the union’s wage demands in all types of employment,” an argument Chancellor Konrad Adenauer warned him not to repeat in public. Other CDU politicians, however, feared the pit closures would lead to the Bolshevization of the nation. Adenauer thought the Ruhr might descend into a “witch’s cauldron” if the coal issue was not resolved.20 Just as important, by 1958 the chancellor began to worry that the power of the oil majors like ESSO-­Exxon might be a greater threat than the coal cartel. The former, so Adenauer feared, were delivering fuel oil in huge quantities and low prices with the aim of “squeezing German coal out of the market.” The problem was that “no one can prevent these oil suppliers, which monopolize the oil market, from then raising their prices after they have managed to reorder West Germany’s economy from coal to fuel oil.”21 Social pressure climaxed in September 1959 when IGBE organized a second protest, this time in the capital of West Germany, where sixty thousand miners marched silently through the streets waving black flags in a call for federal assistance. Only then did Erhard change his approach, admitting the competition he had unleashed might not be functioning as intended, having “led to unnatural dumping prices far below those of the world market.” In a public radio address he explained this about-­face, noting how “it is one thing if each year hundreds of thousands of people in the Federal Republic willingly leave their workplace. But it is another thing when thousands of people are forced because of structural shifts to move into other professions.”22 Following the protest in Bonn, the cabinet passed a draft bill for a fuel oil tax. The government also approved a new fund to support miners. With help from the ECSC, Bonn paid out 150 million deutschemarks for wages lost during the crisis, and the government began financing a massive new retraining program to helped miners find jobs in other industries. Together, these

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measures cost 800 million deutschemarks, the single largest state social expenditure in German history to that point.23

Supply Chains of Oil While this social support cushioned the adjustment for the workers employed in a field declining under the weight of global competition, West Germany’s first energy transition continued to accelerate, and oil began reaching Europe in ever larger quantities. The new fuel oil tax aside, which was watered down from the original proposal, Erhard had opened his nation’s energy system to competition from Middle Eastern oil, and this would have massive consequences for West German society. The hydrocarbon supply chain the majors had been building since 1950—­to bring oil from the wells of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, through the Suez Canal by freighter or by pipeline to Lebanon, across the Mediterranean to the ports of Trieste and Marseilles, or still further to Rotterdam and Hamburg—­began to bear incredible fruit during the 1960s. Global oil output surged. Between 1960 and 1968, global oil production doubled to two billion tons, with expectations that it would soon crest three billion. Much of this new oil was pushed toward Western Europe by a political decision made on the other side of the Atlantic. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower codified the United States’ informal oil import quota system in 1959, in the name of protecting domestic American oil firms, he fractured the global oil market and forced American corporations with foreign oil reserves to aggressively market their crude in Western Europe.24 The Federal Republic—­t he second largest consumer market in the world—­ absorbed the biggest swells of this oil wave. German oil consumption rose 19 percent each year between 1960 and 1965. Where France added 49 million tons of oil to its market between 1957 and 1967, the Federal Republic added no less than 115 million, its appetite for the dark liquid growing nearly sixfold during this decade. 25 To consume this oil West Germany built, with the help of the majors, an expensive new infrastructure to link the Federal Republic into the global hydrocarbon supply chain. Stoked by the United States’ generous depletion allowances and foreign tax credit, which gave US companies in the Middle East huge profits they could deploy anywhere in the world, as well as by Bonn’s own depreciation allowance that reduced the cost of infrastructural investment, the majors went on a building spree.26 Firms like ESSO-­Exxon, BP, and Shell had huge capital endowments from their lucrative business, and could self-­ finance new investment where coal companies could not. After 1959 the oil industry sunk over 15 billion deutschemarks in infrastructural funds into the Federal Republic and the neighboring countries that supplied West Germany.

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From the late 1950s on, refineries crept inland from the coastal cities, first to the Ruhr, then to the Rhineland, and eventually to Bavaria. The growth of refining capacity was dizzying, rising ninefold between 1955 and 1970. The goal of the oil industry: to locate a refinery within 150 kilometers of every point in West Germany, an achievement realized by the end of the 1960s. Before 1958, ships, railroads, and trucks transported oil from the coastal centers to the interior through a fractured and expensive logistical network. But the rise of inland refineries brought a new method of moving oil: pipelines. In 1956, under the financial leadership of ESSO-­Exxon, BP, and Shell, West Germany’s first pipeline was completed connecting Wilhelmshaven to the ESSO-­Exxon refinery near Cologne. Two years later, a second one opened connecting Rotterdam to the Ruhr. After this the race to the south was on, with pipelines eventually bringing oil from Marseilles, Genoa, and Trieste to Karlsruhe and Ingolstadt. In 1955 West Germany had not a single pipeline; a decade later these tubes carried over 40 percent of all oil traffic throughout the country.27 This infrastructure brought vast quantities of energy to the cities of West Germany, the growth rate of fuel oil in particular astonishing contemporaries. Households burned just three million tons (Hard Coal Equivalent, HCE) of this in 1957; by 1965 they were using twenty-­eight million. Industry saw similar growth rates, while fuel oil for electricity exploded from virtually nothing in 1957 to account for 12 percent of all electricity production by 1972. As a proportion of final energy consumed in the Federal Republic, fuel oil rose from just 6 percent in 1957 to 30 percent in 1965, while hard coal fell from 66 to 34 percent. And with the oil flood came falling prices. From 1958 through the mid-­1960s, hard coal prices stayed even while those of fuel oil declined by roughly 30 percent: from 109 deutschemarks/­tons to 88 in Hanover; from 102 to 78 in Stuttgart; and from 160 to no less than 81 in Munich.28 This infrastructure opened new regions of West Germany to the fruits of low-­cost energy—­above all, Bavaria, which was in the midst of industrialization. In 1960 hard coal in Bavaria cost much more than in the industrial heartland of the Ruhr. Pipelines and the localization of refineries changed this, completely eradicating the price gap for oil products between the Ruhr or the coast and the south. By 1970 three-­quarters of Bavaria’s final energy came in fluid form, and southern Germany formed a pro-­oil voting bloc in Parliament that resisted any effort to dam the river of oil.29 West Germany’s entanglement with the global hydrocarbon supply chain, in other words, fueled economic growth, but it also generated anxieties about domestic stability. According to one estimate, the widening price gap meant that by 1967, twenty-­five million tons of fuel oil were effectively replacing thirty-­five million tons of coal a year. Even the Economics Ministry, a bastion

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of free market thinking, began worrying that “at present, the expansionary needs of the great international oil firms alone is determining the future sales potential of Germany’s coal industry.”30 Specifically, the oil companies’ investments threatened to destroy the wealth of Ruhr coal. By the 1960s, hard coal looked like it had little future, and investors that had sunk capital into this arena began trying to move funds elsewhere. But the structure of the hard coal industry hindered this, since mines required capital to be fixed in time and place over long periods. From the initial planning stage it took eight to ten years to open a mine, another fifteen before it reached maximum operational capacity, and only after operating for twenty-­five years would it achieve a rate of profit deemed normal by investors. And because coal required a disproportionately large share of investment to be sunk into immovable assets specific to mining, it proved challenging for investors to repurpose this capital for other uses.31 In the early 1960s, coal companies consequently began paying lower dividends than other industries, a reflection of falling profitability. During a period when the rest of the economy experienced an investment boom, investment in coal shriveled from 1.1 billion deutschemarks in 1959 to less than 300 million a year by the end of the 1960s. The ratio of equity to total assets and liabilities among mining companies fell, a result of mining firms assuming debt simply to manage operations that were contracting. By the mid-­1960s, Ruhr producers estimated that reducing their overall annual output by thirty-­five million tons, a figure that seemed utterly likely at the time, would destroy 2.75 billion deutschemarks worth of capital.32 Many wanted out. But who, exactly, would buy aging mines that were unprofitable? After 1962, the CDU-­led government finally began to admit it must help the Ruhr reduce output through an ordered transition. Under Chancellor Erhard’s leadership, the CDU devised a plan to contract the industry. In 1963 Bonn passed the Law for Promoting the Rationalization of Hard Coal Mining, creating an agency that paid firms to physically close their mines, 12.5 deutschemarks of federal funds for each ton they chose not to produce. The government, in other words, would cushion the destruction of fixed capital caused by the oil wave by opening the public purse. The CDU’s opponents lamented the sad irony of giving public money to private corporations to not produce. Over the next two years, thirty-­one large mines and twenty smaller ones would close at a public cost of nearly 350 million deutschemarks.33

Denouement and the Transfer of Capital In 1966 an economy-­w ide recession, accompanied by another round of falling oil prices, pushed hard coal into its second crisis in less than a decade. Stock-

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piles rose higher than in 1958, and coal firms found more of their scarce capital tied up in these illiquid assets that were impossible to monetize. Mineowners responded by cancelling thousands of workers’ shifts. Others exploited Erhard’s “rationalization” program to close more mines. Since 1960 Ruhr coal had already shed 120,000 jobs, but now the pace accelerated, and over the next two years another 135,000 people would leave the region to find work elsewhere. The old myth of the Ruhr as a center of upheaval again reared its head. The “existential anxiety” generated by this second crisis, so warned Helmut Schmidt, the SPD’s parliamentary leader, was spawning a “breeding ground for political radicalization on both the Left and the Right.” In his opinion, this region of six million people was becoming the cardinal danger to the nation’s domestic politics.34 Over the course of 1966, elites across the political spectrum thus began hastily devising plans to restructure their energy system. In the words of Deutsche Erdöl-­A ktiongesellschaft’s (DEA) directors, one of West Germany’s leading domestic energy firms, “The process of substituting fuel oil for coal . . . must be channeled in an orderly fashion to prevent the destruction of national wealth invested in the mines.” At the end of 1966, the unions presented a plan to forge a single enterprise out of all mines. Meanwhile, the CDU and the SPD, which formed a new grand coalition government in 1966, began trying to use state levers to create corporate agglomerations in the field of energy. Larger domestic firms in both coal and oil, they hoped, would mitigate the social challenges posed by the new hydrocarbon infrastructure. 35 That the SPD controlled the Economics Ministry in the new government helped these ideas flourish. Karl Schiller, a charismatic Keynesian economics professor from Hamburg who had ascended to the rank of economics minister after 1966, was critical of Erhard’s liberalism. West Germany’s energy problems, in his mind, “cannot be solved with a policy of laissez-­faire.” Since 1964 he and other SPD luminaries had been trying to “develop a public energy firm into an effective instrument of energy policy.” Upon becoming economics minister, Schiller brought together IGBE, UvRb, and the government of North-­R hine Westphalia to discuss a solution to hard coal’s woes. Thus began the total reorganization of what had once been Germany’s main energy. While the unions supplied the concept of a single firm, corporate leaders provided the practical details for how this might unfold.36 In the hopes of facilitating the flow of capital out of coal, in 1965 the UvRb had suggested creating a bad bank financed by the federal government to absorb unproductive mines. While the idea stalled under Erhard, the new grand coalition took up a modified version in which owners would lease their mining assets over twenty years to several large organizations owned by Bonn, the state of North-­R hine Westphalia, and

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a private rescue consortium. In return, the owners would receive a 3.5 percent annual payment on their assets—­a paltry return at the time, reflecting coal’s declining value. 37 Schiller eventually accepted a version of these ideas, though with a caveat: the reorganization must be overseen by a government commissioner with the legal power to coerce recalcitrant coal firms into accepting the program. Under immense pressure from Parliament, Schiller, IGBE, and the coal firms reached an agreement in 1968. Under the terms of the reorganization, the government merged nearly all mines in the Ruhr into a “total firm,” to be named Ruhrkohle A.G. (RAG). The old mining companies agreed not merely to lease their assets to RAG, but to hand them over entirely along with their liabilities. In return, they received 2.1 billion deutschemarks worth of payments spread into annual installments. The federal government and North-­ Rhine Westphalia underwrote the risk of this with a secured loan of 3.3 billion deutschemarks. In return, the commissioner received “extraordinarily broad” powers to decide which mines lived and which were closed, selecting them from a social instead of a microeconomic standpoint.38 Schiller paired this entire agreement with a massive development program to revitalize the Ruhr, of 17 billion deutschemarks from the European Economic Community, North-­ Rhine Westphalia, and the federal government. By late 1969, over 90 percent of Ruhr coal production was in RAG’s hands: fifty-­two mines, twenty-­nine coking factories, twenty colliery power plants, and no less than 183,000 workers. The new enterprise produced three-­quarters of West Germany’s hard coal. With its sheer size and market influence, alongside the powers vested in the state commissioner, RAG had “practically no other parallel in the industrial sector of the German economy.”39 Although corporations that owned mines disliked the details, they jumped at the chance to extricate themselves from a dying industry. DEA and other domestic energy firms quickly transferred their coal branches to RAG, reducing their labor costs and enabling them to rush more vigorously into other fields.40

•   •   • West Germany’s political economy changed profoundly as a result of its postwar energy transition to oil. Under Ludwig Erhard, a liberal approach to energy had reigned through the early 1960s, in which competition and the smashing of economic conglomerations were to bring Germans the lowest possible price for their energy. Erhard paired this with tactics that kept pressure on the mines to modernize, and that favored oil companies with financial support

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and minimized any barriers they faced in extending their operations across borders. The expansion of pipelines and refineries, moreover, opened energy-­ poor inland regions of Europe to all the benefits and drawbacks of inexpensive Middle Eastern oil. But the rise of a new oil infrastructure, itself partly a result of Erhard’s policies, disrupted his liberal vision by exposing West Germany to new social risks. Under the CDU-­SPD coalition of 1966, the nation embraced a politics of “bigness” and corporatism to harness the oil wave while managing the problems that came in its wake. But even before the rise of a new political economy in the 1970s, West Germans realized their market and their very energy system was a political creation, one forged through struggle. Indeed, the tensions between hard coal and oil were conceptualized by participants and politicians alike as a “battle” between systems in which there would be losers.41 Even Erhard came to appreciate that energy was not made by the market, but instead shaped by questions that required active political decisions: how to safeguard the miners of the Ruhr; how to extricate fixed capital from hard coal, or at least avoid the social costs associated with its destruction; and how to determine the price of coal—­ by state fiat, by mineowners, by benchmarking to oil costs, or by a corporatist negotiation between unions, employers, and the state. That such a critical part of the economy as energy was shaped by an overt struggle between groups should reaffirm how West Germany’s incredible Economic Miracle hinged as much on political interventions and decisions taken in the name of social stability as it did on the liberation of market forces. More importantly for understanding climate change today, West Germany navigated its postwar energy transition without massive social disruption only because the state actively shaped the process. Bonn facilitated the flow of capital out of the old energy by assuming the risk as well as financial losses that came with oil’s rise and hard coal’s decline. Capital was not destroyed as it might have been; rather, it moved, though at great expense to the taxpayer. The RAG deal was one of the single largest net transfers of wealth in West German history, where nearly five billion deutschemarks of fixed assets changed hands as companies rushed out of coal. RAG became, if not a zombie enterprise, then one on life support. The state, in effect, subsidized the cost of modernizing and maintaining the capital sunk into this older energy system.42 Western Europe’s energy transition in the 1950s and 1960s suggests how we should see the current effort to move off fossil fuels to renewables as a battle of two systems. Suggestions that this transition can unfold smoothly, with little financial disruption to existing industries and in cooperation with fossil fuel producers, miss the point. Those who instead demand an “economic revolu-

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tion” that comes “at the expense” of oil or coal companies, more accurately track recent transitions. As SPD leader and solar luminary Hermann Scheer pointed out when pushing Germany’s own drive to renewables in the 1990s, with clear reference to his nation’s past, a scenario in which a new energy replaces a previous one, instead of just adding to it, is better conceptualized as a political project that can only be carried out by an alliance of “system breakers.”43 In this sense, a history of energy transitions vindicates one of the most (in)famous descriptions of capitalism: that change comes through creative destruction. But to modify this, it is the state that has, and that will continue to be, a leader in deciding what is created and what is destroyed.

three

ACCOUNTING THE DEAD The Moral Economy of the Coal-­F ired Social Contract

Trish Kahle

On November 20, 1968, an energy disaster ignited the Appalachian coalfields. At the Consol No. 9 mine near Farmington, West Virginia, ninety-­ nine miners journeyed underground for the overnight shift. Only twenty-­ one returned alive. The rest were killed in a catastrophic explosion that sent a six-­hundred-­foot “boiling plume of poisonous black smoke” into the sky. Any miner who might have survived the initial blast became trapped in the “underground holocaust” that followed. For days the explosions continued unabated as the billowing smoke “alternatively belched from the shaft and then unaccountably reversed its flow and inhaled, bursting forth again with renewed detonations below.” Many observers quickly placed the catastrophe in a long line of mine disasters that had claimed nearly one hundred thousand miners’ lives since the beginning of the twentieth century. In this narrative, mine disasters expressed the systematic devaluing of miners’ lives, and revealed how the Appalachian coalfields existed outside the scope of liberal democratic governance. The explosion’s aftermath, however, suggests that the Farmington Mine disaster is better described as a moment of transition than continuity.1 The Farmington Mine disaster represented a distinct kind of energy transition: not a reconstitution of the nation’s energy portfolio, but a renegotiation of energy’s moral economy. Renewed coalfield organizing efforts over mine 62

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safety and occupational health gained traction in the aftermath of the explosion and led to the modernization of mining workplace legislation. Rather than the culmination of linearly progressive change, modern coal mining regulations resulted from miners’ leveraging of the new context for mortal danger: the rebirth of the coal industry as the baseload fuel of the nation’s rapidly expanding electric power industry. Coal’s transition from its previous role as the fuel of railroads and heavy industry to primarily being used for generating electric power led miners to make new moral claims on the nation’s political institutions and energy consumers, demanding legislation that better reflected the value of their lives.2 As rebellion against the energy regime that was killing miners by the thousands spread across the Appalachian coalfields, politicians and journalists began to adopt the miners’ moral framework in the crafting of and reporting on new legislation, replacing earlier narratives for workplace regulation that centered protection for vulnerable populations or wartime mobilization. The new framework for regulating working conditions and structuring compensation operated from a core paradox. First, this framework asserted that electricity was the “lifeblood of the modern nation.” At the same time, the framework recognized how the human costs of electric power, exacted at the coal seam, had turned coal mining into a “way of death”—­a fact that constituted “a blot on the conscience of America.” Three pieces of legislation attempted to reconcile this paradox in the wake of the Farmington Mine disaster: the West Virginia black lung law of 1969, the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 (“the Act”), and the amendments to the Act known as the Black Lung Benefits Act of 1972. These laws set in place a moral economy negotiated between the workers who produced the overwhelming majority of electric power in the United States and the nation that consumed it. The US Supreme Court affirmed such legislative efforts as a proper realignment of the burdens and benefits of energetic life through economic mechanisms. This decision reflected an understanding that energetic life entailed both rights and obligations.3 Tracing the moral economy of American energy politics from the Farmington Mine disaster to the passage of landmark health, safety, and compensation legislation offers a new lens through which to consider the problem of energy transition in the post–1945 United States, attuned to both the embodied and spatial disparities of energy governance. During the tumultuous period between the Farmington Mine disaster in 1968 and the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the constitutionality of the Black Lung Benefits Act in 1976, miners leveraged moral economic arguments to transform the terms of energy production in the United States. Analyzing the material alongside the social, the political beside the bodily, and the legal alongside the economic,

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this chapter shows how miners marshalled a modern version of moral economy. They emphasized their role in energy production as a source of political power capable of countering the structural human costs of mechanized coal production for electric energy. In doing so, they reversed the temporality of E. P. Thompson’s formulation in which traditional social norms were leveraged against the coming of market society.4 This high-­energy moral economy legislated regulation and compensation to compose a new structure of rights and obligations of energetic life. Any attempt to govern a coal-­fired democracy had to balance what West Virginia congressman Ken Hechler described as the “basic fact,” that “any human being is worth more than a ton of coal,” with the tacit reality that nation did in fact need coal—­despite the deadly consequences of the nation’s energetic appetite.5 The moral economy that attempted to balance these competing claims was best expressed in the legislation that formalized compensation structures and exposure levels as a mechanism to stabilize the nation’s energy regime. The moral economy legislated by the West Virginia black lung law, the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, and the Black Lung Benefits Act of 1972 was precarious and short-­lived. Nonetheless, it suggests the centrality of workplace politics in our histories of energy transition.

The Moral Economy of the Modern Way of Death Coal mining had always been a dangerous occupation. By the late 1960s, the industry retained its dubious national lead in workplace deaths and disabling injuries, measured either by frequency or severity. Workplace deaths, however, had declined substantially since the earlier part of the twentieth century. Indeed, a sustained movement for workplace health and safety emerged at a moment when the number of fatal accidents in the mines had fallen more than 50 percent from its 1907 peak. Even in the post-­1945 period, the aftermath of the Farmington Mine disaster was distinct. Two Illinois basin disasters, at Centralia and West Frankfort, both killed more than one hundred miners but did not have the same impact on national energy politics. What had changed after the Farmington Mine disaster in 1968 was not the deadly nature of coal mining, but rather its political-­economic context.6 In the postwar years, the US energy regime underwent rapid reconfiguration. Between atomic utopianism, which promised to ease nuclear fears with abundant electric energy “too cheap to meter,” and the oil-­powered freedom of the open road, the coal industry experienced its own transition. In the years after 1945, coal shifted from an industrial fuel closely associated with railroads, steel, and war mobilization to a fuel primarily used to generate electricity. By 1966, more coal would be burned to generate electricity than for all

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other uses combined. This transition had wide implications for energy governance and the politics of citizenship.7 Coal-­fired electricity, usually delivered invisibly over substantial distances thanks to the growth of coal-­by-­w ire technology, powered new aspirations for American consumptive citizenship. It lit bright suburban homes and made possible massive office buildings that relied on artificial illumination and air conditioning. Coal even fueled Cold War domesticity, defined by the expanded range of appliances and entertainment items that became ubiquitous in homes across the country. If spectacle of the Cold War American kitchen epitomized President Richard Nixon’s idea of democratic freedom as he debated Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, these freedoms rested on what was implicit but absent in the model kitchen: the feminine and the black, as articulated by Kate Baldwin, but also the energetic. Moreover, both coal production and consumption took place domestically, largely free from the international entanglements that plagued oil and nuclear power. Coal was a domestic problem that demanded domestic solutions. The solutions proffered were shaped by the political culture of the Cold War and the mid-­century liberalism that sought to redress protested inequalities through federal legislation and its bureaucratic administration.8 Energy in its many forms was the subject of political and social contestation in this period. However, because coal production and consumption were largely confined to people who recognized each other as part of the same polity, the particularities of coal forged a distinct relationship between coal miners and electricity consumers. Both spheres of energetic life, production and consumption, fell within a well-­defined public sphere that made it a legible target for regulation, across which the costs and benefits could be balanced democratically. And indeed, coal had many costs, not least of which were those incurred on miners’ bodies. Accidents, explosions, and collapses had killed more than one hundred thousand workers in the nation’s coal mines. Many more had died from or contracted black lung, a fatal respiratory disease acquired through repeated exposure to coal dust, though their numbers were harder to measure because they had gone uncounted for so long. Those costs were long-­k nown and discussed as matters of industrial relations and occupational medicine. But by the late 1960s, miners’ efforts to control workplace accidents and occupational disease would instead be conceived as rights claims amid a broader rights revolution that transformed the kinds and scopes of claims groups previously excluded from political access and power made on their government, its institutions, and their fellow citizens. While the rights revolution found its roots in Black civil rights litigation in the decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous Supreme Court decision that upheld seg-

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regation as constitutional, the rights claims made by African Americans in their struggle for freedom, even when they were left unfulfilled or were met with racist violence, forever transformed the legal landscape and the political imagination of the nation. The miners’ claim that disability caused by coal dust exposure was a violation of their rights was made legible by this broader legal and political context.9 The expansive ideas of freedom and belonging that many Americans espoused in the mid-­twentieth century, and that were rooted in the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, were difficult to reconcile with the human costs of coal mining. The tension between these aspirations and the reality of coal production shaped claims like those voiced by Josh Descaro, a miner, reform activist, and member of United Mine Workers Local 1248. “We are not the 1920s coal miner,” Descaro told an ABC News reporter in 1971. “We are not the man that goes in and drives a mule for his dust or his gas or no matter what . . . We want to live and have families and have a regular life just like anyone else that isn’t a miner. We want to . . . consider our job as safe as a man that is a lawyer, or a doctor.” These claims to safety both challenged and aspired to the Cold War narrative that equated American freedom with a comfortable—­and coal-­fired—­middle-­class lifestyle. President Lyndon B. Johnson had explicitly tied this narrative to coal when he declared National Coal Week in 1967 to celebrate the coal that “fired—­and is still firing—­t he furnaces of freedom.” As the human costs of coal production grew more geographically concentrated and access to coal-­fired electricity became further democratized, the energy transition that bound coal producers and consumers together in a new energetic relationship was replete with moral tension. The result, one activist said, was “a violence boiling” in the Appalachian coalfields.10 The revived movement for coal mine health and safety leveraged this changed context for death to demand new legislation to address the black lung crisis, which had been exacerbated by underground mechanization and the failure to revise outdated mine safety laws. Federal mine safety legislation, which had first appeared on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War II, had lagged far behind the technological and political economic transformations in the industry. A second federal law providing mechanisms for limited enforcement only appeared in 1952. Smaller mines—­those with fewer than fourteen workers underground at a time—­only came under federal regulation through a 1966 amendment. Although by the 1952 and 1966 revisions had also been spurred on by mine explosions, none of these laws or amendments had meaningfully reckoned with the impact of mechanized coal mining on miners’ health and safety. Perhaps even more troubling, lax enforcement meant that compliance with already existing laws was low. As late as 1967 a full 80

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percent of the nation’s underground mines operated in violation of already existing federal safety standards.11 The moral unease generated by the disparity between existing legislation and underground working conditions had drawn President John F. Kennedy’s attention as early as 1963, after two explosions killed fifty-­nine miners within the span of two months. Kennedy seemed to believe that accident prevention measures already available to industry, along with existing regulatory powers, could effectively reduce mining accidents. President Kennedy scolded Interior Secretary Stuart Udall. He stated plainly, “I consider such a loss of life unacceptable.” On Kennedy’s orders, Udall convened a conference on the mine safety question. In the opening session, Udall raised the possibility of new legislation, asking administrators and inspectors from the five largest coal-­ producing states to outline “what new laws are needed.” The basic problem, Udall suggested, was that regulation had fallen well behind the technological advancements that had revived the coal industry and made it possible to fill the new utility orders with only a fraction of its previous labor power. Still, most parties to coalfield governance—­labor, industry, and state—­tacitly accepted that some level of workplace deaths would have to be acceptable to keep the nation electrified. Such thinking was evidenced even by United Mine Workers President Tony Boyle, when he wrote to Udall in March 1968 that the “217 men who were killed in coal mines in 1967 is too high a price to pay for the production of coal. On the other hand . . . it is a far smaller price . . . than the 1,388 men who died in coal mine accidents in 1940, the year before the passage of the original Federal Coal Mine Safety Act.” Legislation, in this view, had the power to balance moral and human costs with social and energetic goods, not to eliminate deaths altogether. Just months later, speaking after the Farmington Mine disaster, Boyle would justify such a view by saying “as long as we mine coal, there will always be this inherent danger of explosion.” But if the US energy regime would continue to result in some level of workplace injury and death, its defenders would have to explain why a certain number of deaths could be tolerated and a higher number could not. What personal costs, borne by coal miners, their families, and their communities, would equal the benefits remunerated to the nation in electric currents?12 Although mine disasters persisted despite regulatory efforts, and remained the most visible example of the paradox which fired the nation’s “furnace of freedom,” the near-­exclusive focus on major explosions inadequately reflected the way that miners thought about their own safety. After the Farmington Mine disaster, the safety movement ultimately focused on “mining as a way of death.” Less focused on individual stories of death and disaster, miners honed a structural and relational view. The same energy regime that had devalued

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miners’ lives in pursuit of its electric lifeblood also offered a new mechanism by which miners could reassert the value of their lives. Despite that from the outside, mine disasters and black lung could appear completely different “ways of death,” miners understood them as one, a relationship between work and death that could be traced through different arcs of time. A miner might narrowly escape death in an explosion or roof cave-­in one day only to return to work and, over the next ten years, contract the black lung disease that would ultimately kill him. The end point of this timeline was always death. As one miner told journalist Jeanne Rasmussen, “Out here, we don’t retire. We die.” Miners’ framework for understanding the relationship between work and death deeply shaped their organizing, tying together the interests of disabled miners with those still working underground.13 However much these deaths might have appeared tied to a deeper history of the devaluing of miners’ lives in pursuit of coal, the value of miner’s life in 1968 was in fact calculated differently than it had been in decades past. Coal’s place in the nation’s economic and energetic life had changed. Miners were left balanced precariously between high production goals, which they experienced as workplace danger, and the rapidly growing demand for low-­cost electric power, which promised economic security. In expanding the consumption of coal-­fired electricity, the United Mine Workers (UMW) saw an answer to the economic and social havoc wreaked by mechanization on coal-­mining communities. The meaning of this new arrangement, however, appeared differently depending on one’s vantage point, as a 1967 cartoon in the United Mine Workers Journal elegantly but unintentionally captured. The Journal declared “Well Balanced” a miner walking on a high-­voltage wire with a full bucket of coal at each end of a balancing pole, one to represent “high production” and the other “low cost.” The cartoon was meant to convey optimism, with the miner providing an extraordinary performance reminiscent of a circus act. But balance came at a dangerous price. Alternatively, one might look and see a miner teetering on a shaking high wire—­movement clearly depicted by lines drawn around his shoulders and the wire both in front of and behind him—­to deliver coal to the cityscape below. He moves forward, perhaps well-­balanced, but precarious. His bodily well-­being remains completely at the whim of prices and production quotas.14 In the wake of the Farmington Mine disaster, rank-­and-­fi le miners and their families fractured the consensus among union, industry, and political leadership that precarious balance was preferable to economic catastrophe. Widows of the miners killed in the explosion confronted West Virginia congressman Ken Hechler, demanding he “do something about all this coal dust.” Later, Hechler would recall that the Farmington Mine disaster “galvanized me

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into action and really changed my entire life.” Although Assistant Secretary of the Interior J. Cordell Moore warned him not to “go blaming anybody or looking for scapegoats,” Congressman Hechler was enraged by how the men who set the terms for mine safety seemed to accept that working to end mine disasters was a futile endeavor. After being confronted by the widows, he set out on a legislative fight that would consume most of his remaining time in Congress: to pass legislation that would finally protect what he described as the miner’s “divine right to live, to breathe.” If the United States was going to claim modernity and civilization, Hechler insisted, the nation had to address the “criminal” conditions in the nation’s coal mines. That responsibility, he felt, clearly fell to the nation as a whole, which must “rise up and demand strong and effective mine-­safety legislation be passed by Congress.” To Secretary Udall, he said “We must move beyond being mere determinists . . . we can fuel the world’s lamps without snuffing our lives in the process.”15

Making Slow Violence Visible In the first months after the Farmington Mine disaster, national tensions simmered. Existing laws were increasingly recognized as inadequate to the challenge of balancing the moral ledgers of the nation’s energy regime. The unease prompted early discussions over how to modernize federal mine safety laws. Open confrontation, however, loomed in the West Virginia coalfields, the heart of the nation’s bituminous coal production. The newly formed Black Lung Association (BLA) took the national unease over the Farmington Mine disaster as their cue to escalate their fight for a state black lung law that would both establish a program to compensate disabled miners and build a regulatory architecture for prevention. This strategic move further demonstrated that miners saw mine safety and black lung disease as a single way of death. Through their organizing, they focused on the slow violence the nation’s energy regime exacted on their bodies. Working and disabled miners felt they were unable to wait any longer for politicians to reckon with the moral problems of energy production. While discussions dragged on, miners died.16 By February 12, nearly three months after the Farmington Mine disaster, the legislative process had stalled in the West Virginia state house. Members of the BLA threatened to close the state’s coalfields if the law was not passed. Wearing the hard hats that identified them with the coal they produced, hundreds carried placards which retooled the UMW slogan of no contract, no work to read no law, no work. They even carried a black coffin to represent those who had already died “in the mines,” again linking the different ways mining killed the workers who mined it. Six days later, 282 miners walked off the job at the East Gulf Mine in southern West Virginia. Within a week,

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12,000 miners were on strike, mostly in the state’s southern counties, which produced some of the richest bituminous coal in the world. More than 2,000 miners marched on Charleston, the state capitol. One of those miners, Othenel Bennington, told the Associated Press, “We demand representation and we intend to be heard.” Ken Hechler, a fierce proponent of black lung legislation, had initially hesitated to support the strike, believing that the legislative process would provide the best chance of success. After meeting with the striking miners in Charleston, however, he threw his full support behind their efforts and donated $1,000 of his own money to the BLA. The strike continued to gather momentum. It spread into the northern sections of the state and into neighboring Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Soon, 40,000 coal miners had walked out, halting more than 90 percent of West Virginia’s coal production. When the companies sought injunctions, Federal District Judge John Field said he had “no authority to order striking coal miners back to work.”17 The strike ultimately lasted three weeks, and it shook the legislative stalemate that had taken hold within West Virginia and at the federal level. Moreover, the confrontation in West Virginia widened the sense of moral crisis in the national press beyond the relatively narrow purview of mine explosions, which black lung clinician Dr. I. E. Buff suggested had threatened to turn black lung legislation into “window dressing” on the much-­needed safety law. A New York Times editorial concluded that the “Black Lungers” had “a claim on the conscience of a nation in which coal remains a vital fuel.” Before the West Virginia House and Senate had even agreed on a bill, the New York Times editorial board added that “action at the federal level is even more urgently needed.” Miners continued their strike into early March to pressure the West Virginia Senate to meet their demands on diagnostic criteria and compensation by signing on to the House version of the bill. By then the New York Times suggested the strike had also had a wider national impact. President Nixon’s administration was starting to show movement in response to “growing public pressure” over the “scandal” and “injustice” of disabled miners being shut out from compensation.18 By the time the West Virginia bill became law, the state legislature had met miners halfway on the primary sticking point: the presumption of disease. While miners demanded presumption after five years working underground, the law ultimately provided presumption for miners who had worked ten of the previous fifteen years in dust exposure jobs. The issue seemed unlikely to be resolved until federal legislation had passed. According to Alan Derickson, “confused irresolution was the order of the day.” Elements of the West Virginia law appeared to contradict each other, as did the growing patchwork of state black lung laws that had passed earlier in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Virgin-

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ia. Still, the miners’ efforts to secure a presumption clause established a direct tie between individually disabled miners and the broader regime of energy governance, inscribing miners’ structural view of the coal-­death relationship into law. Presumption suggested that black lung disease was a structural feature of American energy production, an externality foisted onto miners, their families, and communities rather than a by-­product of poor management or oversight. Presumption raised thorny moral questions for a nation so dependent on coal. Efforts to modernize federal mining regulation would attempt to negotiate a settlement by establishing how much miners’ lives were worth—­ in dollar value—­to secure the nation’s coal supply, and necessarily following, who should pay for them.19

Balancing Moral Ledgers The passage of the West Virginia black lung law all but ensured the passage of federal regulation in the coming year. Two fundamentally political questions formed the center of this regulatory debate: how many miners’ deaths were acceptable in a high-­energy society dependent on coal-­fired electric power and how much compensation from whom was required to balance the moral ledgers of that energetic debt? Such questions made clear that basic concerns like the permissible amount of dust in a working mine was a matter of politics and moral economy, not the technocratic administration often associated with such regulation. According to Jennings Randolph, the Democratic senator from West Virginia who introduced one version of mine health and safety legislation, everyone knew “the ‘safest’ coal mine and the ‘healthiest’ mine [was] the closed one.” Closed mines, however, would not meet the demands for increased production. The challenge, Randolph argued, was “to achieve the feasible and the ‘proper balance’” that would also be effective in keeping miners healthy and safe. Reducing electricity consumption was not an option. By the late 1960s, energy consumption had, in the minds of American politicians, become both a measure of quality of life and evidence of American moral authority in international politics. If the moral costs of coal were high, so, it seemed, were the benefits of the energy it provided. Coal was, according to Randolph, “indispensable to our economy and our country.”20 The moral balancing of these tensions came down to debates that sought to balance the ledgers of energy risk in two ways. One would determine what kinds of fines could be assessed for mine safety violations, and who would pay them. The other would decide how past inequities—­scarred into miners’ lung tissue—­would be redressed. By the early months of 1969, as the black lung rebellion erupted across the West Virginia coalfields, the Senate Subcommittee on Labor had convened for hearings on federal legislation after four different

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bills had been introduced, all with varying approaches to worksite safety violation fines and black lung compensation schemes. While the length of time it ultimately took the 1969 act to pass has typically been assumed to reflect the coal industry’s efficacy in stalling negotiations, the many days of hearings conducted on the matter, and the many different versions of what eventually became the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 offer a glimpse into the wider turmoil about how to assess the moral costs of a fossil fueled energy regime, and where these costs should be redressed.21 The difficulties in moving so fluidly between miners’ bodies and dollar amounts quickly became apparent as UMW President Tony Boyle challenged Senator Jennings Randolph and Senator Harrison Williams (D-­NJ) on their plans to fine miners substantially for mine safety violations—­between $25 and $1,000 per instance. Senator Randolph advocated such penalties to incentivize compliance with new federal regulations. Boyle contended that not only did miners who violated safety regulations risk losing their jobs, but that miners indeed already made payments for violations with their health, bodies, and lives: “the supreme sacrifice.” Asked Boyle: “Would you want me to fine a dead man?”22 Although the penalties specifically targeted at miners would be dropped from the law that ultimately passed, Boyle’s sharp words were undercut by his own complicity in the unbalancing of the nation’s moral ledgers—­siding with the companies over miners, putting the industry ahead of the workers who made it profitable—­a fact that miners had raised consistently in the aftermath of the Farmington Mine disaster. Moreover, despite the spat over fines, there was substantial agreement over the need for modernized mine safety regulations. In that political moment, even the coal companies had to at least provide lip service to support for regulations, even if they would continue to nitpick at the specifics to try and minimize the impact on their operations. A far more heated debate would unfold over what kind of compensation was owed to miners who had contracted black lung disease—­and who would pay for it.23 New Jersey senator Harrison Williams, who had sponsored one of the competing mine safety bills, felt that the challenge was to create a legislative framework that would make the costs of coal-­fired energy more visible. The “legal” definition and the “human” definition were out of sync. Conservatively, he claimed, 70 percent of the nation’s working miners had black lung disease, with another one hundred thousand retired and disabled miners also afflicted. While the black lung provisions were ultimately included in the same bill as mine safety, debate dragged on through summer and late into the fall. President Nixon threatened to veto the bill because he felt the amount of federal monies the black lung compensation program would cost far too high.

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Congressman Ken Hechler, the miners’ strongest ally in Congress, announced publicly there would be a national coal strike if President Nixon vetoed the bill. This threat resonated. Stockpiles were already drawn down because of ongoing labor unrest over the previous year. Nixon finally signed the bill behind closed doors on December 30, 1969, an indicator that although the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act represented an effort to rebalance the moral economy of the nation’s energy production, this new balance was quite precarious. Over the coming years, it would be tested through the difficulties of administering its landmark black lung compensation program.24

Accounting the Dead The response to the new black lung benefits program attached to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 was overwhelming. Although the Social Security Administration received “only a few weeks’ notice” that the agency would administer the massive program, within one month of the program’s enactment, disabled miners and their widows filed more than one hundred thousand claims. The early days of the program were plagued by delays, and when more than 50 percent of claims were denied, disabled miners returned to their local Social Security offices in protest. These protests were amplified by the fact that working miners continued to walk off the job as the new law failed to alleviate the safety crisis unfolding underground. Government agencies, coal miners, union and company leaders all sought to find the proverbial balance point between lives lost, kilowatts delivered, and profits made. At the national level, this rich fabric of protest, contestation, and negotiation taking place in the coalfields was distilled into dollar costs. And indeed, these costs had added up quickly.25 By 1971, only two years after the institution of the program, more than $533 million dollars in compensation had been paid to miners who were “totally disabled” or their widows, even though a substantial proportion of claims had been denied. The payout cost failed to express the tensions over the criteria for receiving benefits and the policies and procedures for program administration. However, the high cost combined with the number of claims denied focused national scrutiny on the program, and in 1972 Congress passed the Black Lung Benefits Act (BLBA) as an amendment in an effort to better facilitate payments and claims processing.26 The BLBA represented an even greater effort at redressing the inequalities of American energetic life through financial redistribution, recognizing that coal mining remained a dangerous necessity, which required miners to sacrifice their lungs for the nation’s electric power. It allowed a wider range of surviving family members to claim death benefits and extended black lung ben-

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efits to surface miners, who had previously been excluded. It also committed $10 million to the construction of new black lung clinics in the coal regions. Reflecting the demands of the Black Lung Association, which had led the Social Security office protests, the BLBA also made it harder to deny claims and allowed claimants to introduce a wider range of evidence in support of their claim. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that in its first year alone, the BLBA amendments would result in the payment of an additional $954 million to miners and their widows. By increasing the annual benefit payout more than four and a half times, the black lung compensation program would become a more than $1.2 billion annual program, with the federal government footing approximately one-­third of the cost where state compensation programs and company payments fell short. Although the burden of payments was ultimately meant to fall to the states and the companies, the BLBA conceptualized the federal government as the guarantor of the program. This focus on immediate payment at great expense and with much confusion reflected an increasing understanding of the importance of stable coal production to meet the nation’s energy needs as the future of oil and natural gas appeared increasingly uncertain. And when state programs failed to materialize and companies balked at paying their share of claims, the federal government continued to increase its payments, which by the mid-­1970s had reached nearly one billion federal dollars annually.27 The BLBA was immediately challenged in the courts by companies that felt it was unfair they be expected to pay black lung benefits to disabled former employees and their widows and dependents. They contended that the BLBA held them unexpectedly liable for working conditions that were legal at the time they had taken place. The federal government argued the justification for such retroactive liability was that the uneven costs of an imbalanced moral economy had in fact been exacted on miners’ bodies and accumulated in operators’ profits. The extraordinary recovery of the industry’s profitability across the 1960s, in this logic, had directly resulted not only in the disabling of workers and their premature deaths but also in the destabilization of the nation’s largest domestic source of energy. But this line of thought, countered R. R. McMahan, the counsel employed the coal companies, ignored “the legislative history of the Act as being a national obligation and recognized as a moral obligation by the government.” Both parties agreed that black lung benefits were more than an expanded worker’s compensation program. They were a necessary form of “reparations.” The question at stake was not whether they should be paid, but on whom the obligation to pay fell.28 Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered the Supreme Court’s opinion upholding the constitutionality of the 1969 act and the 1972 amendments. He rejected

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the operators’ claims. Their obligation to pay was indeed fair and constitutional. The Supreme Court, in a 6–2 decision, recognized the black lung program as standing in a legislative tradition of moral economy, “adjusting the burdens and benefits of economic life.” Rather than acting as deterrent for companies still running mining operations or as an arbitrator of a company’s past “blame-­worthiness,” the Supreme Court held instead that the black lung program as expanded by the BLBA was “justified as a rational measure to spread the costs of the employee’s disabilities to those that have profited from the fruits of their labor, the operators and the coal consumers.” Reparations to coal miners for the unequal bodily costs of energy production which they had borne would come through a combination of state, federal, and industry funds.29

The Farmington Mine Disasters’ Enduring Legacy The Farmington Mine disaster, which set off this wave of legislative changes in mining regulation between 1969 and 1972, was not the mine’s first explosion. In the half-­century before the fateful November 20, 1968, explosion of Consol No. 9, the mine had claimed at least forty-­nine lives in the pursuit of its rich bituminous coal. The 1968 disaster would, however, be the last. After a decade of activism by the families of the victims—­nineteen of whose bodies were never recovered—­Consol agreed to permanently close the mine and designate the site, both above-­and belowground, as a memorial to the miners who had perished. Additionally, the victim’s families secured a memorial near a public highway, a place more visible than the underground tombs that marked the fulcrum of coal’s moral economy. This memorial, however, is not the primary signifier of the disaster’s impact on American energetic and moral life. That mark, instead, can be traced through the regulatory measures and compensation schemes that were meant to reckon the blood debt that the nation owed its miners.30 It is important to recognize, however, the basic tension embedded in such a moral balancing act. The moral economy of high-­energy society retains this inherent precarity as fossil fuel workers, including coal miners, continue to walk the high wire of American energetic life. Regulation can ease the disparity between the human and ecological costs and the social and economic benefits but cannot address the basic fossil fuel premise of energy precarity and sacrifice. The moral challenge of just transition, which sits at the heart of contemporary efforts to confront the climate crisis through both mitigation and adaptation, will be to create an energy system that is not premised on such a precarious and unsustainable balancing act.

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HARD HAT COWBOYS Energy Workers and Coalfield Capitalism in the Anthropocene

Ryan Driskell Tate

Carol Ullrich was small and muscular in steel-­toed boots and coveralls. “People are surprised when I tell them I drive a truck in a mine” she said, “like when I try to cash a check or something and tell them where I am working.” She arrived in Gillette, Wyoming, by way of Missouri, where she spent her youth scraping by. Now she drove a giant earthmoving machine that overshadowed most buildings. The job wasn’t hard once she got used to it. She spent her ten-­hour shifts in the Black Thunder Coal Mine, perched on the tractor seat of a Lectra Haul. The practice of driving the unit rig honed the spatial skills that she needed for more skilled equipment. “You start on a truck and scraper,” she said, “then you work your way up.” The twenty-­four-­year-­ old was already second in line to run the coal shovels, a midlevel position. “It makes me proud to be driving equipment.”1 By the 1980s, Gillette had become the energy hub of the Powder River Basin, a massive geological unit that stretches four hundred miles beneath the prairies of Montana and Wyoming. The self-­styled “Energy Capital of the Nation” sprouted almost overnight when it transformed, ten years earlier, from cow town to coal town. The changeover owed much to the conjunction of national and global energy politics. During the late 1960s, coal executives felt besieged by the passage of new social regulations on their labor and environmental practices. The one-­two punch of the Federal Coal  Mine  Health and Safety 76

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Act of 1969  (“the Coal Act”) and the Clean Air Act of 1970 threatened the industry’s razor-­t hin profit margins out East. As Kentucky and West Virginia coalfields erupted into wildcat strikes and worker unrest, the nation’s top executives reneged on their lukewarm commitments to the so-­called labor-­ management accord. They began to diversify their interests and migrate their operations out of the scrum of Appalachia and into the largely unskimmed coalfields of the American West.2 The nation’s political embrace of energy nationalism after the 1973 energy crisis leveraged the industrial gambit for the western states. The political prerogatives of “energy independence” supported the expansion of domestic energy reserves within the nation’s territorial boundaries, and nowhere showed more promise than the vast coalfields of the Montana and Wyoming. “The coal reserves of the Northern Great Plains,” remarked Carl Bagge, president of the National Coal Association, in 1974, “are a vital part of the fuel resource base necessary for both energy growth and national self-­sufficiency.” The shifting geography of production provided a massive transition within the coal business: a new era of rip-­and-­roar extraction on the Northern Great Plains. By century’s end, the fossil landscapes of Wyoming and Montana constituted the largest coal producing region of the United States.3 These strip mines of the Powder River Basin reorganized the nature of coal work, and with it, the politics of energy workers. The coal miner, now a journalistic stock character of “Trump country,” was once the archetype of the industrial proletariat.4 These fossil fuel workers served for almost a century as the junkyard dogs of the American labor movement. Coal miners held immense control over their work, long after factory workers watched automation and supervisory control reduce their command on the shop floor. As today’s reporting on coal communities tends toward parachute journalism and clickbait headlines, they focus on how economic anxiety and rural culture morphed old-­time radicals into aggrieved reactionaries. The reports make compelling copy, but largely ignore the massive structural changes in production that remade coalfield capitalism over the last half century. The energy histories of the recent past have likewise given bare-­bones treatment to actual workers, with most scholarship tending to favor the high political theater or culturalist accounts of consumptive habits.5 The recent history of the coal industry remains stunted by a chronology that treats the mid-­twentieth century, or earlier, as the ostensible end of coal’s relevance to the modern political economy. Today, most histories of energy transition refer to regime change: the switch from one energy portfolio to the next, from the so-­called age of coal in the industrial era to the age of oil today. These narratives notice that coal contributes to a smaller share of national

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energy markets, relative to other resources, like oil and natural gas, and therefore treat coal as trivial to the energy history of the recent past. But the truth is, the modern United States morphed into a high energy society because energy production and consumption grew in absolute terms, and coal production expanded, rather than contracted, in the second half of the twentieth century (from 512 million short tons in 1940 to 1 billion in 2007).6 Andrew Needham has called this the “never-­ending age of coal”: the continued reliance on mines and coal-­fired power plants. The rise of Powder River Basin contributed to the expansion of coal production, while also creating a new coal workplace that undermined earlier labor traditions. The story is partly about technopolitics: just as the open-­ pit workscape reengineered the environment, it also enabled the industry to counteract the solidarity and historic militancy coal miners forged underground. The heavily mechanized production processes enabled managers and operators to create an enviro-­technical system conducive to nonunion labor. While the big machines brought workers like Ullrich pride in the job, it also removed them from the close and private interactions that historically conditioned miner’s solidarity underground.7 But coal operators extended their upper hand beyond the labor process itself. They remade the mining workforce through strategic coordination in hiring practices and recruited rural workers with no backgrounds in mining. They also promoted extractivism as a political identity, touting a workplace culture that likened miners to agrarian producers—­“ hard hat cowboys.”8 As a result, when union representatives arrived on the scene in the mid-­1970s, they found western operations difficult to organize, and sometimes downright hostile to collective action.9 The story of energy transition in the coal sector, at least in the late twentieth century, was about reinvention rather than replacement: new geographies, new technologies, and new extractivist politics.10 The Powder River Basin rearranged the geographic, technological, and cultural assemblages of the American coal industry. The rural and far-­flung plains became the epicenter of the business, and because of corporate strategies in the 1970s, workers, like Ullrich, related to the job as producers rather than wage earners. This political and cultural makeover has created wider implications for energy politics today, continuing to beset the possibilities for a “just” transition toward clean energy futures in some of the nation’s most productive coal regions.

Mine Control Strip mining wrought the greatest technological change in the coal business in the twentieth century. There’s some scholarly uncertainty about its origins,

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but there’s archeological evidence that the Hopi and Plains Indians yanked coal from the ground, and some miners in the 1820s certainly relied on mule-­ drawn shovels to scrape topsoil above coal seams. The first commercial strip mines, though, opened in the early twentieth century after the invention of electric shovels. The Northern Pacific Railway built one of the biggest strip mines in the country in 1923 in Colstrip, Montana. From the beginning, the coal operators experimented with mechanized surface mines to undermine the political power of the United Mine Workers. The Colstrip venture undercut the union miners in Red Lodge, who had grown boorish and militant in the years after World War I. At the time, operators gloated that highly mechanized mines cut labor costs.11 Still, the nation’s strip mines accounted for less than 1 or 2 percent of American coal production until World War II. Afterward, the postwar boom and build-­out of metropolitan America enabled earthmoving equipment manufacturers, like Caterpillar and Bucyrus-­Eerie, to introduce new bulldozers, loaders, scrapers, graters, and trucks to the market. These big machines, with carrying capacities of more than one hundred tons, stocked awe within a Cold War society that relished sheer technological dominance. In 1967 the US Department of the Interior applauded the newfound carrying capacity of the strip mining shovels. With no loss of irony, the White House even hosted a conference on “National Beauty” a few years earlier that heaped praised on these new digging machines for their size and speed.12 The coal operators introduced strip mining in Appalachia with mixed success. The titanic earthmovers required fewer workers and reduced labor costs, but provoked concerns about unemployment. After John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he ordered the US Department of Labor to study technology-­induced unemployment from processes like strip mining, a situation he called, quite stunningly, the “major domestic challenge, really, of the Sixties.” Of course, coal operators justified highly managed and mechanized strip mine operations through ideologies of “efficiency.” The industry boasted about the savings in “manpower.” According to calculations at the time, the surface mine produced eight times more coal per worker than an advanced underground mine. Another estimate almost doubled the prospective savings in labor costs: a strip produced one million tons of coal with only twenty-­five technicians compared to almost four hundred workers in an underground mine.13 Behind these objective grounds of efficiency, though, lied pressing political considerations. The coalfields may have powered modern industrial capitalism, but they remained reliant on workers, both for human brawn and skill. The coal miner carried embodied knowledge that created what British scholar

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Carter Goodrich once called “miners’ freedoms”: the control over their labor process and decision-­making. On top of that, historians and social commentators have suggested that the structural position of mine communities within the economy, both in subterrestrial “workscapes” and isolated towns, ignited their sense of common cause and purpose. The coal companies tried to combat worker power time and again and wrestle control over productivity out of their hands, but they often failed to do so.14 But the strip mine subverted the miner’s control by providing operators with the Holy Grail of coal business: industrial methods of mass production in an industry famous for its craft autonomy. The roofless strip mine left no physical constraints on the size and speed of the equipment. The high-­capacity machines and conveyors increased what mine engineers called the velocity of throughput: the pace at which workers disassembled the ecosystem, rooted coal from the ground, and processed it for market. The strip mine functioned as a type of factory and for the first time in centuries reorganized the industrial production of coal. The draglines machines even extended the working day with highly experienced technicians, several stories off the ground, shifting joysticks and pedals twenty-­four hours a day.15 Despite the upsides for coal operators, strip-­mining remained somewhat impractical given the geological conditions in Appalachia. The shovels and tractors removed outer layers of rock and soil to expose underlying coal. The procedure worked best on flat prairie, above coalbeds clumped near the surface of the earth. But the geological activity out East buried the coalfields under 160 million years of compacted swamps and fossilized rock. The miners needed to extract very thin ribbons of coal buried deep belowground in mountainous regions. As a result, many Appalachian coal operators found it cheaper to rely on traditional methods of underground mining (and later mountaintop removal), rather than buy or rent new expensive strip-­mining equipment that could never reach full capacity. There were exceptions, of course, including the famed Big Muskie dragline in Ohio, which came into operation in 1969 and set a new precedent for the industry’s sheer magnitude. But coal operators only pushed strip mining to new limits once it migrated into the western coalfields, where large coal seams lay just thirty feet below rolling prairies. The mine engineers in the Powder River Basin could plan and direct a mechanized labor process.16 From the first day, mine engineers mapped the cartography of the strip mine on green-­screen computers to simulate spatial design of the pits and walls. They assigned workers to tasks in the sequence that reduced the day-­to-­day interaction among workers, isolating them in articulated trucks, and reducing their ability to communicate. The

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mines inserted workers into the work process as individuals—­tenders of the big machines—­rather than a group.17 The work process, once exposed at the surface, provided managers a spatial framework of labor surveillance. Just as historian Brian Leech has shown at the copper mine in Butte, Montana, strip mines in Wyoming enabled managers to observe workers from great distances using closed-­circuit television cameras and crude computer software systems. They listened to employee conversations on the CB radio. These networks even monitored truck activity and could even report the “exact angle at which a dozer was working” and recorded the precise moves of the equipment against the time clock. The increased visibility of miner’s work ratcheted up the pressure on workers to produce. “You were always in fear that you were going to do something wrong and get fired,” one miner told anthropologist Jessica Smith, “I didn’t understand that until I worked there.”18

Proud Westerners The establishment of these western mines as nonunion continued into corporate strategies of recruitment. In the early 1970s, the executives of the Buckskin Coal Mine outside of Gillette, run by the Shell Oil Company, bragged to shareholders that their “highly selective hiring process” ensured they could “respond quickly to customer needs.” The general manager of the Black Thunder Coal Mine in Wyoming more fully explained the company’s ethos: “We built into our employee programs opportunities for employee to grow and develop into the kind of person who stands on his/­her own two feet and is proud of the ability to operate and repair some the largest machinery in the world.” He hired people who “place a premium on dealing person to person, eyeball to eyeball and honoring a handshake which closes a deal.” The value for mutual respect undercut the need, he said, for union “middlemen” and legal contracts.19 The coal companies and contractors preferred to hire workers with no mining experience. Joe Hamner, president of Carter Mining Company (Exxon), explained that they preferred “inexperienced people, by and large, and then we have an extensive training program.” The coal companies ran their own training programs because, as one manager put it, the point of the training programs was “to stay out of a union situation.” “I got it free on the job,” Carol Ullrich remembered of her experience, “I couldn’t have afforded to go to school and get this training.” Of course, the local employment offices worried that hiring out such inexperienced people created unsafe environments. Elsie Freeman, the director for the Wyoming state employment office, said

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that “too many inexperienced people on these jobs results in an increasingly unsafe working condition.” Her office sent information to nearby states, discouraging them from sending transient workers. She found too many instances of inexperienced workers creating safety problems at the mines and causing labor turnover.20 The hiring managers recruited in historically nonunion areas such as the ranching regions of Wyoming and Montana and the farm belts of North and South Dakota. Many believed that a lack of family history in mining or unionization would dissuade potential recruits from organizing on the job. As one hiring manager explained, he wanted “young people with good farm values who had no union background, no family union experience.” The coal companies preferred workers who displayed some measure of what the anthropologist Matthew Desmond calls “country competence”: a specific body of knowledge that comes from growing up in rural settings.21 The sons and daughters of local ranchers and farmers were obvious candidates for hire. Pat Hayworth, a thirty-­two-­year-­old ranch hand, left the cattle business because of poor wages. He opposed strip mining at the outset: “You know, they’re taking that earth and disrupting it, moving it.” But he lived, like many miners, with the cognitive dissonance. He felt pulled by competing loyalties: mine work damaged the farmlands on which his families and ancestors had come to depend, but the prospect of a steady wage seemed too good to be true. Hayworth took a job for nine dollars an hour cleaning the coal from the conveyor belts between the Big Sky Strip Mine and the Colstrip power plant in Montana.22 The coal companies were often explicit in their lack of tolerance for the United Mine Workers. In many cases, they purged suspected activists and used probationary hiring periods to separate the miners from earlier union traditions. Chris Padilla, a union supporter in nearby Utah, felt so worried about the company’s threats to fire pro-­union miners that he asked the local union “not to contact him at his home again because he was afraid that someone would see [an organizer] and report it to the company.” “The union-­free approach is a very practical thing,” bragged the employee relations managers of the Carter Mining Company in Gillette. “For one thing,” he said, “we don’t have strikes or other work disruptions.”23 The coal companies constructed a new image for themselves in the America West. The eastern coal states, like West Virginia and Kentucky, evoked such bleak images of rotted-­out company towns, even if they were more nominal than real, that pro-­development figures worried about coal’s association with Appalachia. The western coal managers wanted to resist the characterization of their operations as “backward” and any association with poverty

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and “white trash.” “We are not Appalachia,” said one midlevel coal manager. “When people think coal mining, they think Appalachia, but we couldn’t be more different from them.” The coal managers created an “Anti-­Appalachia” image, as anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston put it, by contrasting the “freedom” and “ingenuity” of the western plains with the eastern mines. The vice president of operations for Westmoreland Resources said the western mines rid themselves of the “longtime adversary attitude in the East” through the cleverness of “western thinking.” 24 By depicting their nonunion operations as natural outgrowths of an exceptional western culture, operators expressed confidence in the innate “western”-­ ness, and rugged individualism, of their workforce. One executive described his workers as “Proud Westerners” who “fiercely defended their right to deal straight on with a person when a problem develops—­not through some third party who takes their money and really can’t deliver.” A hiring manager in Gillette explained: “The individuals out here seem to be open, free, primarily rancher-­t ypes from small-­town backgrounds. They’ve battled the elements all of their lives and survived. They’re proud of that. They don’t take too kindly to being organized.”25 The coal companies stressed their compatibility with agriculture, even as they conflicted with rural landowners, and promoted a common adherence to an agricultural work ethic. The coal companies likened miners to cowboys to eclipse the class dynamics involved in their work. The historians Shane Hamilton and Jefferson Cowie have shown how much the “cowboy” embodied the working-­class pastiche of the 1970s that signified, predominately for white men but also women, the “physic meltdown of blue-­collar identity.” The cowboy toyed with the plasticity of working-­class consciousness and tapped into the country’s culture of redneck populism, which in movies and television shows, like the Dukes of Hazzard, and politicians like George Wallace, took aim at liberal elites rather than economic institutions. The white rural culture that emerged blended “county” and “western” into a conservative politics that expressed a hardened exterior in the face of economic and social hardship.26 The use of a “cowboy” trope complimented the nation’s new media obsession with the working-­class “hard hat.” In cover stories and bottom of the hour news blocs, the “hard hat” became an archetypes of America’s newfound “forgotten men.” According to historian Jefferson Cowie, these workers faced a “death by a thousand cuts” (global competition, capital flight, anti-­union drives, deindustrialization) and appeared to lash out at whatever threatened their survival. “In the 1970s,” wrote labor leader Gus Tyler, “fury comes easily to the white worker.” The politicians courted these “hard hat” voters inside and outside formal labor organizations.27

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The western coal operators reconciled the hard hat with conservative cowboy culture. The companies explicitly marketed their large mining trucks to “take the punishment” of “hard hat cowboys.” The cowboy and the hard hat provided uniquely American archetypes for the companies. The hiring managers sought workers who subscribed to a version of masculinity that forewent comfort and leisure.28 To be sure, the coal companies never fleeced or dummied their workers into blind faith or “false consciousness.” Many miners grasped the economic strictures of their work. Nevertheless, many subscribed to individualistic work life rooted in the fierce independence of the mythic “frontier” because it valued their rural identities. These codes of masculinity provided a psychic wage for white men who lost their status in a changing political system in the 1970s. Soon, coal miners cast themselves in the mold of the outlaw. They wore T-­shirts that brandished their outsider status: where the hell is gillette, wyoming? read one. The economic uncertainties of rural life shaped their beliefs about austere character and manhood. As one nearby rancher summed up, “Times are tough, but so are we.”29

Extractivism The symbol of the hard hat cowboy in extractive industries further invested the workers in the coal company’s pursuit to master the land—­that is, extractivism as a political identity. The brute-­force extraction of mine work reinforced a masculine emphasis on physical strength against the natural elements, and ability to transform nature into commodities. These western mines, built in the heart of the rural and agricultural breadbasket, stressed the common adherence to the myth of agrarian living. Some operators encouraged workers to recognize the significance of their role as “energy producers,” who provided electricity to a nation of consumers.30 After all, the mines opened amid feverish political rhetoric about the need for domestic energy independence. The miners who went to work in the coal industry found themselves pulled into a patriotic political enterprise. Without a doubt, the heavy recruitment among agricultural communities made it easier for some workers to promote traditional producerist ideologies. The producerist ethic emphasized the heritage of the agrarian myth: the belief since the colonial era that white men, nose to the plow, were the backbone of the American republic. These rural workers often viewed urbanites as effeminate because they lacked hardihood and relied on rural places for the production of modern life. Under this reasoning, the rural coal miner produced the economic and primary needs of urbanites and therefore filled the role of patriarch. The miners, like the nation’s farmers, who bragged about their capacity to “feed the world,” prided themselves on their roles as pro-

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viders to “power the nation.” As Jessica Smith has noted, coal miners linked their labors to the people who consumed their coal, even if those relationships stretched hundreds of miles away. “The bed of one 320-­ton haul truck,” one miner bragged, “carries enough coal to supply one American home for 40 years.” “It powers this nation” another said, “and we take a lot of pride in that.”31 The coal companies structured labor in the mines to reflect the producerism of the region. The new miners compared the industrial strip mine operation to farming in method and procedure: “Preparing the land for the harvest, harvesting the product, and the getting the land ready for its next step.” As anthropologist Caroline Tauxe once commented, the strip mine ran in cycles that mimicked the seasonal growth cycle. The mines ran full steam during the prime summer months of June to September and operations slowed down through the harsh winters. The workers operated heavy-­duty machines to complete taskwork in isolation, and like family members and cowhands on ranches, spent their days engaged in separate tasks in different parts of the farmstead. “Sometimes it seems like you’ll never get through it,” one farmer said, “just looks like a big ocean out there.” The farmers said their job sometimes boiled down to “driving in circles all day,” a characterization that surely resonated with haul truck drivers in the mines.32 The energy companies touted these connections to the rural heartland in part to downplay the sheer newness of their endeavor on the Northern Great Plains. After all, this wasn’t historically coal country. The coal operators even stressed their commitment to “traditional family values” of the agrarian society. One intent was to blur the lines of “us” and “them” and reduce criticism from nearby ranch and farm communities over land use. A company public relations official even claimed it was “only a matter of time until the local farmers lose their suspicion of the mining companies” because “they can see family members getting jobs there and not having to leave.” The energy companies ran advertisements that featured husbands and wives and children in farm fields. The Basin Electric Power Cooperative, for instance, told their workers that they believed “a healthy, family-­orientated agricultural economy is essential in the production of the nation’s food supply.”33 The coal companies recognized the benefit of hiring workers from rural and farming backgrounds. The habit of long hours and pitching in on the ranch and farm could carry over into flexible work rules on the nonunion jobsite. With more flexible work rules, companies gained further control over production. They compared this to lending a helping hand to a family member. “I grew up in a family where whatever needed done, whoever was available did it,” one manager said. The employment manager in Gillette said nonunion

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operations created flexible work rules, which allowed the companies to place their workers anywhere in the mine and provided better management control over production. Walter Siebert, at the Mountain States Employers Council, felt the “union-­free” approach encouraged “flexibility of operation, elimination of old labor-­management adversary relations that you have with unions, the creation of the kind of atmosphere in which employees and employer can work together.”34 Some miners agreed that growing up and driving equipment and horse trailers made it easier to handle mine equipment. “It was easier for people to come out of an agriculture culture,” one miner said. “You just grow up doing everything.” “You have to get the job done,” another miner agreed. “I think people from an agricultural background understand that.” One miner, who grew up on a ranch near Gillette, told the anthropologist Jessica Smith that ranch work taught her that “whoever was there pulled the calf.” “With the equipment,” she continued, “whoever was at hand was expected to do it.” The ranch and farm kids understood “running the heavy equipment and working until a job is done,” one miner said, even if the “product doesn’t magically appear.” “I grew up on a farm,” another women said, “so I was very used to physical labor. Getting dirty didn’t matter to me. You did what needed to be done. You didn’t wuss out, wimp out, or worry about your fingernails.”35 The familial structure promoted an “all in this together” attitude that was not oppositional to employers. As one miner remembered about the first years of the coal boom, “All of us—­managers, operators, everybody—­were figuring out how to do this together.” The companies further promoted the idea of being a “team player” in the mines. But they especially liked the term family because it gave workers a reason to identify with the corporate culture. The practice of promoting a “family” wasn’t new in American capitalism. The corporate paternalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had constructed social relations between employer and employee around the notion of patriarchal control and mutual obligations (like the “Ford family”). Most companies claimed these relationships eased the transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism by recreating rural social and community bonds in company towns and mill villages. During the late twentieth century, some firms in the service sector, like Walmart, still deployed rural “family values” to justify men’s “natural” management authority over the predominantly female workforce.36 During the 1970s, the producerist ethic of agrarian capitalism carried renewed appeal with the cultural prominence of the “family farm.” Across the Northern Great Plains, coal operators extended the dissonance

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between myth and reality in the mines. Coal miners were encouraged to see themselves as part of the agrarian world despite the industrialized nature of their work. As one mine manager put it, “We want everyone to be able to go home to their families at the end of the day. And remember that we’re a family out here, too.”37 In the western mines, workers, increasingly lumped together as “technicians,” were encouraged to view themselves as members of a crew family, committed to the good of the company, rather than their own economic justice.

•   •   • The history of energy transitions, often told as one resource portfolio swapped for another, remains incomplete without greater recognitions of energy workplaces, and how easily changes in technology and corporate strategies can influence transitions within energy politics and culture. When in the 1960s coal operators set their sights on the unskimmed coalfields of the American West, they sought to outrun the union situation and social regulations of the East. They purposefully engineered the physical designs and layouts of the strip mines in the Powder River Basin to bolster their corporate control of the workforce. They established set tasks and methods of surveillance that more closely resembled the factory floors rather than underground mines. They encouraged workers to take pride in their control of big technologies and machines. Over time, these strip mines of the Powder River Basin broke apart coal miners’ historical sense of togetherness and occupational community. From the beginning, mine managers even recruited workers from nearby agrarian regions to bolster a politics of individualism. The practice of hiring “hard hat cowboys” eluded the class politics of old mining communities in nearby western towns, like Butte and Red Lodge. The new strip miners found the work familiar, similar to the rhythms of farm life, which companies preyed on to discourage union jurisdictions. The managers even encouraged workers to embrace the company culture and to believe that, unlike in Appalachia, the mine boss and the miner were compatriots in the West—­“all in this together.” The emergence of an extractivist politics proved crucial in the years ahead when the politics of the environment and global climate change threatened the coal industry, and encouraged workers to identify with their managers, and industry, over an assortment of green boogeymen. At a time when the climate movement faces the prospect of trying to ensure a “just transition” in coal country, it is necessary to consider how the system was constructed in the first place. The coal companies were not amateurs in politics. They ma-

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neuvered throughout the 1970s to construct a particular kind of coal mine workforce that would withstand easy overtures. They’ve sought to retain the cultural and political loyalties of that workforce ever since. If the first step toward building solidarity in an age of global climate change is communication, then history can inform our conversation, giving us the means to understand the values and relationships coal miners hold so dear, and why.

Part II OIL TRANSITION IN CRISIS The 1970s

In the fall of 1973, Western Europe and North America experienced a shock to their economies that defied comparison with almost any previous peacetime experience. By the early 1970s, oil provided half the energy consumed by these industrial societies. But in the span of just five months the price of this now essential, seemingly irreplaceable product quadrupled, sending waves of panic across both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States politicians spoke of an “Energy Pearl Harbor”; in Europe the media warned of an “economic collapse of catastrophic proportions.”1 These nations had experienced energy shortages and scares during the two world wars, but wartime rationing was hardly unexpected. Now, after twenty-­five years of near-­ continuous growth, during a period of retreating Cold War tension, and in an era in which inexpensive energy had come to seem natural, something novel happened. Political decisions made in regions far from the capitals of the United States or European nations threatened the livelihood of the world’s most prosperous societies. The oil shock had arrived. Enhancing the sense of doom, the spike in crude prices overlapped with other international challenges occurring at the same time, from the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system to the end of twenty years of relative peaceful labor relations. The boom years were over, and a new era was dawning in which the Western world, so it seemed, was becoming ungovernable; capitalism unmanageable.2 89

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Prior to the 1970s, the United States had hardly ever witnessed true energy scarcity; the only popular memory of shortage was connected to wartime rationing. Europe, by contrast, had experienced several energy scares since 1945, above all in 1956 and 1967, when Arab states prevented oil from moving through the Suez Canal. But in both these earlier instances European fears quickly subsided as the United States ramped up its spare oil capacity to supply its allies, and as the oil majors like Exxon rerouted tankers around the globe to cover supply gaps. What made 1973 different was the sheer extent to which Europeans, and to a lesser extent Americans, had come to depend on hydrocarbons from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to fuel their cities, factories, and cars. In 1957 Western Europe consumed 124 million tons worth of oil (in thermal coal equivalent units) a year; by 1972 that figure had more than quadrupled to 628 million tons, 80 percent of which came from the Middle East and North Africa. In the mid-­1950s, the United States imported less than 20,000 barrels of oil a month; by 1973 imports exploded to over 110,000 barrels. By then, the United States no longer had spare oil capacity that it could deploy in the event of a crisis.3 To a certain extent, then, the oil shock of 1973 was no surprise. By that time, many in positions of authority already feared that the postwar world of abundant oil was changing. Since its inception in 1960, OPEC had been actively trying to change the balance of power over crude production with the international majors. When the Tehran and Tripoli Agreements of 1971 granted OPEC more leverage over the price of crude, American and European experts began warning that oil shortages might erupt in the near future. As Victor McFarland points out in chapter 5, by 1971 the United States was already experiencing electricity brownouts and higher oil prices, leading the New York Times to speak of an energy or fuel crisis. Thus when price negotiations between OPEC and the majors collapsed in late 1973, at the same time as Egyptian and Syrian forces invaded Israeli with an aim toward retaking territories lost in 1967, the resulting oil embargo and price hikes were extreme but not unanticipated.4 Nevertheless, 1973 still merits the term oil shock. Change, even if anticipated, was wrenching. Over the preceding twenty-­five years North America and Western Europe had built their economies around low-­priced, abundant energy. By the 1970s, these continents were consuming extravagant amounts of energy compared both to the rest of the world and to their own recent histories. When judged against the animal power regimes from whence Europe and the United States had emerged several generations prior, the difference was stark: a color TV used more energy than a team of horses could provide in a week; the largest cars boasted more horsepower than entire factories from

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the middle of the nineteenth century. By the 1960s, both continents were doubling power plant capacity every ten years just to keep pace with the ravenous appetites of their consumers and industries, appetites that electric utilities at times spurred intentionally in order to bolster their bottom lines. So, too, were economies dramatically accelerating the rate at which they pumped carbon into the atmosphere. Between 1920 and 1950 global carbon emissions grew by 75 percent. During the next thirty years—­Les Trente Glorieuses—­t hey rose by no less than 225 percent, with North America and Europe at the fore.5 Despite the exploding demand for energy, moreover, which in theory should have dragged up prices, energy prices had actually fallen between 1950 and 1973. This was an historical anomaly without precedent, which in retrospect has been called the “1950s Syndrome” or the “Great Acceleration.” All the major energy sources during this period were present in abundance. But among primary energies, the price of oil fell the most precipitously in real terms, a testament to the incredible infrastructure built after 1950 to bring the vast new fields of the Middle East online. Compared to consumer goods, the real price of petroleum in Europe fell by over two-­t hirds from the 1920s to the 1960s. During these same years, wages rose relative to energy prices as Europeans and Americans constructed a new postwar social contract between labor, capital, and the state. By 1973, in some European countries wages had risen three times faster than the price of gasoline. As a result, industries complemented their increasingly expensive workforce with machinery fueled by cheap energy, making entire branches of the economy far more energy-­ intensive than ever before. By the 1970s, in other words, the low cost of energy had become naturalized; some Europeans spoke of the “right to gas” where there had once been the “right to bread.” Quadrupling the price of oil seemed to jeopardize nothing less than the economic foundation on which North American and European societies were built.6 Making the shock more worrisome, it dovetailed with fears coming from other quarters that the world was running out of fossil fuels. With the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1960s, a host of intellectuals began warning the industrial world was headed toward an environmental crisis as humanity damaged its relationship with Earth beyond repair. Concerns about population growth, pollution, and technology initially took center stage in this critique. But by the early 1970s, so too did energy. In 1970 famous predictions about the imminent peak of oil seemed to come true, as the United States’ capacity to produce crude began declining for the first time. In 1972 the Club of Rome, an organization of global elites for global elites, published a groundbreaking study that predicted the world was using up its resources so fast that collapse was on the horizon. Humanity, the study concluded, would

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reach its limits to growth “sometime within the next one hundred years,” after which a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” would commence.7 When the oil shock erupted the following year it seemed to vindicate these conclusions. Indeed, many contemporaries interpreted the oil shock in this very manner, as a crisis spawned by global limits not as the outcome of a new balance of power between OPEC, the international majors, and the consumer countries. The year 1973 thus created an energy paradox: how could growth be maintained in a period of expensive and increasingly, so it seemed at the time, scarce fossil fuels. As Duccio Basosi illustrates in chapter 6, contemporaries greeted this challenge by calling for an “energy transition.” The 1970s were the decade when this concept gained currency. Experts and politicians began to denaturalize the relationship between human beings and energy, appreciating that the amount and the type of energy consumed could be actively guided and changed by states or markets. But a transition toward what? This remained an open and contested question. Environmentalists called for an end to fossil fuels and the expansion of renewable energies. The primary concern among policymakers, however, was not transitioning away from oil or coal, but rather finding new ways of reviving the energy-­intensive growth machine of the 1960s by tapping new sources of energy, whatever and wherever they might be. Hence their interest in nuclear power, as well as the exploration of new oil reserves in hard-­to-­reach places like the North Sea or the Arctic.8 As McFarland shows in chapter 5, the United States responded with interconnected but often conflicting strategies. The same went for states in Europe. Many hoped to revive the lost world of cheap energy by tapping new sources of fossil fuels to achieve “energy security” or “energy independence,” by regulating oil companies more closely, or by applying pressure through international channels to convince OPEC to reduce prices. Others, by contrast, used the crisis to advance a new type of energy transition, one of conservation. As Thomas Turnbull illustrates in chapter 8, the oil shock changed the very epistemology of energy, giving credence to views crafted before 1973 and questioning a long-­ held shibboleth of economic theory: that economies needed energy in order to grow. For economies, even the United States’, did not slow as much as theory predicted they would from an energy price shock as monumental as 1973. The lesson drawn was that to more optimally allocate energy resources over space and time, decision-­making must be decentralized, that nation-­states should no longer attempt to achieve centralized efficiency through pro-­rationing or price controls, as had been done in the past. A new social science of energy conservation emerged after 1973, where the relationship between energy consumption and growth was seen to be more malleable, and where conservation

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itself emerged as a new type of potential transition. But the path toward such a transition, according to its advocates, must be charted by a liberal market economy that placed the burden of change on the individual consumer.9 Although calls for a decentralized market-­approach to energy gained momentum in the 1970s, North America and Europe at first responded to the oil shock with state guidance and even planning. As Henning Türk points out in chapter 7, the 1970s became a decade of “energy policy,” in which nation-­states more actively sought to shape energy markets, whether it be through the United States’ efforts to centralize energy policy in the federal government, West Germany’s four energy programs (1973–1981), or France’s massive nuclear project. And for the first time in history, substantial energy planning extended beyond national or continental boundaries to the international level, as Türk illustrates, where the newly created International Energy Agency (IEA) tried to orchestrate its own vision of an energy transition for the United States and Western Europe after 1973. As an outstanding illustration of how energy transitions are not unidirectional processes that move automatically from the old to the new, the IEA advocated a return to coal as a way of surmounting the geopolitical challenges generated by OPEC. This advocacy led to a coal renaissance, one that was short-­lived in Europe but which had greater staying power in the United States, where mining employment began to rise for the first time since 1923.10 This decade of energy planning, however, led to a backlash as it became increasingly apparent that the initial strategies pursued after 1973 were ineffective. President Richard Nixon’s quest for energy independence never reduced the United States’ reliance on overseas oil, while efforts to centralize American energy policy fell victim to political infighting and calls for less government and more markets. Europe experienced similar problems. West Germany’s state-­led nuclear project, partly a response to the events of 1973, stalled in the face of a massive civil protest, while Great Britain and France’s bilateral deals with Middle Eastern oil states did little to stabilize the flow of petroleum to their nations. A second oil shock in 1979, unleashed by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, only reinforced the sense that national and international programs to manage the hydrocarbon supply chain were failing. A new group of economists and pundits now began arguing that the energy crises revealed just how ineffective the state was in governing the economy, and how the market was the answer. More generally, the failure of politicians to effectively address the shock helped erode faith in active political governance across the Atlantic. The criticism of the state and the market fundamentalism that came to define the 1990s and 2000s, in other words, had important roots in the reactions and counterreactions to the oil shocks of the 1970s.11

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The chapters in this section point to larger insights about the nature of energy shifts, and the prospect for a green transition today. In chapter 6 Duccio Basosi illustrates just how capacious and nebulous the concept of energy transition was for intellectuals, activists, and policymakers in the 1970s. Transition meant different things to different groups, and the multiplicity of meanings made active change difficult because people could hardly agree on what, exactly, the problem was, much less on how to solve it. Was the root challenge the scarcity of hydrocarbons, or was it a more deep-­seated rupture between humanity’s relationship with the biosphere? The same capaciousness characterizes the transition debate today. In some ways, perhaps, there is now more agreement on the nature of the problem: humanity is burning too much fossil energy, which is warming the planet. But how to solve this dilemma is as hotly contested as ever, as the multiple iterations of the idea of a Green New Deal, along with its political demonization, demonstrates. Some proposals want to ramp up nuclear power, natural gas, and large-­scale solar to support growth, while others call for a radical reduction in our energy footprint by ending gas and nuclear and moving to small-­scale decentralized renewables. As Victor McFarland points out in chapter 5, in the 1970s such strategic questions were never just about energy; rather, they spilled into many other facets of political life, and connected to perennial ideological questions about how to organize government, how to achieve justice, or how to manage one’s relationship with other countries. McFarland shows how energy became part of a battle between competing visions of American society. This contest rages on today and stems from fissures that first opened fifty years ago in the 1970s: should nations strive for a growth oriented, energy-­consuming society with a secure supply, or is fundamental change in both energy consumption and production required? As these contributions all underscore, energy discussions touch deeper, more intractable issues about governance, markets, geopolitics, or what the “good life” should be. Nevertheless, moments do arise when altering an energy system seems to be more possible: moments of opportunity. The oil shock created the impetus for a transformation not only in energy use, but in how experts conceptualized the very relationship between prosperity and energy, as Thomas Turnbull recounts in chapter 8. But as Henning Türk reminds us in chapter 7, the direction of change is never foreordained, and the energy perceived to be modern is by no means bound to succeed. Coal advanced after 1973, pushed not only by markets but by a collection of international actors. Coordinated, decisive action, and initiative on the national and the international level can matter immensely for transitions. The 1970s are a profound illustration of just such a moment when radical transformation was suddenly imaginable in a way that it had not been a decade earlier, even if collective action never fully realized that vision.

five

AMERICAN POLITICS AND ENERGY TRANSITIONS IN THE 1970S

Victor McFarland

During the 1970s, Americans agreed that the United States was facing an energy crisis. They became more conscious of the environmental costs of energy production, including air pollution, oil spills, and the risk of nuclear accidents. The Arab embargo and production cuts in 1973–1974, followed by the Iranian Revolution in 1978–1979, disrupted oil supplies. Prices soared, contributing to high inflation and unemployment. There was no consensus, however, on the precise nature of the crisis or the required solutions. Energy became one of the most contentious subjects in US politics, intersecting with fundamental debates about environmental protection, economic justice, the proper role of government, and the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. The struggle over energy policy became a battle over competing visions for American society. This chapter examines two broad approaches to US energy policy that were influential during the 1970s, each of which focused on a different aspect of the energy crisis and prescribed a different kind of energy transition in response. The first, the energy independence strategy, aimed to reduce US dependence on foreign oil. Its advocates, including all three presidents of the 1970s—­R ichard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter—­worked to centralize control over energy policy in the hands of the federal government, especially the White House. They advocated the massive expansion of domestic ener95

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gy production, including from sources that environmentalists opposed, like coal, synthetic liquid fuels, and nuclear power. Energy independence advocates hoped that even if those domestic energy sources could not completely displace imported oil, greater self-­reliance would still give the United States more leverage in dealing with oil producers and rival consumers. By contrast, the environmental movement saw the main problem as overconsumption and the use of dangerous, polluting energy sources. Environmentalists called for an energy transition involving conservation and the replacement of fossil fuels and nuclear power with smaller-­scale, renewable energy production. Some influential activists believed that such policies would not only protect the environment—­they would also promote a more democratic society, with less power for distant corporate and government authorities and more for local communities. US energy politics during the 1970s frequently bogged down in political gridlock. Partly as a result, the era left an ambiguous legacy for later attempts to address energy challenges, especially climate change. The energy crisis prompted many important conservation measures, encouraged government support for the development of renewable resources like wind and solar power, and inspired many Americans to be more thoughtful about their energy use. However, it also contributed to deregulation and the rise of market-­ oriented conservative politics, and it reinforced the treatment of energy policy as a national security problem that could be solved by expanding domestic production of fossil fuels. Those legacies of the 1970s are now some of the most serious obstacles preventing more effective action to reduce carbon emissions.

The Beginning of the Energy Crisis In American memory, the energy crisis has become so closely associated with oil supply disruptions in the Middle East, especially the 1973–1974 embargo, that other reasons for the crisis have been overshadowed. When the term energy crisis was popularized in the early 1970s, it referred to an interrelated set of problems that extended beyond oil to include other forms of energy, such as coal, electricity, and natural gas. In fact, it was in those sectors that the first signs of trouble appeared. As early as the summer of 1969, the US Federal Power Commission (FPC) noted an “energy supply crisis” as the utility company Consolidated Edison struggled to meet electricity demand in the New York metro area. That September, FPC chairman John N. Nassikas testified that the problems extended to the natural gas market, where earlier projections had “proven to be overly optimistic.” As a result, he concluded, “Only a few years remain before demand will outrun supply.” By April 1970,

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Nassikas was warning of a developing nationwide “energy crisis.”1 A quarter century of economic growth after World War II had dramatically increased US demand for energy, especially since fuel prices had stayed relatively cheap. Natural gas sold across state lines had long been subject to federal price controls. As production costs rose in the late 1960s and early 1970s, companies chose to sell their gas in the less regulated intrastate market, providing abundant supplies within producer states like Texas and leaving gas-­importing areas like the Northeast exposed to shortages. Electric utilities also faced rising costs, especially as they adapted to stricter air pollution regulations. Utilities supplemented or replaced their dirty coal-­fired plants with cleaner plants that burned oil and gas, increasing demand for those fuels.2 Many policymakers and industry leaders portrayed the crisis as a technical challenge: how to introduce new energy supplies while keeping prices and environmental costs within acceptable levels. Nassikas told members of Congress that US electricity consumption was forecast to quadruple in the next twenty years. At the same time, Americans also expected utilities to cut air pollution. To meet those goals, Nassikas explained, “obviously a transition must be accomplished,” involving “a vast amount” of new, cleaner electric generation capacity. The short-­run solution was a massive increase in the use of gas, which might include new supplies from Alaska and Canada, liquefied natural gas imports from overseas, and synthetic gas from coal. In the long run, electric utilities were expected to switch to nuclear power. Nassikas proposed a stronger federal role to oversee the energy transition and achieve a “balance” between energy production and environmental protection.3 Those recommendations were taken up by the White House in June 1971, when President Richard Nixon outlined an ambitious program ranging from increases in conventional oil and gas production to newer energy sources like nuclear fission and fusion, solar energy, magnetohydrodynamic power, liquid fuels synthesized from coal and shale, and natural gas released with the aid of underground nuclear explosives. Some of those technologies were nothing more than theoretical possibilities in 1971, and many of them involved serious environmental costs, but Nixon optimistically included all of them as sources of “clean energy” available to meet the United States’ needs.4 By that point, however, it was already clear that supply-­side interventions alone would be unable to solve the energy crisis. The deployment of nuclear fission reactors was well behind schedule, and even in the most optimistic projections, a transition to fusion and other experimental energy sources was still far in the future. As a result, Nixon suggested that new energy supplies should be combined with policies to limit demand. He recommended higher

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prices, arguing that “the costs incurred in protecting the environment and the health and safety of workers,” which were “part of the real cost of producing energy,” should be paid by consumers. This idea had sweeping implications, foreshadowing later calls for carbon taxes and other ways of pricing environmental “externalities,” costs that were not usually included in energy prices.5 Nixon, however, never seriously tried to implement his proposal. Instead, he did the opposite, including oil in the package of wage and price controls that he introduced in August 1971 as an inflation-­fighting measure.6 For the rest of the 1970s, price controls subsidized US energy consumption and hindered efforts to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Nixon wanted conservation to buy time for the transition to new sources of energy. Others advocated conservation as an end in itself. When the New York Times ran a three-­part series on the energy crisis shortly after Nixon’s speech, it asked: “Is unbridled growth indispensable to the good life?”7 Such suggestions drew on a broader critique of overconsumption advanced by thinkers like Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and the members of the Club of Rome. While books like Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth predicted shortages of other resources, like food and minerals, the looming energy crisis seemed to validate their basic point that the rapid economic growth of the mid-­t wentieth century was running up against basic ecological limits.8

The Oil Crisis Although oil was just one of many energy sources that seemed to be running short, it increasingly dominated the national debate. Earlier calls for an energy transition had focused on the need to switch from dirty fuels to cleaner ones, or from limited resources to more abundant ones. After 1973, US policymakers prioritized a different kind of transition: to any kind of energy that would reduce the country’s reliance on imported oil. The United States had been the world’s leading oil producer for more than a century. Even after it became a net importer in the late 1940s, strong domestic production and government-­imposed quotas on imports kept the country mostly self-­sufficient. Prices were stabilized by the Texas Railroad Commission keeping a cushion of spare capacity in reserve and adjusting domestic production as needed. A similar role was played overseas by the Seven Sisters, the Anglo-­American companies that dominated the world oil industry and informally limited competition among themselves.9 Starting in 1970, however, the old petroleum order broke down. American spare production capacity disappeared, the United States became more dependent on imports, and the

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members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) took more control over the pricing and production decisions that had previously been managed by the Seven Sisters. Prices rose, and so did worries about future disruptions to the market. In October 1973, the leading Arab oil producers cut their production and placed an embargo on the United States in response to American support for Israel. The embargo was mostly ineffective at shutting off oil to the United States, since the oil companies could redirect supplies from elsewhere. Even so, it had a powerful psychological impact. Combined with the production cuts, uncertainty in the oil market sent prices soaring from roughly three dollars per barrel to nearly twelve dollars per barrel by December. Nixon’s price controls made the situation more complicated. They protected consumers from the full impact of the price increase. Combined with the federal government’s system of allocation rules, however, the price controls also exacerbated local shortages of gasoline and other oil products, contributing to the gasoline lines that became the most infamous symbol of the oil crisis.

Project Independence In November 1973, President Richard Nixon responded to the embargo by announcing Project Independence, an effort to make the United States self-­ sufficient in energy by 1980. The plan included a variety of emergency measures to reduce oil consumption. Nixon pointed out that Americans consumed far more energy than most other people in the world, and argued that, at least in the short run, they simply had to cut back: “That means less heat, less electricity, less gasoline.” In the long run, though, he proposed a full-­scale energy transition. Nixon called for a massive research and development effort, on the scale of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program, to develop new energy technologies and expand the use of American coal, natural gas, offshore oil, shale, nuclear power, and other resources that could eliminate the need for oil imports.10 Nixon’s goal of energy self-­sufficiency before the end of the decade was clearly overoptimistic. Within months, administration officials would report that Project Independence was “collapsing.” By 1976, National Security Council staffer Robert Hormats warned that US energy policy was in a “sorry state” because the goals of Project Independence were “simply unreachable, at any reasonable cost.”11 It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss Project Independence as empty rhetoric. It changed the national debate on energy in ways that continue to shape American politics today. Nixon framed the energy crisis not as an

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economic or environmental issue, but as a security threat—­a test of America’s “ability to act decisively and independently at home and abroad,” one that demanded the sort of national strength and unity that the country displayed during World War II and the Cold War.12 Turning energy into a security issue boosted the president’s authority, which was greatest when it came to foreign policy and defense.13 It also provided a powerful argument for overriding any concerns—­especially environmental ones—­that might stand in the way of new oil wells, gas pipelines, coal mines, and nuclear reactors. In his Project Independence proposal, Nixon argued that environmental regulations should be relaxed on a limited and temporary basis. In private, he was blunter. Nixon ordered his cabinet: “In all areas, whenever it is a matter of energy or environment, energy comes first.”14 He told an audience of state and local officials that the United States needed to burn more coal regardless of pollution concerns, since “if you are going to freeze to death, it doesn’t matter much whether or not the air is clean.”15 Other policymakers followed Nixon’s lead. In February 1974, William Johnson, a Federal Energy Office official, argued against “overzealous adoption of new environmental measures that will intensify the energy crisis.” Johnson urged the relaxation of limits on strip mining, leaded gasoline, and air pollution. Even some of the administration’s own officials were dismayed at the sudden turn away from environmental protection. Robert Sansom of the Environmental Protection Agency complained that because of the energy crisis, he was “constantly being requested to relax this or that regulation.”16 The most notable setback for the environmental movement was the construction of a controversial pipeline to carry oil from the newly discovered oilfields in northern Alaska to Port Valdez in the south. Environmentalists and other opponents of the pipeline argued that the risk of oil spills would be too great. In the months leading up to October 1973, the bill authorizing construction of the pipeline stalled in Congress. After the Arab embargo began, however, the pipeline’s advocates argued that it was needed to boost domestic oil production, and Nixon demanded immediate passage of the bill. The congressional stalemate was quickly broken, and the bill passed by a large majority.17 The most contentious subject in American energy politics was oil pricing. The price controls that Nixon imposed in 1971 remained in place after the embargo, creating a fundamental conflict between the oil companies and the consumers who benefited from lower prices. The industry and its allies, including oil-­state members of Congress and laissez-­faire conservatives, fought to abolish the price controls. The idea of energy independence gave them a potent rhetorical tool. The industry argued that price controls subsidized consumption and discouraged domestic production, preventing the United

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States from reducing its reliance on foreign oil. Higher prices were not just in the self-­interest of the oil companies—­they were something that Americans had to accept in the service of national security. President Gerald Ford endorsed that approach, arguing that price controls had to be lifted to enable the development of new energy supplies. His energy proposal announced in January 1975 included new energy conservation measures, along with “200 major nuclear power plants, 250 major new coal mines, 150 major coal-­fired power plants, 30 major new refineries, 20 major new synthetic fuel plants,” and “many thousands of new oil wells” whose profitability would be assured by raising US energy prices to the world level.18 The proposal ran into congressional resistance, and Ford was forced to compromise on the question of price controls. Even so, the bill that eventually emerged from Congress—­t he Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975—­retained many of Ford’s proposed measures to spur a transition away from imported oil.19 They included new funds for coal production that would, in combination with other government policies, encourage a massive increase in the use of coal for power generation over the coming years.20 The power of energy independence as a political tool extended to foreign policy as well as domestic policy. US policymakers hoped that even before alternative energy sources became available, the mere prospect of a transition away from imported oil would make the United States more powerful. Other oil importers, especially the countries of Western Europe and East Asia, would have to accept American leadership in exchange for access to the advanced new energy sources being developed in the United States. Two National Security Council officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in December 1973 that the United States enjoyed considerable “leverage” over its European allies because “we are well ahead of the Europeans in most fields of energy-­related technology.” With Project Independence and domestic US fossil fuel reserves, they explained, “We have a real option and the makings of a long-­range plan for self-­sufficiency in energy, unlike almost all Europeans.” US allies would have to cooperate, or risk being left behind when the United States pursued “a ‘go-­it-­a lone’ policy.” Project Independence was also a cudgel against OPEC. If the OPEC nations believed their oil would be worth less in the future, they would have an incentive to seek a compromise with consumers and pump more in the short run. In a February 1975 speech, Kissinger declared: “The massive development of alternative energy sources by the industrial countries will confront OPEC with a choice” between “a significant price reduction now in return for stability” or “the risk of a dramatic break in prices when the program of alternative sources begins to pay off.”21

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Environmentalism and the Oil Crisis The post-­1973 fixation on energy independence overshadowed, but did not fully displace, the earlier focus on transitioning to cleaner and more environmentally acceptable ways of using energy. President Nixon’s call for conservation measures, like stricter automobile speed limits and lowering thermostats in the winter, opened political space for a broader conversation about cutting excessive energy use. An exchange in the House of Representatives in December 1973, for example, featured unusually sweeping criticism of Americans’ energy-­intensive lifestyles. William Cohen (R-­ME) argued that the embargo was only a symptom of a much deeper problem: the American refusal to accept that natural resources were finite. “While we have only 6 percent of the world’s population,” Cohen noted, “we nevertheless manage to consume over 35 percent of the world’s energy.” He demanded “stringent, mandatory conservation measures” that would “check our profligate use of energy.” Harold Johnson (D-­CA) denounced “unplanned, often chaotic growth” and “suburban sprawl” that made it harder to “conserve our rapidly disappearing natural resources.” And John Seiberling (D-­OH) criticized “our dangerous dependency on the automobile” and other glaring examples of American “energy extravagance.”22 Some Nixon and Ford administration officials agreed that the United States should reduce its reliance on vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel. In October 1974, US Department of Transportation official John Hirten urged a substantial increase in the gasoline tax, noting that it could fund mass transit and reduce pollution.23 And in February 1975, Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton argued that to solve its long-­term energy problems, the United States needed to move away from “lifestyles built around the auto mystique.”24 Such rhetoric was backed up by some limited moves to support alternatives to the automobile. In August 1973, shortly before the embargo, Nixon signed the Federal-­Aid Highway Act, which allowed for the limited diversion of some gasoline tax revenues to railways instead of roads. A year later, Ford signed the National Mass Transportation Assistance Act, providing new funds to states and local governments, which he hailed as part of “our fight against excessive use of petroleum.” The victories prompted hopeful talk of a “transit renaissance.”25 Money going to freeways still dwarfed the new aid to mass transit, though. Rather than a fundamental transition in American transportation patterns and a move away from the automobile, federal policy mostly emphasized incremental improvements in the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks, especially through the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that were imposed as part of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 and set to increase gradually over the following years.

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A few critics outside government still hoped for a more sweeping energy transition. One of the most influential was the physicist Amory B. Lovins, whose 1976 Foreign Affairs article “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” called on Americans to turn away from centralized, high-­technology “hard” energy sources, like coal and nuclear power. Instead, he advocated the use of “soft” energy that was small-­scale, affordable, distributed, and renewable, like rooftop solar water heaters, wind turbines, and biofuels, coupled with a stringent conservation program that would sharply cut total energy use. Most prophetically, Lovins warned about the “serious environmental risks” of fossil fuel use, especially the “climactic constraints” that might become all too apparent within a few short decades.26 The “soft” energy path was a sociopolitical vision as much as an environmental and technological one. It reflected the values of the American counterculture and a suspicion of centralized power that had become widespread on the Left since the Vietnam War.27 Lovins argued that the “soft” energy path was preferable to the “hard” path not only because it would preserve the environment but also because it would guarantee freedom from governmental and corporate power. He warned that the energy independence plans then being advocated by the Ford administration would expand federal authority, creating “a world of subsidies, $100-­billion bailouts, oligopolies, regulations, nationalization, eminent domain, corporate statism” that could lead to rule by “a faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite” and a “garrison state.” For Lovins, these concerns trumped environmental protection. He argued that even if nuclear power were safe for the environment and human health, he would still oppose it. The same was true of utility-­controlled solar power plants. Lovins denounced all large-­scale energy systems, whether they were renewable or not, because they let governments and corporations “bypass democratic decision in favor of elitist technocracy.”28 This perspective stood in sharp contrast to Project Independence, an approach inspired by wartime industrial mobilization and overseen by a strong executive authority.

The Carter Administration In April 1977, three months after taking office, President Jimmy Carter announced a comprehensive new energy policy framework. Some of his ideas echoed those of ecological critics like Lovins.29 Carter argued that “our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems—­wasteful use of resources,” and demanded a new commitment to conservation, including smaller, more efficient cars, the greater use of mass transit, and more effective insulation of buildings. He called for an increase in energy prices, arguing that “we are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and

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use more than we can really afford.” He warned that US oil and gas supplies were “simply running out.” Carter was the most explicit of any US president up to that point in calling for an energy “transition,” including the development of “the new, unconventional sources of energy,” like solar power, “that we will rely on in the next century.”30 Carter underscored his commitment in 1979 by installing a solar water heating system on the roof of the White House and promising to boost funding “to stimulate solar and other renewable forms of energy.”31 During the 1950s and 1960s, federal funding for solar energy research had averaged a miniscule $100,000 per year. As late as 1973, federal energy research and development spending included $32 million for conservation and a mere $4 million for solar power, compared to $85 million for coal and $407 million for nuclear fission. Under President Carter, the Department of Energy’s budget for solar power rose to nearly $600 million by 1980, with another $555 million for improving energy efficiency. Such funding levels, however, still fell short of the nearly $800 million in research funding that the department earmarked for fossil fuels, or the more than $1 billion for nuclear fission, not to mention the huge sums committed to oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power by private industry.32 Carter’s rhetoric also threatened to undercut the US commitment to a renewable energy transition. Following the precedent set by Presidents Nixon and Ford, he framed the energy crisis as a national security problem, famously describing it as the “moral equivalent of war.” Carter warned that without transitioning away from oil, “we will constantly live in fear of embargoes” and “could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs.” He also called for a huge increase in coal production to more than one billion tons per year, to take advantage of domestic energy resources that could never be cut off by foreign powers.33 Carter even described alternative energy sources in similar terms. He declared that solar energy “enhances the security of our Nation” because “no foreign cartel can set the price of sun power; no one can embargo it.”34 Framing energy as a security issue was a double-­edged sword. It created a sense of urgency and appealed to Americans who cared more about defense than the environment, but it also led in troubling directions. By endorsing Nixon’s energy independence framework and treating the energy crisis as a security issue, Carter invited his audience to follow Nixon’s argument through to its original conclusion: during an emergency, the need for energy trumps environmental concerns. If energy shortages posed such an imminent threat, then surely the United States needed to tap all domestic sources of energy, not just clean, renewable ones? Invoking the Manhattan Project and other war-

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time metaphors was also risky. Fossil fuels and nuclear power had delivered victory in World War II, and they still powered American tanks, ships, and warplanes in the 1970s. Their association with military power gave them an aura of seriousness and practicality. By contrast, renewable energy struggled to shed its association with eccentric tinkerers and a green counterculture that overlapped heavily with the antiwar movement. As Carter and other US leaders militarized the energy policy debate, they exacerbated some of the political obstacles facing wind, solar, and conservation.35 Demands to increase domestic energy production received a boost in 1978–1979, when the Iranian Revolution triggered another oil supply crisis and a sharp price increase. Carter warned that the United States’ “intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our Nation.” He vowed to put the nation on a war footing, once again looking to the experience of 1941–1945 for inspiration. Carter called for more renewable energy, including ethanol biofuels for blending with gasoline, and government-­backed funding, via a “solar bank,” to develop enough solar power to meet 20 percent of US energy demand by the year 2000.36 That plan for an energy transition, however, was coupled with demands for more fossil fuels like oil shale and “especially coal, our most abundant energy source.”37 Carter’s proposals formed the basis for the Energy Security Act of 1980, with a $20 billion US Synthetic Fuels Corporation to accelerate the production of liquid fuels from coal and shale. Although synthetic fuels were highly polluting, the need to boost domestic energy production took precedence over environmental worries.38 Carter’s foreign policy, too, prioritized the continued supply of fossil fuels, doubling down on the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and other friendly oil producers in the Persian Gulf.39

The Legacy of the 1970s From a twenty-­first-­century perspective in the shadow of climate change, the 1970s left a mixed legacy for US energy policy. The oil shock inspired valuable conservation efforts, including tighter fuel economy standards for automobiles. It led to greater funding for alternative energy sources and conservation, including research and development efforts that took many years to bear fruit but eventually contributed to breakthroughs in photovoltaics, efficient lighting, and other critical technologies.40 More generally, the crisis of the 1970s focused public attention on energy policy and encouraged Americans to consider the possibility of a deliberate, policy-­led transition to a new energy regime. The US energy policies of the 1970s, however, prioritized energy independence over environmental protection. To accelerate the production of domestic fossil fuels, ecological concerns were put on the back burner, including

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efforts to stop pipeline development in Alaska, mountaintop removal in Appalachia, and climate change, which had already drawn the attention of leading scientists and some government officials. Jimmy Carter raised the issue of global warming already as a presidential candidate in 1976, and brought it up repeatedly as president.41 At the end of his time in office, the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued the landmark report Global Energy Futures and the Carbon Dioxide Problem, which predicted severe climate risks and argued for “a priority commitment here and abroad to energy efficiency and to renewable energy resources.”42 Frustrated by inaction during later presidential administrations, many environmentalists imagined that, if only Carter had been reelected, during his second term he would have done more to limit carbon emissions.43 Unfortunately, Carter’s efforts to promote renewable energy proved limited and temporary compared with the more sustained focus on boosting fossil fuel production. During his administration, the idea of a transition to renewables was briefly in vogue even among some conservative Republicans, but the moment did not last.44 After President Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981, he argued that the energy industry should be liberated from government interference, slashed funding for solar power and other renewable technologies, and underlined the point by dismantling the solar water heating system that Carter had installed on the White House roof.45 The fossil fuel industry undertook a sustained effort to cast doubt on climate science and discredit efforts to speed a transition to zero-­carbon energy, sharply polarizing the debate and entrenching climate skepticism in the Republican Party.46 By contrast, the pro–fossil fuel policies of the 1970s proved highly resilient to changes in presidential administrations. Carter and the other presidents of that era all supported an increase in the production of coal and other domestic fossil fuels. Department of Energy research into hydraulic fracturing helped lay the groundwork for the US natural gas boom of the early twenty-­first century.47 To this day, the ideology of energy independence that was popularized during the oil crisis remains a powerful tool in the hands of fossil fuel advocates, providing cover for the self-­interest of the oil, gas, and coal industries and their political allies. Even the Democratic administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama advertised their commitment to domestic oil and gas production and “all-­of-­t he-­above” energy strategies that included fossil fuels. The energy transition required now, in the era of climate change, will involve moving beyond those ideas inherited from the 1970s.

six

THE DECADE OF THE “ENERGY TRANSITION” A Critical Review of the Global Energy Debates of the 1970s

Duccio Basosi

The 1970s are usually considered a watershed in energy history. Seeking to establish a greater degree of substantial control over their natural resources, in late 1973 the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) shocked the world by quadrupling the price of crude petroleum, which then covered almost half of the world’s total supply of commercial energy.1 In the same months, in the context of the October war between Egypt, Syria, and Israel, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) resorted to the “oil weapon” in support of the “Arab” cause, by decreeing an—­u ltimately unsuccessful—­embargo on shipments of oil toward any countries whose governments would support Israel in the war.2 In the following months, while neologisms like “petrodollars” flowed back and forth in the international economy, the oil-­importing countries hastily gave themselves new energy ministries, implemented short-­term “energy policies” and passed long-­term “energy plans,” in order to ensure “energy security,” “energy efficiency,” “energy conservation” and “energy diversification.”3 In the same years, environmentalism emerged as a powerful cultural and social force worldwide, and put in sharp focus the ecological damages resulting from the utilization of most existing energy sources: acid rains and the greenhouse effect from the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear contamination, and deforestation.4 Finally, a new redoubling of crude oil prices in 1979–1980 reinvigorated 107

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both the intellectual and diplomatic discussions on energy worldwide, and the practical search for new energy policies, particularly in the oil-­importing countries.5 In the following decade, a true countershock in oil prices eased some of the political and intellectual tension that had accumulated around energy since 1973 but, by then, the developments of the 1970s had left lasting legacies both on how energy was produced and consumed, and on how it was thought of.6 By the end of the 1980s, global oil consumption had stabilized (it would start to grow again only in the late 1990s) and new producers from outside OPEC in Mexico, the North Sea, and the Soviet Union supplied substantial amounts of what petroleum was consumed.7 Natural gas had emerged as a major energy source next to oil and coal (with Soviet gas now playing an important part in fulfilling Western Europe’s energy demand).8 Nuclear energy had come to play a minor but discernible role as a component of the world’s global energy supply (and a major role in countries like France, Japan, and Brazil that had invested heavily in nuclear programs in the previous years).9 Though less central to policymaking, energy ministries remained in place as permanent components of national bureaucracies worldwide, energy policies kept absorbing portions of national budgets, and energy as such remained an important subject of public debate, be it in relation to national objectives of energy security, to elusive discussions on sustainable development or to specific concerns for global warming.10 Though it is only seldom noticed, the 1970s brought also the maturation and generalized spreading of the idea that the human use of energy was subject to change over time. That, in other words, human history had been and would be—­indeed, for many it should be—­a history of “energy transitions.” Such a notion was not completely unknown in previous epochs. Yet, in the 1970s, the historicity of energy came into focus with much greater force, not only for the sheer number of attempts at dealing with the issue explicitly and systematically—­if without much overall coherency—­but also for the impact that such intellectual endeavors had on both the general public and the political class worldwide. Recently, energy policy analyst Kathleen Araújo has written that “contemporary thinking about energy transitions is deeply rooted in ideas from the 1970s and 1980s.”11 With greater polemical verve (and not without reason, at least as far as popularization was concerned), historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz have claimed that, between 1975 and 1980, “the term ‘energy transition’ was invented by think tanks and popularized by powerful institutions,” including the US Department of Energy, the Trilateral Commission, and various industrial lobbies.12 But neither of these two works delved specifically into the subject.

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Given the increasing importance of “energy transition” as an analytical category in present-­day discussions about energy, not to say as a political slogan, this chapter adds evidence to the claim that the 1970s were the decade of the “energy transition” in discourse if not necessarily in practice. Based on research in multiple languages on both scholarly works, publications for mass circulation, and political discourse, this chapter shows how during the 1970s “energy transition”—­and its variants, “energy revolution” and “energy substitution”—­first emerged in a North Atlantic environment and then became a crucial phrase worldwide, used to interpret the past, to describe the present, and to shape the future. The denaturalization of the relationship between human beings and energy was by no means a minor fact, and indeed present-­day debates about energy and energy policies owe much to those of the 1970s. At the same time, among the legacies of those debates, there was also the potential for the notion of “transition” to obscure—­in Bonneuil and Fressoz’s terms—­our understanding of energy past and future trends: seldom defined in precise ways, the phrase soon became a buzzword, signifying many different contents and concealing real contradictions between different meanings associated to it.13 In short, it was already then, as it is now, an extremely “problematic example of the vagueness that surrounds much of the energy lexicon.”14

North Atlantic Lineages The notion that human use of energy was subject to change over time most likely appeared shortly after the adoption of coal as the main source of power for Great Britain’s industrialization in the nineteenth century. In his classic study, The Coal Question, William Stanley Jevons wrote that “should our coal-­ mines ever be exhausted  . . . we should lose many of the advantages of our high civilization, and much of our cultivated grounds must be again shaded with forests to afford fuel to a remnant of our present population. That there is a progressive tendency to approach this limit is certain; but  . . . when it does approach, the increasing difficulty and expense of working the mines of coal will operate  . . . , so that the transition may not be very violent.”15 Approaching the subject from a different standpoint and a different epoch, in the 1930s historian Lewis Mumford put different sources of energy at the very heart of his historical inquiry into Technics and Civilization and even expressed his personal desire to see “carboniferous capitalism” one day substituted by a new civilization based on solar power.16 Possible future shifts of some kind between different sources of energy were invoked also in some writings of the “age of oil” after World War II. In the 1950s, while the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency mended fences between the United States and

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the Soviet Union, Palmer Putnam’s Energy in the Future chanted the virtues of the atom as a possible replacement for petroleum, while Harrison Brown’s The Challenge of Man’s Future wrote about a possible “transition” from hydrocarbons to a mix of nuclear energy, water power, and solar energy.17 In the same years, in Western Europe, the Organisation for European Economic Co-­ operation’s “Hartley Report” recommended that Western European countries implement major investments in coal and nuclear energy in order to diversify their energy sources away from imported Middle Eastern oil.18 But it was only with the 1970s, particularly after 1973, that the notion of energy transition, broadly intended as a shift from one way to produce and consume energy to a different one in a given society, made a forceful appearance on the stage of intellectual and political debates in the North Atlantic world.19 Among the first works to adopt the language of “transition”, the Ford Foundation’s A Time to Choose assumed three different scenarios for US energy consumption growth up to the year 2000—­“ historical growth,” “technical fix,” and “zero growth”—­made it clear that the choice to pursue one scenario over the other was an eminently political one, and debated the “transition problems” that the United States would meet in each, including of course what specific energy policies and energy sources would be needed to meet the expected goals.20 The following year the Italian nuclear physicist Cesare Marchetti of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) used the phrase energy substitution to illustrate a chart where, based on (a somewhat extravagant) extrapolation of past experiences, natural gas was projected to mechanically overtake oil as the most used energy source by 1990, to be then overtaken by nuclear power around 2070, perhaps not surprisingly, given IIASA’s well-­k nown pro-­nuclear inclinations.21 While neither study used the phrase energy transition, both would provide abundant material for successive works that adopted it systematically. They also implied very different conceptions of what the transition was about. While for the Ford Foundation it was the politically guided passage of the United States from its pre-­1970s reliance on cheap oil to a new set of social and technological arrangements coherent with the chosen target scenario, for Marchetti it was rather the beginning of the dominant position of a new source in the composition of the world’s overall energy mix. In this respect, it should be noted, Marchetti’s terminology was particularly unfortunate: since the world’s absolute consumption of coal had kept increasing even after oil had dethroned it, what the Italian scientist called an “energy substitution” was in reality an “energy addition.”22 Throughout the 1970s, grand developments in nuclear energy were among the most cherished hopes of political and economic establishments through-

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out the industrialized world, and most likely not only there.23 It should not come as a surprise that, in 1975, the first article to systematically frame the “energy question” in terms of “transition” in the newly created journal Energy Policy dealt with the “strategies for a transition from fossil to nuclear fuels,” thus inaugurating a genre of pro-­nuclear energy transition pieces that would remain dominant in mainstream publications at least until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.24 Coauthored by two eminent IIASA scientists, Wolf Häfele and Alan Manne, the piece was only marginally less deterministic then Marchetti’s (who was abundantly cited in the notes), in that it rather arbitrarily took both world energy demand as destined to grow for the next forty years, and nuclear fission as the only technology that could flank fossil fuels on the supply side.25 But by defining “the period of transition” as the one leading towards a configuration where nuclear energy would meet “all demands for electricity and non-­electrical energy,” Häfele and Manne were now also implicitly defining the transition as a process ending only with the virtual disappearance of fossil fuels from the global mix.26 Ecologists and environmentalists contested the nuclear endpoint of the transition: in The Poverty of Power, biologist Barry Commoner introduced readers to basic thermodynamics and denounced capitalism as the origin of three intertwined crises in the economy, the environment, and energy.27 To the extent that new forms of energy should power a world oriented toward social and ecological equilibrium, Commoner forcefully made the case for the need “to plan a transition from [the United States’] present heavy dependence on petroleum to renewable sources of energy,” to be achieved by the turn of the century.28 By the end of the 1970s, Commoner’s works enjoyed wide circulation in translations worldwide and inspired reflections on “energy transitions” toward conservation, solar energy, and changed consumption patterns as parts of broader transitions to some form of ecological and socialist society, as in the works of the philosopher André Gorz in France and of scientists like Giovan Battista Zorzoli, Federico Butera, and Enzo Tiezzi in Italy.29 All in all, “transition” in these works implied the actual replacement of fossil fuels and nuclear by solar power, in a context where social well-­being should be seen as decoupled from energy consumption.30 Energy conservation, neighborhood-­scale development of solar energy, and the use of fossil fuels only as “transitional technologies” also constituted the preferred “energy path” for the US physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins, who famously wrote in a Foreign Affairs essay in 1976 that the United States could double its “end use efficiency by shortly after 2000.”31 Yet, his was a quite different vision from both Commoner and the French and Italian eco-­ socialists mentioned earlier, who believed that planning and a certain dose of

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class struggle were crucial ingredients in the transition (though Soviet-­style socialism fared no better than capitalism in their works).32 On the contrary, Lovins and other supporters of the “soft energy path” were attentive in reassuring private businesses that “resolute technical fixes and modest social innovation” would make their programs fully compatible with existing social structures.33

Penetration in Political Discourse, Global Diffusion, and Amorphous Re-­S ignification The year 1977 saw the publication of Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post-­ Petroleum World by Denis Hayes.34 Citing abundantly from both Commoner and Lovins, adding precious insight from economist Herman Daly’s steady state economics, and providing numbers in large amounts, Hayes forcefully made the case for the adoption, in the United States and globally, of policies and measures aimed at realizing a quasi-­full transition to a solar-­powered economy by the third decade of the twenty-­first century (though it somewhat equivocally used the additions of coal to wood and oil to coal as models for the substitution of solar for fossil fuels and nuclear power that it actually recommended).35 Two years later, President Jimmy Carter appointed Hayes to direct the recently created Solar Energy Institute. But 1977 was crucial for the discourse of energy transition in at least three other and more important respects: it entered political discourse, it globalized, and it saw a crucial new meaning added to the already rich menu of contents that were potentially included under its heading. It entered political discourse from the front door when, on April 18, 1977, President Carter gave a televised speech to the nation, claiming that “twice in the last several hundred years, there has been a transition in the way people use energy,” and that “we must prepare quickly for a third change to strict conservation and to the renewed use of coal and to permanent renewable energy sources like solar power.”36 It was not clear then, and it is not clear now, whether Carter, who admired Lovins, implied that coal would serve as a transitional technology or rather as a permanent feature of a new coal-­solar energy mix to be achieved in the early 2000s.37 Whatever the case, less than two months later the French newspaper Le Monde reported that, during the works of the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC), then taking place in Paris with the participation of ministerial delegations from nineteen industrialized and developing countries, a commission co-­chaired by the US and Saudi foreign ministers had agreed on “the necessary transition toward renewable energy,” to be achieved through conservation, technology transfer, and the exploration and exploitation of all forms of energy.38 It was not only the French

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newspaper that gave resonance to transition énergétique: shortly after Carter’s speech the use of the phrase began to spread beyond the North Atlantic area. The transiçao energetica appeared for the first time on Sao Paulo’s Folha in May 1977.39 By 1979, OAPEC Secretary General Ali Ahmed Attiga used it in a contribution to Third World Quarterly.40 By 1981, even a book published in the Soviet Union addressed the issue of the perehod k novym istočnikam ènergii.41 The “energy transition”’s diffusion in political discourse and its globalization went hand in hand and accelerated at the turn of the decade. Recovering some of the language of the CIEC, in September 1979 Mexican President José Lopéz Portillo gave an impassioned speech to the United Nations General Assembly, proposing “the adoption of a world energy plan that covers all nations  . . . and has as its fundamental objective the assurance of an orderly, progressive, and just transition from one age of man’s history to the next,” by promoting “the exploitation of potential reserves of all types, traditional and non-­conventional.”42 In the same period, the Mexican press began to debate the transición energética.43 In 1979 the Non-­A ligned Movement included a reference to the “energy transition” in its final declaration.44 In February 1980 the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, chaired by former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, presented its findings to the UN Secretary General, recommending “an orderly transition  . . . from high dependence on increasingly scarce nonrenewable energy sources.”45 In 1980 energie-­wende became the title of a book showing the technical possibilities for the Federal Republic of Germany to have “growth and prosperity without oil and nuclear” (though not without coal) by the first decades of the twenty-­ first century.46 Finally, at the end of 1980 the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 35/­56, affirming that “the international community will have to make substantial and rapid progress in the transition from the present international economy based on hydrocarbons,” and Resolution 35/­204, recognizing in a rather convoluted language “the importance of developing new and renewable sources of energy in order to meeting requirements for continued economic and social development, particularly in the developing countries, through, inter alia, the transition to the increased use of new and renewable energy sources.”47 However, the increasing vagueness of such uses of the phrase should not be lost on the reader: with growing frequency, the political-­diplomatic jargon turned the transition either into a journey “away from” petroleum but with no clear final destination, or into a journey “toward the increased use” of other sources, but with no clear indication either of standards or deadlines to measure achievements and shortcomings. The first intellectual manifestation of such an amorphous conception of the energy transition was, again, in

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1977, with the publication of Managing the Energy Transition by Roger Naill (notably, it was the first book to carry the entire phrase in its title).48 Noted at the time mainly for its recommendation that the United States solve its energy problems by importing more oil (a rather surprising one in those years), Naill’s book presented in reality the transition neither as a path toward some specified goal (as in most cases), nor as the result of a process (as in Marchetti’s case), but simply as the United States’ post-­1973 condition. Indeed, the notion that the energy transition was simply the post-­1973 condition, this time of all the industrialized capitalist (and oil-­importing) world, was also at the heart of a much more influential text published the following year: in the Trilateral Commission’s Energy: Managing the Transition, the transition itself was never defined, let alone recommended, but only presented as a fact.49 Coherently, the pamphlet aimed at mobilizing the capitalist world’s elites toward a “coordinated approach to energy problems” in which virtually any policy was fine, provided that it help to balance energy demand and supply: from the consolidation of Washington’s “‘special relationship’ with Saudi Arabia” to the increase of “emergency stockpiles” in Japan; from the reduction of oil imports in Europe to the development of new energy resources in non-­ OPEC Third World countries; from cooperation with OPEC to the establishing of joint nuclear policies and public funding programs for research and development on “nuclear fusion, solar and deep sea drilling technology.”50 In August 1981 this new, global, and amorphous notion of transition came in full display at the United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy, held in Nairobi with 130 ministerial delegations and four heads of state and government in attendance. The forty-­t hree-­page “Programme of Action” adopted at the conclusion of the conference constantly oscillated between presenting the transition as a path “toward the increased use of new and renewable energy sources” and the state of the world after the two “oil shocks,” in any case eschewing the indication of either targets or deadlines to be met.51 Nor was this a language imposed only by the capitalist world: a paper presented by the Soviet delegation to display the country’s progress with “new and renewable sources” virtually made the case that each new oil discovery should be considered a “new energy source.”52 For his part, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang sent a well-­w ishing message to the delegates, expressing the hope that “international co-­operation will be strengthened in the process of the exploration and development of New and Renewable Sources of Energy to the benefit of the people of the whole world,” while in that same year China’s sixth five-­year plan promised that, since “oil consumption in 1985 is to be 10 million tons less than that of 1980  . . . the state plans to increase coal supply in the five years and appropriate funds to expand related engineering work.”53

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If anything, of course, the inclusion of shale oil, peat, and tar sands under the “new energies” heading of the conference made the claim that the world was transitioning to post–fossil fuel energies a rather contradictory one.54

Basic Misunderstandings The Nairobi conference offered the stage also for the appearance of another, brand-­new conception of energy transition: the Reagan administration sent to Nairobi a chief delegate who avowedly knew nothing about energy, but who consistently stressed that “market forces” would be best qualified to lead the transition toward an increased use of “new and renewable energies.”55 As also illustrated by Victor McFarland in chapter 5 of this volume, while these positions were fully consistent both with President Ronald Reagan’s “neoliberal rationality” and with his pro–fossil fuel political agenda, on the plane of logic a transition left to “market forces” could only be intended as an open-­ended process, de facto implying that no goals at all could be set for it.56 But if the US delegation’s version at the Nairobi conference epitomized the tendency toward an ever-­growing fuzziness about what needed to be done, if anything at all, there was also, throughout the decade, a deeper underlying misunderstanding on why there was, or ought to be, a transition. Far from being a matter of mere intellectual curiosity, even a broad overview of such basic conflict of ideas enables to better understand why the collapse of oil prices in the mid-­1980s muted, at least for a while, much of the talk on the subject. Common to almost all those that participated in the debate on the future of energy was the idea that in the 1970s the world economy had reached some kind of limit. But what kind of limit was a controversial subject. For the neoliberal economists who would gain preeminence in the Reagan years, the only real limits to economic activity were those created by clumsy governments interfering with the “free working of the marketplace.”57 For many others, one of the great topics of debate in the 1970s was that of the physical limits posed to economic activities by the finite, nonrenewable nature of many of the input factors entering modern economics processes, including fossil fuel sources as far as energy was concerned. Dating back to Thomas Malthus, the question of the physical exhaustion of the Earth’s resources had been present to energy economists since at least Jevons’s reflection on coal cited earlier, and had generally been answered in similar ways: if there was ever to be any scarcity of oil or coal, the price mechanism would ensure that either alternative sources would become competitive or that marginal fields would be put to work, bringing the system back to equilibrium.58 Successive oil-­exhaustion scares in the United States and Western Europe had risen and ebbed throughout the twentieth century, but in the early 1970s the issue made a powerful comeback

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on the global scale due to the quasi-­simultaneous occurrence of three distinct events.59 The first, in 1970, was the coincidence of the beginning of a decline in US oil production exactly with the time at which, back in the 1950s, a relatively unknown oil geologist had forecast that the United States would reach its ultimate peak oil: in the early 1970s that geologist, M. King Hubbert, became a minor celebrity, at least in the United States, and his ideas fully entered the public sphere.60 Then, in 1972 a private association of businessmen and intellectuals, known as the Club of Rome, published its first report on the future of the planet: prepared by a team of MIT researchers, the report became a hugely successful book, Limits to Growth, with translations in more than fifteen languages and sales in the order of millions of copies.61 Its message was that the world was on an unsustainable path from various viewpoints, including what the authors described as the excessive exploitation of nonrenewable raw materials, such as oil and coal.62 The third was, of course, the 1973 oil shock itself, which showed that some form of limitation to the physical availability of cheap energy had actually taken shape and that, irrespective of what market economics said about the longer run, in the short run both the real economy and real people were affected by it.63 However, the degree to which physical limits should be considered as a rationale for the transition varied. For several authors involved in the aforementioned debates, the physical end of oil was not an immediate concern: as Commoner explained, Hubbert’s prediction had superficially come true in 1970 only because in the previous fifteen years high profits from the Middle East had kept US companies away from explorations in the United States.64 Not that the depletion of finite raw materials did not matter over the longer term, but the biophysical limits of the planet’s capacity to absorb the ecological damage from the burning of fossil fuels, and the economic and social costs of resorting to more difficult oil, were of much greater importance to Commoner (who in this had a clear point of convergence with Lovins). Besides, Commoner and the eco-­socialists did not consider the energy crisis as the most important crisis of the time, but rather as a symptom—­a crucial one, indeed—­of a more generalized crisis of both western capitalism and eastern state socialism. Solving the energy crisis was a necessary step, but by no means a sufficient one, to close the circle of humankind’s relationship with the biosphere.65 Not much concerned with questions of ecology, not to say with ending capitalism, the Ford Foundation’s Time to Choose saw the scarcity problem in the near future mainly as one of rising energy costs (which were taken largely for granted), partly to be ascribed to OPEC’s and OAPEC’s geopolitical stances.66 Similarly, as one of the first editorials of the academic journal Energy

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Policy put it: “Our economies grew strong on cheap energy: we now have an obligation to establish and maintain a fair distribution of reserves throughout the world.”67 In Häfele and Manne’s words: “Oil and gas resources are, to a large extent, located in politically unstable areas. Coal and shale are available in large quantities, but—­in the absence of in situ extraction methods—­w ill continue to be dirty and expensive.”68 In several studies, the trends in demand (often projected to rise as if prices and conservation policies did not matter) counted more than supply per se. For example, well into in 1981, when the slowdown in world energy demand was well visible, IIASA’s pro-­nuclear Energy in a Finite World framed the energy problem in the following terms: “If the living standards of the industrialized world are at the very least to be maintained, and if the peoples of the developing world are to achieve reasonable standards of living in time, there will have to be economic development and, in the case of the least developed countries, rapid economic growth. But development requires energy—­lots of it.”69 In other cases, still, the oil shocks of the 1970s were represented as warnings of the physical scarcity of oil to come. For example, the pro-­nuclear report by MIT’s Workshop on Alternative Energy Technologies warned that “behind all the prospective energy gaps and imbalances beyond 1985 is the inescapable fact that the time when the production of oil will plateau and then decline is clearly in sight.”70 Similarly, the Trilateral’s report explicitly adopted Hubbert’s “peak” language when it claimed that “sometimes in the early 1990s  . . . virtually all of the OPEC producers will be likely be producing at, or near, their peak sustainable capacity or at officially imposed limits; non-­OPEC production will begin to top out; and the world will have to look to the Saudis to provide any incremental supplies needed.”71 Nor was this only a pro-­nuclear concern. Oil exhaustion also supplied the main rationale for the West German energie-­wende and showed up in Hayes’s Rays of Hope, even though only as subordinate to other environmental, economic, and social concerns.72 President Jimmy Carter bought the exhaustion argument in full when he explained the need for the third transition with the certainty that “sometime in the 1980s, [production] can’t go up any more,” and most participants in the Nairobi conference went along when they discussed the consequences of the “diminishing resources of conventional and traditional energy, especially of hydrocarbons.”73 Of course, when in the 1980s the oil glut and the countershock arrived, most of the rationales for the transition based on expectations of either permanently high prices or imminent peak oil lost much of their attractiveness.

•   •   •

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At the end of this appraisal of the manifestations and contradictions of the “energy transition” in the intellectual and political discourse of the 1970s, one might wonder whether in that decade there was more to the energy transition than just its existence in language. The question has already been asked, implicitly or explicitly, in various works, and is usually answered in the negative, at least as far as the global picture is concerned.74 At first this might appeared a foregone answer: today, total world energy consumption is more than twice its 1971 level, oil has remained the most utilized source (despite a decline to one-­t hird of the total), and fossil fuels in general have kept covering around four-­fifths of the global energy mix from the 1970s to the present.75 If by “transition” we mean a world where a non–fossil fuel source has taken over petroleum in the energy mix, not to say actually replaced it in full, we should conclude that no transition whatsoever has occurred in or since the 1970s. In a sense, global warming testifies to this. But such oriented readings miss a crucial point: in the 1970s, political and economic establishments, particularly in the large energy consumers of the industrialized “West,” did not sign up to any specific conception of energy transition, let alone to an ecological one. Rather, they largely adhered to what has been called here an amorphous view of the transition, which inspired or at least provided a conceptual envelope to policies aimed at reducing the role of oil in the energy mix and at promoting some increased use of other sources (coal, nuclear, natural gas, and even some renewables), but with no specific ambitions for either relative or absolute substitutions, no specific targets for absolute energy consumption levels, and no deadlines or standards to measure any progresses and setbacks. As unfortunate as it is, that transition seems to have been remarkably successful.

seven

REVERSING THE TRANSITION FROM COAL TO OIL? The International Energy Agency and the Western Industrialized Countries’ Restructuring of Energy Supply in the 1970s

Henning Türk

In the decades after World War II, the Western industrialized countries experienced a fundamental change of their energy supply. Coal as the hitherto predominant energy source was superseded by cheap oil. Already in 1960 the share of oil in the energy consumption of the Western industrialized countries overtook coal: oil counted for 39.6 percent of energy consumption and coal for 35.7 percent. This development continued so that in 1973, 53.8 percent of total energy consumption was covered by oil and only 19.8 percent by coal.1 The substitution of coal by oil had far-­reaching consequences, as coal was an indigenous source or was obtained from neighboring countries, whereas oil was mainly imported from the Middle East or North Africa. The increasing import quota for energy resources signaled that the Western industrialized countries were becoming more and more entangled in a web of complex international economic relations.2 The readjustment of international economic relations also influenced the power relations between different countries and regions and resulted in processes of growing dependency. These developments culminated in the first oil crisis in 1973–1974 with the oil embargo of the United States and the Netherlands by the member countries of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) and the quadrupling of oil prices.3 119

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The growing dependency of a large part of the Western industrialized countries raised the question of how to cope with this new challenge. This topic was discussed on the national but also on the international level, but the latter mostly takes a backseat in predominantly national stories about the oil crisis. Therefore, I concentrate on these international discussions, perceptions and decisions. How did the Western industrialized countries appraise the issues of growing dependency on insecure oil and the repercussion of the oil crisis on the international level? How did these developments and events influence the perceptions of different energy sources? Which problems did the Western industrialized countries single out and which solutions did they propose? By focusing on the discussions in international organizations, like the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), this chapter sheds new light on the nature of energy transitions. The analyses of international reactions to the transition from coal to oil as the main energy basis for the economies of the Western industrialized countries with its peak in the oil crisis in 1973–1974 can offer valuable insights into the processes of energy transitions. In the literature about energy transitions, the economic and technological approach prevails. Energy transitions are often described as rational processes that can be explained by “a combination of functionality, accessibility, and cost.”4 They seem more or less unavoidable. But these transitions did not occur automatically. On the contrary, they are influenced by decisions of and discussions among central national, transnational, and international players, such as politicians, governments, multinational companies, or international organizations. And, above all, energy transitions are not unidirectional. Representatives of the seemingly old-­fashioned energy forms struggle to maintain their energy source as an important fuel or try to adapt to the new requirements. Besides, national or international events like the oil crises or nuclear accidents could lead to a sudden reassessment of different sources of energy. Perceptions change and seemingly depreciated energy sources could undergo a renaissance. Energy transitions are therefore contested developments that need to be analyzed historically. In this framework of energy transition, the IEA offers a particularly instructive case study, since it was the first international organization with the concrete task of changing the energy structure of its members and reversing the dependency on imported oil. With the help of the IEA, the member states tried to influence the energy consumption patterns of the Western industrialized countries as a whole. By this, they wanted to reshape the power balance between oil-­producing and oil-­consuming countries in a defensive, inward-­ looking way. This task was not easy, because the IEA had no hard power to

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enforce the transformation of its members’ energy basis. It relied only on soft-­power tools like peer reviews, reports, recommendations, or normative documents. This paperwork and the IEA’s self-­understanding show that the first decade of its work under the lead of its executive director, Ulf Lantzke, was devoted to a combination of market-­oriented policy and interventionist approaches. In the eyes of the IEA, the governments had to play a key role in the energy market. This view coincided with the so-­called decade of energy policy5 that started with the oil crisis and ended with the decline of oil prices in the mid-­1980s.6 It was shaped by the dominance of energy issues on the national and international political agenda, which diminished when the oil price decline seemed to reveal that oil was not as scarce as expected. In this period, the government-­centered approach was superseded by neoliberal approaches that doubted the need for a strong state role in the energy market. To answer the central questions of this chapter and to integrate these events into the broader context of energy transitions, I first describe the collaboration of the Western industrialized countries in the OECD and the founding of the IEA in the aftermath of the first oil crisis. I then concentrate on the elaboration of the IEA’s long-­term program to reduce dependency on Middle-­ Eastern oil. Subsequently, I analyze the development of its activities in the coal sector, and concentrate on the implementation of the IEA’s recommendations.

Cooperation in the OECD and the Founding of the IEA in 1974 The Western industrialized countries’ main international organization for discussing the consequences of energy transitions was the OECD. In its founding process in 1960–1961, this Paris-­based organization took over the oil committee of its predecessor, the Organisation for European Economic Co-­operation (OEEC). The oil committee gathered the senior civil servants of the OECD’s member countries responsible for energy. Its main task was to monitor and evaluate trends in the oil sector.7 In the oil committee, the increasing substitution of coal by oil and the growing dependency on imports from the Middle East and North Africa led to discussions about oil security and recommendations to the member states how to prepare for possible future oil shortages. But, all in all, the situation was not regarded as problematic during the 1960s. The US government pledged to bring in the United States’ spare capacity to overcome oil shortages in possible crisis times, and additionally, despite the founding of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),8 it was not expected that the oil producers would be able to form a united front. Even after the first oil embargo during the Six-­Day War in June 1967, the Western industrialized countries stayed relaxed. The close collaboration between the OECD committees, the United States, and industry

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had worked soundly, and the embargoing countries had been only able to keep the embargo up for a few days.9 In the eyes of the OECD, the first oil embargo was no cause for alarm. More worrying was the declaration of the American representative in the oil committee, who announced in 1970 that US oil production was reaching a peak and that the spare capacity to help the other OECD countries in a future oil crisis would be no longer available.10 As a reaction to this declaration, the OECD set up an oil crisis mechanism that included an oil allocation scheme.11 But it had a major shortcoming: it only applied to the European members of the OECD. All efforts to include the US oil production failed before the oil crisis broke out in October 1973.12 This event changed the attitude of the US government. Now it was ready to participate in a crisis mechanism and even to include American oil production as a last resort in situations of a severe oil shortage. As a precondition, it demanded the founding of a stronger energy organization than the OECD to counter the assumed power of the oil-­producing countries. Additionally, this step allowed the US government to rally its Western allies behind it and to restore its leadership role in the Western camp. The other Western industrialized countries—­except France—­a lthough more reluctant concerning the confrontation with the oil-­producing countries, accepted the US proposals because they deeply depended on American support in times of a future oil crisis and expected to increase their energy security with the help of the new organization. Additionally, they hoped to benefit from a technology transfer by a close collaboration with the United States. As a consequence, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was founded in November 1974.13 The IEA was conceptualized as an autonomous suborganization of the OECD in Paris with its own rules. In its various bodies, the Western industrialized countries gathered to coordinate their energy policy approaches. The member states officials discussed their views with energy experts and representatives of the IEA secretariat, thereby developing a common view on the energy problems of the times and the possibilities of resolving these challenges. The members expected the IEA to be effective in different time spans. In the short run, it should prevent the potential future use of the “oil weapon” with the help of a crisis mechanism that was elaborated in detail in the founding document. Additionally, the member states were to keep oil stocks that corresponded to the average of ninety days’ worth of oil consumption. In the middle and long run, the IEA was supposed to help its members reduce dependency on oil imports, especially from the Middle East.

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But how did the IEA try to lessen the dependency of its member states on insecure crude oil imports? What role did other energy sources like atomic energy and coal play in the expectations of the new organization?

The IEA and the Restructuring of Energy Supplies Concerning the restructuring of energy supplies, the founding document of the IEA only provided the framework with some general remarks about its aims.14 It was therefore crucial in the initial period of the IEA to fill this part of the IEA’s work with a concrete program. As the whole IEA project depended from the beginning on American leadership, it was no surprise that the US government took the initiative on that score by proposing a Long-­Term Co-­ Operation Program (LTCP). After the elaboration of the crisis mechanism, the US government saw “a viable long-­term cooperative program to reduce dependency on imported oil” as “the essential second step in redressing the producer/­consumer power balance.”15 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger unveiled the US views in a detailed speech at the University of Chicago Board of Trustees Banquet on November 14, 1974.16 He dramatically underscored the necessity to conserve energy and develop alternatives to oil as preconditions for the decrease of oil prices. At the same time, he saw the danger that measures taken by one government could be thwarted by measures of other countries. Secretary Kissinger therefore pleaded for a coordinated approach by the oil consumers organized in the IEA, proclaiming: “Conservation measures will be effective to the extent that they are part of a dynamic program for the development of alternative energy sources. All countries must make a major shift toward nuclear power, coal, gas and other sources. If we are to ensure substantial amounts of new energy in the 1980s, we must start now.”17 That statement and Kissinger’s further remarks reflected the common views of the time. Oil was mainly regarded through the lens of energy security and vulnerability. From this perspective, oil seemed to be a precarious energy source, and the related dependency structure was judged as highly dangerous. Therefore, oil consumption was to be curtailed and the strongly rising flow of money from the oil-­consuming countries to the oil-­producing countries reduced and channeled back to the Western industrialized countries. Although most of the Western industrialized countries agreed to this perception in principle, the negotiations within the IEA about a common program to reduce dependence on imported oil took far longer than Kissinger expected. The difficulty was that some countries, like the United States or Canada, were themselves large oil and energy producers. These countries

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looked for security of their future investments in the exploitation of expensive energy sources, such as tar sands. By contrast, main energy consumers like West Germany or Italy feared to largely finance the investments of the IEA’s producing countries. Their main interest was a technology transfer from the United States to the other IEA member countries. After one year of tough negotiations, the Long-­Term Co-­Operation Program was finally adopted in January 1976. With the program, the IEA’s member countries wanted “to contribute to the security of their energy supply, to the reduction of their dependence on imported oil as a group and to more stable conditions in the world oil market.”18 The basic pillars of the program were energy conservation19; an accelerated expansion of conventional alternative sources of energy, such as nuclear energy and coal; cooperation in research and development activities; and a relatively low floor price for the import of oil to secure the investments in alternative forms of energy. Striking is the absence of any passage on renewable energy. It did not play any role for the IEA in the 1970s, because the IEA approached the energy problems on a short-­to medium-­term perspective. As the IEA expected renewables only to be helpful around the year 2000, it preferred investments in energy sources that would offer a faster alternative to oil. In this regard, energy conservation and nuclear energy were initially the most promising alternatives for the IEA. Nuclear energy was very attractive because it could replace oil, which was still used in the generation of electricity. But surprisingly in the following years, coal policy evolved into a major part of the IEA’s work. How could old-­fashioned coal become one of the most interesting energy sources for the IEA?

The Development and Heyday of the IEA’s Coal Policy, 1977–1981 The first more detailed mentioning of coal as an important part of the IEA’s strategy can be detected in the so-­called Group Objectives and Principles on Energy Policy. The ministers of the member governments accepted these documents in the highest body of the IEA, the governing board, in October 1977. The reasoning of the Group Objectives and Principles was based on a dramatic situation that was predicted for the oil market in the mid-­1980s due to rising demand and stagnating oil production.20 The IEA proclaimed that the expected gap in oil supply could only be closed by a reduction of oil imports.21 The IEA’s group objective therefore prescribed oil imports of twenty-­six million barrels per day (mbd) in 1985—­seven mbd below the projected demand. To reach this aim, the ministers committed themselves to a strengthening of energy policies in their home countries on the basis of the adopted principles. In these principles, the member states pledged to develop a national energy

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policy that was based on a coherent energy program. One pillar of the Group Objectives and Principles was that the price for energy should “reach a level which encourages energy conservation and development of alternative sources of energy.”22 To cut oil consumption, members were to promote energy conservation and the use of atomic energy and coal instead of oil. Concerning coal, the members wanted to apply a “strong steam coal utilization strategy”23 and expand the international trade in steam coal. They consequently promised to promote coal as “a major fuel for electrical power generation and in industrial sectors,”24 to enhance market stability and to secure the necessary infrastructure for international coal trade. One year later, in 1978, the IEA’s secretariat conducted and published a major study titled “Steam Coal: Prospects to 2000.”25 The IEA anticipated a growth of the economy in the OECD of 3.4 percent annually and a rise of energy consumption of 2.7 percent annually. Acting on this assumption, the IEA formulated a reference case based on the extrapolation of existing patterns of energy consumption. In comparison to this reference case, the IEA described three scenarios about the future development of energy consumption. Two scenarios were based on different assumptions about the expansion of nuclear energy, and the third scenario comprised the strong development of coal use. From the secretariat’s point of view, all three scenarios were alarming because the demand for energy would not be met. The IEA therefore concluded: “A massive substitution of oil by coal will be required of industrial societies and developing countries alike if they are to sustain in this century even modest economic growth in a setting of moderately increasing prices. This displacement of oil by coal, however, will in itself not be sufficient but must be accompanied by more rigorous energy conservation and supply development.”26 The IEA further asserted that the expansion of coal use should rest on an intensified world trade in coal, which depended on “the adoption and execution of coordinated government policies to facilitate coal development and usage.”27 Why did the IEA commence these activities in 1978? One part of the explanation is internal. Executive director Ulf Lantzke had been the former head of the energy department in the West German Ministry of Economics, where he had been responsible to a large extent for West German coal policy and became an expert in this field. It was thus no surprise that he brought in his expertise and pushed coal as an alternative to oil. Additionally, Lantzke was very ambitious and wanted to enlarge the tasks of the IEA to make his organization a central player in international energy policy. He tried, for example, to become a key player in the preparation of the World Economic Summits, the G7 meetings. Even his former colleagues from the West German Ministry

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of Economics complained about Lantzke’s ambitions in this regard.28 Besides, international nuclear energy topics were already negotiated and discussed at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Nuclear Energy Agency, as well as the other already existing OECD suborganization, and on European level at the European Atomic Energy Community. The IEA member countries were consequently not keen to duplicate the work in international nuclear policy and inhibited the secretariat’s ambitions in this regard.29 International coal policy, in contrast, was a new field without any rivals for the IEA. The other part of the explanation is external. In the founding period of the IEA, the secretariat and most of the member states championed nuclear energy as the central substitute of oil. But between 1974 and 1978, it became clear that the rise of nuclear energy was slower than expected. In many societies of the member states, we can detect a strong resistance to these technocratic large-­scale projects.30 Additionally, the societies became more and more aware of the risks of nuclear energy. These developments delayed the expansion of nuclear energy and made it more expensive than expected. The IEA worried about that and thus turned to coal as the new favorite energy source. The IEA used the impetus of its 1978 steam coal study to turn the following year into “the year of coal” for the IEA, as its legal adviser Richard Scott later put it.31 Two events further accelerated the urgency from the perspective of the IEA and its member states. The first was the second oil crisis that began at the end of 1978 with the Iranian Revolution (Iran was at that time the world’s second largest oil producer).32 The other was the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March 1979.33 Both events illustrated two problematic trends. First, oil supply was still very insecure. The Western industrialized countries still depended too much on the supply from untrustworthy states. Second, it became more and more difficult to justify the expansion of nuclear energy. The conclusion for the IEA was obviously to push coal as much as possible. Thus, the IEA developed a coherent framework for upgrading coal policy in the IEA. The governing board firstly adopted the “Principles for IEA Action on Coal” at the end of May 1979. In this document, the member states pledged to enhance coal “as a major energy source within the IEA group.”34 The aim of the IEA and its member states was not to push coal at all costs, but to expand world trade in competitive coal. They assumed that reliable and cheap coal producers, like the United States or new member state Australia,35 should extract more coal and export it to other countries that needed cheap coal. The “Principles for IEA Action on Coal” therefore demanded that “countries with the potential for large increases in coal production, in particular Australia, Canada and the United States will extend their coal production facilities and infrastructure to permit increased domestic use of coal as well as exports con-

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sistent with economic and social costs.”36 The document further proclaimed that “all IEA countries will enlarge their use of coal; where insufficient coal is available domestically, countries will seek long-­term secure supplies of imported coal and provide security of access to markets.”37 By this, the IEA expected the production and use of coal to double until 1990 and to triple until the year 2000, compared to the production and use of 1976.38 The IEA also established a coordinating body between governments and industry. Analogous to oil policy, where the IEA worked closely together with the Industry Advisory Board of the large multinational oil companies, the IEA founded the Coal Industry Advisory Board on July 11, 1979. It was composed of “individuals of high standing active in coal producer, user, trader, transportation or other energy-­related enterprises.”39 The members were proposed by their home governments and appointed by the IEA governing board. Its first chairman was Nicholas T. Camicia, president of the Pittston Company in the United States. In following years, the Coal Industry Advisory Board published studies about the development of the coal market and future requirements for an expansion of coal trade, and it directly advised the IEA and the member states in the governing board.40 But how could the IEA secure the implementation of its recommendations?

The Monitoring of the IEA’s Member Countries’ Energy Policy As mentioned earlier, the IEA was founded as an autonomous suborganization of the OECD in Paris. This led not only to the transfer of the OECD’s energy staff to the new organization—­it also meant that the IEA applied the same policy instruments as its umbrella organization. A central policy tool of the OECD, which had no “hard power” to force the implementation of its decisions, was the peer-­review process.41 Teams, consisting of bureaucrats of the member states and experts of the secretariat, regularly visited the member states to check their performance. Additionally, the reviewed members had to come to Paris to justify their policy to the other members and the secretariat. Finally, the findings of the peer-­review process were published. The IEA already started experimenting with the peer-­review process in 1976. The subgroup on energy conservation of the Standing Group on Long-­ Term Cooperation (SLT) prepared a review of the development of energy consumption and compared the national conservation programs with a list of measures elaborated by the subgroup. It criticized countries like West Germany for its low investment in public transport or its refusal of speed limits on highways. The United States was pilloried for its low taxes on all fuels, which would send the wrong signals to consumers.42 In 1977 the Group Objectives and Principles on Energy Policy were the ba-

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sis for an intensified and more comprehensive peer-­review process that should be conducted every year.43 In the Principles on Energy Policy, the member countries pledged to “strengthen their policies  . . . , taking into account the results of the reviews.”44 Since 1979 the IEA published thorough reviews of its member countries’ energy policies and energy programs.45 In 1979 the IEA also implemented a review process for the coal sector with the “Decision of the Governing Board on Procedures for Review of IEA Countries’ Coal Policies.” It was a slimmed-­down review procedure. Every two years, the IEA governing board would “assess the prospects for world coal production, trade and utilization and review the extent to which the main elements of national coal policies required to provide a co-­operative framework within the IEA for expansion of coal use and trade have been adopted and implemented.”46 Additionally, the IEA countries were to inform the IEA secretariat about any decisions regarding coal policy, especially about governmental interference in the coal market. In the following years, the IEA governing board published its reviews every two years.47 With the help of these different review procedures, the IEA hoped to bring the energy policies of the different countries more in line with its overarching aims. The success of the reviews is difficult to assess, but at least the national bureaucracies had to keep in mind that they had to justify their different political measures on the international level.48

Contested Energy Transitions As this chapter has shown, during the 1950s and 1960s, the energy basis of the Western industrialized countries changed from coal as the main energy source to oil. For many industrialized countries, this implied a rising dependency on energy imports. This development became more and more problematic when some important oil-­producing countries tried to gain political advantages from this, culminating in the first oil crisis in 1973. The Western industrialized countries discussed the repercussions of their changing energy structure in the OECD oil committee. During the 1960s, energy experts stayed relaxed, because the US spare capacity was available in crisis times. Only after the United States announced in 1970 that is was no longer possible to use the American spare capacity during future crises did experts become nervous. The OECD developed a crisis mechanism for future oil scarcities, but it had the drawback that the United States did not participate. Finally, the 1973 oil crisis underscored that closer consumer cooperation was necessary. From the United States’ point of view, this had the advantage that it could use its strong position on energy matters to foster the cohesion in the

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Western camp and resume its leadership role. Therefore, in November 1974, the IEA saw the light of the day as a child of the oil crisis. The IEA was founded with the task of providing a crisis mechanism for future oil crises and aligning its member countries to the comprehensive aim of the IEA: to reduce dependence on imported oil. It developed normative documents that prescribed what the energy policy of its members should look like and tracked how they followed its prescriptions. In the discussions at the national and international level, Middle Eastern oil was framed in the context of dependency, energy vulnerability, and energy security. For the IEA and its members, it was therefore crucial to develop alternatives to insecure oil imports. In January 1976 the IEA adopted a Long-­Term Co-­Operation Program, which built the framework for the restructuring of energy supplies, mainly by pushing energy conservation, atomic energy, and coal production and usage. Renewable energy was no option for the IEA, as it could not replace oil in the short-­ and medium-­term. As the extension of atomic energy did not develop as fast as expected, the IEA turned more and more toward coal. From the IEA’s point of view, international coal policy was a very attractive field because it had no international organization as a competitor and could thus obtain a unique feature in the evolving structure of global energy governance. Besides, international developments—­like the second oil crisis in 1978–1979 or the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979—­made coal more attractive. The rise of oil prices, the deposits of coal in friendly and stable states, and the large quantity of available coal were further aspects that spoke in favor of coal. The strategy of the IEA and its member countries seemed to work. Between 1973 and 1980, the share of oil in OECD’s primary energy consumption fell from 53.8 percent to 48.9 percent, whereas the share of coal increased from 19.8 percent to 21.3 percent. Additionally, the IEA’s coal policy paved the way for turning coal from a regionally traded product to a product that is traded on a world market today. However, all the efforts of the IEA concerning the further restructuring of its members’ energy consumption experienced a strong backlash during the 1980s. With the oil price decline that reached a low-­point in 1986,49 the perception of energy vulnerability diminished and the “decade of energy policy”50 came to an end. The restructuring of energy supplies lost its urgency. The new perceptions of energy were now inspired by neoliberal thoughts. On the international level, this shift was reinforced with the appointment of the new IEA executive director Helga Steeg in 1984. The former head of the department of trade in the West German Economics Ministry was well-­k nown as an advocate of economic liberalism. In one of her first

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announcements, she stated: “Most of IEA work is in removing impediments to a free market in oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy.  . . . I am a strong believer in letting the market allocate energy resources, and giving governments as small a role as possible.”51 As this chapter has shown, the energy transition from coal to oil was not smooth, nor uncontested. Perceptions of the different energy sources changed and were influenced by crises, catastrophes, or new scientific knowledge. Besides, actors like international organizations or multinational companies strive to push through their agendas and concerns connected to various forms of energy. The advancement of one energy source evokes opposition and counterforces that try to reverse developments. Energy transitions are thus no automatic processes. They are results of perceptions, interests, and bargaining at different political and economic levels. Above all, they are not evolving unidirectionally. They are stumbling processes, sometimes advancing, sometimes moving back, that could be analyzed with the dissecting view of historians.

eight

FROM STATE TO MARKET A Transition in the Economics of Energy Resource Conservation

Thomas Turnbull

Economy, if not economics, has long been central to the logics of saving energy resources. The work of French engineer Sadi Carnot underlies this. His attempts to obtain the highest output of work from a steam engine while expending a minimum amount of fuel were undertaken in order to help France to outperform Great Britain in its industriousness. But in doing so, in 1824 he presented general principles which would not only demonstrate the limits of an engine’s performance but also the limits of the universe’s dynamics.1 Carnot reasoned that like flows of water, flows of caloric—­a concept preceding the concept of energy—­required a gradient for its transfer to occur, though one composed of heat differentials rather than those of gradient. Just as water cannot fall upward, caloric could move only from a hot to a cold body, which meant engine efficiency would always be limited.2 Carnot’s identification of the thermal limit of efficiency did not stop later engineers from proposing new kinds of economizer and regenerator engines, which could derive power and consume fuel with unparalleled levels of efficiency, or so their inventors and promoters asserted. Reflecting contemporary uncertainties about the strictures of thermodynamics, those proposing such engines argued that if the heat of combustion could be in some way recirculated, they would be like a perpetuum mobile, and their increased efficiency would mitigate fuel scarcity.3 131

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The idea that increased engine efficiency could reduce overall rates of fuel use was however memorably dismissed by the British political economist William Stanley Jevons. His 1865 treatise, The Coal Question, offered an answer to a long-­running fear about the exhaustion of Britain’s coal, grounded in his emerging theory that value was a subjective rather than material concern. The Coal Question did so by combining a growing understanding of the inescapable dissipation of energy with this theory of marginal utility.’4 Famously, Jevons argued: “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”5 According to his understanding of economics, subjective evaluations of usefulness (utility) governed human behavior. Increased engine efficiency would increase the utility that could be derived from a given amount of coal, serving only to induce more demand for power in a nation that had a seemingly unquenchable appetite for the products of coal-­fired industrialism. In 1866 Jevons’s argument prompted a Royal Commission to investigate the “quantity of coal” in Britain. Five years later, its conclusion split with that of Jevons, concluding that population growth would level-­off and demand for coal would soon be considerably satiated.6 Jevons’s paradoxical take on the energy-­saving capacities of energy efficiency was dismissed, and indeed over the following century a plethora of efficiency-­centered approaches to reducing energy demand emerged. This science of energy resource conservation emerged not only in economics but also from the disciplines of engineering, scientific management, and geology, amongst others.7 On the basis of this science, in the first half of the twentieth century, the enforcement of the conservation of energy resources became an obligation for governments to enforce. They were expected to address the wasteful excesses of commercial competition. What once, in Jevons’s view, been a paradoxical idea—­that energy could be saved via increased efficiency—­would gradually become commonplace policy.8 In the 1930s in the United States, following in the wake of the famed Progressive Era conservation movement, the rationing of petroleum production, foreign oil importation, and indirect control over petroleum and electricity prices, emerged as the three main policies for conserving energy resources at a national level. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, a new and more all-­encompassing science of energy resource conservation began to emerge in the United States. Numerous sciences were enrolled in this new approach. Here the focus is on a set of ideas derived from econometrics. This discipline, according to the founding statement of the Econometric Society, established in 1930 by economist Harold Hotelling and fifteen other academics, took a

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“theoretical-­quantitative and empirical-­quantitative approach to economic problems.”9 Hotelling would use an econometric model to argue that a causal relation between scarcity and price could mitigate the problem of scarcity by dissuading consumers from consuming resources as prices rose.10 Largely ignored at the time, this argument was granted renewed credibility during the 1970s, as it seemed to present a solution to the manifold energy crises of that decade.11 By emphasizing the role of the price mechanism, a Hotelling-­like approach to energy resource conservation would shift the onus to conserve from government to consumer. In this way, price-­driven theories of energy resource conservationism lent credibility to those calling for energy market liberalization. Here the focus is on a significant shift in the knowledge that constitutes the history of economic thought, those ideas that underlay subsequent policies for the conservation of resources rather than the specificities of the resulting policies and their outcomes, though these consequences will be touched upon. A more general objective in this work is to demonstrate the need for historians of energy to more closely engage with the history of economic thought. Historian of economics Philip Mirowski has documented the metaphorical coherence between the economists’ notion of utility and the physicist’s concept of energy.12 But aside from a few relatively recent exceptions, historians of energy have only patchily documented how the history of economic thought has impacted subsequent national and regional energy policies that largely shaped this aspect of history in the twentieth century.13 For much of the twentieth century, economists largely assumed that there was a positive correlation between energy use and economic growth. Put simply, the more energy, the more growth.14 This made sense, as both material and service-­based industries depend on the productive power provided by the consumption of energy resources.15 But since the late 1960s, the energy intensity of economic growth, the ratio between energy use and gross national product, has fallen in many countries. Some interpreted this fall in energy intensity as an indication that energy is not in fact correlated with economic growth, and that in the absence of certain sources of energy, alternatives means of growth can be found. To some, this was evidence that energy and economic growth could eventually be decoupled from one another.16 As the energy intensity of economic growth fell, it became possible, contra Jevons, to persuasively argue that humankind’s aggregate energy use could be reduced via increased efficiency, suggesting the planet’s stores of energy could be run down more slowly. Economic knowledge was particularly important to this belief in energy resource conservation. Within economic thought, energy

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shifted from a factor of production considered closely aligned to economic growth to something considered largely independent from it. Growth, a growing chorus argued, no longer depended upon the consumption of ever more energy.

The Historicity of Saving Energy Energy historians have paid little attention to past attempts made to save energy resources, preferring the more obvious historicity of resource use. This is despite the “father” of the field of energy history, John Nef, having argued that industrialisation, an event marked by the accumulation of capital and the exploitation of mineral coal, was driven, in part, by the onus to conserve wood fuel.17 Moreover, in the early twentieth century, electrification was promoted as a means of coal conservation, as it could produce power with greater efficiency than steam engines. With power effortlessly conveyed over a vast network, the more electricity consumers there were, the more coal could be “saved.”18 The onus to conserve was also central to the history of technology and the environment. To take one example, in 1893 Franco-­German engineer Rudolf Diesel hoped to develop an engine that could run on coal dust and even vegetable oil, all the better for saving anthracite coal. Diesel’s engine could also run on heavier fractions of crude, offering a cheaper source of motive power than petroleum, though one it was later realized had dire consequences for human and environmental health.19 Well-­meaning conservation measures have clearly had unanticipated environmental effects. The lack of interest in energy resource conservation is all the more stark given that conservation, in a general sense, is a foundational topic of inquiry in the field of environmental history.20 Within a vast corpus of conservation histories, the history of energy resource conservation has remained somewhat of a fringe interest, perhaps as the underlying idea is often confusingly addressed as a conflation of the physicist’s law of energy conservation and the environmentalist imperative of wise use.21 In order to distinguish the topic, here the term energy resource conservation is used to describe a broad set of scientific, legislative, and political imperatives that were developed over the long twentieth century to conserve energy resources, but also, and increasingly, to conserve energy in a more general sense, as it is understood in physics and engineering, as a measurement of a system’s ability to do work.22 The historical importance of energy efficiency has been put forward in the past. In 1933 the German-­American economist Erich Zimmermann argued historical explanations that focus solely on “changing energy supplies” risked presenting a form of “one-­sided materialistic determinism,” a stance that ignored “the equal, if not greater, importance of the fuller utilization of

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old forms and of limited amounts of energy, as well as the progress made in the avoidance of waste.”23 As it stands, however, amid a growing wave of energy historical inquiry, authors have tended to focus on energy transitions, overlapping accretions in different forms of fuel supply over time, or what more accurately can be described as energy additions, as new sources of power often come to supplement rather than replace the old.24 In maintaining such a focus, such work misses a large part of the wider energy-­historical story. Attempting to save energy has been shown to be historically consequent in the past and will likely become more so at a time when the majority of fossil fuels have been declared “unburnable” if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change.25

Institutionalist Energy Resource Conservation Like many aspects of environmental history, the influence of the North American Progressive Era conservation movement is an obligatory passage point. Driven by the reformist vision of President Theodore Roosevelt, this federal government initiative, in the words of its famed chronicler Samuel Hays, aimed “to replace competition with economic planning” and in doing so “create new heights of prosperity and material abundance.”26 Strategies for the maintenance of forests had long been a concern, but when it came to the question of exhaustible resources such as coal and petroleum, Roosevelt’s leading conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, hoped that a program of waste prevention, directed at industries that he and others perceived as wasteful and short-­ sighted, would leave more fuel for subsequent generations without overly restricting development in the present.27 Given the knotty practicalities of this intergenerational objective, it was no surprise conservation proved a popular topic for some of the first North American economists. Having founded the American Economic Association in 1885, Richard Ely would go on to publish The Foundations of National Prosperity in 1918, which advocated for the public ownership of all exhaustible resources. His pupil Lewis Cecil Gray identified the central conflict of conservationism lying “between the interest of the present and the future,” and in an observation of lasting influence, he claimed interest rates were critical to determining the rate at which resources should be used. The economist John Ise came next, and is remembered for having called for government oversight of markets in resource speculation, as “it is only by speculation, in one form or another, that resources are conserved for the future.”28 This first generation of North American economists had established the central issues in the economics of energy resource conservation: the disputed role of time, price, interest rates, speculation, and the role of government.29

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Progressive Era economic thought emerged out of the crucible of World War I somewhat reformed. The expediencies of wartime mobilization had indicated that the productive capacities of the nation could be reconfigured and planned in a manner that could achieve greater efficiencies than had occurred under private ownership. A new kind of progressive economist emphasized the need for state-­led economic interventions to correct the wasteful practices of competitive industry. They believed their work was distinguished by its attempts to account for the empirical complexities of real institutions as opposed to the mathematical abstractions associated with neoclassical economics and the laissez-­faire policies this school of thought conferred.30 This position was not so different to the Progressive School, which in Ely’s view, as he had written in 1918, addressed “the historical and statistical study of the actual conditions of economic life.”31 The institutionalists’ focus on the complex entities that constrained and enabled economic activity gave their work a sense of tractability over the material world. The growing credibility granted to institutionalist economic thinking, at universities ranging from Chicago to Texas, would go on to heavily influence North American petroleum conservation policy.32 Somewhat ironically, petroleum conservation was first prompted by this substance’s relative abundance. Between 1899 and 1929, US gasoline production had increased sixtyfold, from 7.4 million to 445 million barrels.33 In 1924 the Federal Oil Conservation Board (FOCB) was established, which built on the successes of the wartime Federal Fuel Administration, which had led fuel conservation and rationing initiatives. The FOCB was tasked with “retarding [oil] development whenever economic demand does not warrant.”34 This obligation to put the brakes on oil production was informed by the idea that if oil prices become too low, this would encourage “wastefulness and disregard” in its use.35 The idea that this state should act as a constraining spigot built on earlier state level initiatives, both Oklahoma and Texas had experimented with policies to control commercial petroleum extraction since the turn of the century. These attempts were more heavily enforced following the discovery of unexpectedly large oil fields in both states in the 1920s and 1930s.36 The FOCB hoped to introduce Texas-­style “pro-­rationing,” in which a state authority issued licenses that gave producers the right to produce a given quantity of petroleum, nationwide. The aim was that considerable quantities of oil would be saved by delaying its extraction and ensuring that which came to the surface was sold at a price that discouraged profligacy.37 This proposal, to deploy pro-­rationing in all of North America’s oil-­producing states, initially faced considerable opposition from industry. The Stock Market Crash of 1929,

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followed by the discovery of 140,000 subterranean acres of oil in East Texas three years later, the largest domestic discovery of petroleum to date, led a profusion of oil to reach the market just as commodity prices collapsed. At one point a barrel of oil sold for just twelve cents.38 Against the backdrop of an ongoing economic depression, this price collapse served to further undermine the view that market forces could offer any kind of regulative capacity.39 The economic prospects of the petroleum industry appeared increasingly untenable. As an engine of economic growth and the means by which, many believed, the war had been won, it was understandable that President Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, the Pennsylvanian reformist Harold Ickes, issued a memo in May 1933, calling for the election of what would be in effect a federal “oil dictator,” an authority able to control this volatile yet vital industry.40 The oil industry had long opposed any interference from the federal government, other than if advantageous subsidies could be agreed upon.41 Should conservation measures ever prove necessary, the American Petroleum Institute argued in 1925, then “the greatest field” for savings in fact lay in improving the efficiency of refineries or helping to foster the invention of more efficient combustion engines.42 The industry’s consumption-­centered approach placed its faith in competition-­driven technological improvements, a position that has obvious parallels to today’s consumer-­centered approach to saving energy.43 This approach was effectively the same as the normal profit-­making practices of the petroleum industry, as it was predicated on increasing the efficacy of production and increasing demand for their commodity. But by 1933, in newly straitened circumstances, the American Petroleum Institute announced a dramatic reversal in their view of conservation. Oil executives from fifty-­four companies agreed to voluntary federal supervision as part of a wider program of emergency legislation, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Their motivation in doing so was that amid a period of depression the state might help stabilize oil prices and help their industry return to stable profitability.44 Icke’s proposed oil code suggested that the federal government should issue each state with a set of production licenses, agreements intended to restrict the rate and scale of petroleum on the market. In effect, the hope was that through constricting supply the federal government could create a situation approximating that of market equilibrium, in which supply matched demand, and in doing so allow profitability to return to the sale of this curiously abundant commodity.45 Alas, in 1935, along with other provisions of NIRA, the US Supreme Court ruled that direct federal intervention in the oil industry was

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unconstitutional, as it was believed to clash with extant antitrust laws. However, the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935 appeared in its place, a piece of legislation introduced by Texas senator Tom Connally that forbade the interstate sale of excess oil production. Connally had established the Interstate Oil Compact, which would commit all oil-­producing states, aside from recalcitrant California, to Texas-­style rationing of oil production.46 The federal government’s role was reduced to issuing forecasts of anticipated market demand via the US Bureau of Mines; these futurological exercises provided an estimate of the nation’s oil requirements, setting the bounds within which production licenses could be issued.47 Economic thought had played a central role in the formation of this interventionist conservationism. The ideas of the “father” of institutional economics, Walton Hamilton, had grown in stature amongst policymakers as faith in the price mechanism had faltered during the Great Depression. As a member of NIRA’s National Recovery Administration Consumer’s Advisory Board, Hamilton had argued that direct federal control over the price of petroleum risked imposing higher prices that would be injurious to the consumer. More widely, Hamilton feared a price-­fi xing authority would be subject to unending industry lobbying. Instead, he proposed that the federal government should work within the institutional bounds of the extant oil industry. Pro-­rationing, as it emerged, was a particularly Hamiltonian form of indirect price manipulation that did not disregard the supposed regulative capacities of a freely operating petroleum market, while also placing constraints on the ultimate size of that market.48 Signs of progressive and institutionalist thinking with regard to fuels and power abounded at the time, from the Federal Water Power Act of 1920, which established the Federal Power Commission, to the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act (also known as the Guffey-­Snyder Coal Act) of 1935, which was directly influenced by Hamilton’s earlier work with the labor economist Helen Wright in 1925, in which they had criticized an increasingly monopolistic coal industry, and the Natural Gas Act of 1938, which had called for greater federal intervention in the provision of this fuel.49 As a facet of this wider interventionist resource policy, petroleum pro-­rationing would remain part of North America’s energy policy until 1972, when fears of oil scarcity were raised, and it was argued that the policy discouraged investment in domestic oil extraction.50 The full history of this institutionalist approach to energy resource conservation remains to be written, but here it is argued that the approach that emerged in the 1970s was defined in almost complete contradistinction to all that had come before.

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Importation as Energy Resource Conservation As the oil industry and the federal government had become more closely entwined in the 1930s, it was agreed that another important method for conserving petroleum was the importation of the fuel from beyond North America’s borders. A distinct form of “American lebensraum” was predicated on maintaining access to other nation’s resources, rather than undertaking the effective ownership of other nations, as colonial powers such as Great Britain had done.51 Petroleum had been imported to the United States from Mexico and Venezuela since the turn of the twentieth century, but a countervailing force was becoming apparent, the nationalization of oil resources by ascendant powers. From Russia in 1916 to Venezuela in 1950, acres of oil reserves would be removed from the global market by increasingly assertive states that were developing in a noncapitalist manner.52 In pursuit of continued control over the globe’s oil, the FOCB carried out a worldwide survey of the fuel’s availability in 1929, which revealed abundant untapped reserves. This exercise led the FOCB to conclude that “the development of foreign fields, through technical assistance and the further investment of American capital, would seem to be a logical conservation measure.”53 The problem was that just two years later the East Texas glut challenged the idea that importation was an effective means of conservation, as foreign supplies would further lower oil prices on the domestic market. With some lobbying, it was agreed that oil companies operating in the United States would have the right to sell foreign oil at rates commensurate with that of their domestic product. Given the fact that foreign oil was invariably produced at a far lower cost than domestic oil, this agreement provided industry with a mechanism for considerable profitmaking.54 As such, under the aegis of domestic oil conservation, increasing amounts of oil flowed to North America via a growing network of tankers and pipelines, thanks to import allowances which would assure continued US interference in the affairs of oil-­rich nations.55 Ironically, import licensing created a dependency on foreign oil which would provide a means by which a selection of oil-­producing states would try to regain sovereignty over their rightful energy resources. By restricting oil production as the United States had long done, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) embargo of October 1973 can quite justifiably be described as an act of conservation. These nations restricted their oil output to regain sovereignty over an irreplaceable resource that had long been ceded to foreign powers under exploitative concessionary agreements.56 It is often forgotten that, alongside assuming a greater role in commercial operations and having a say about the posted price of oil, the third of OPEC’s

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founding objectives had been the “efficient development and conservation of petroleum resources.”57 Perhaps then, rather than the deployment of an “oil weapon,” as the embargo was branded in the West, historians could be more ecumenical if they considered this action as a form of anticolonial activism?58 To do otherwise is to continue endorsing a Western-­centric mode of explanation.59 North America’s response to OAPEC’s conservationist move was to further shed production-­centered approaches to energy resource conservation. As mentioned, pro-­rationing policies were cut in 1972, and oil importation quotas were dropped by President Richard Nixon in 1973. Both these steps were taken in an attempt to avoid forecasted shortages in oil supply and to lessen the threat of further cartelization by foreign oil-­producing nations.60 In response to the OPEC embargo, US energy policy would gain a new focus: the identification and reduction of the determinants of energy demand at the consumption end. This indirect-­demand-­centered approach to energy policy was suited to this period of détente Cold War. In a sense, the approach to energy resource conservation that emerged was based on body of research that could rightly be described as “détente science.” In contrast to the overtly militaristic and centrally planned orientation of Cold War science, détente science was defined by a nonconfrontational, somewhat anti-­technocratic, and market-­ rather than state-­led approach to implementation.61 Critical to this, was that since the late 1960s, the prerogatives of federally funded science had shifted from an interest in “basic” science, which pursued supposedly fundamental research questions which were not tied to a specific militaristic or industrial use, to problem-­oriented “applied” science in which utility was an explicit aim.62 Under the aegis of this new agenda, a number of North America’s leading research organizations successfully applied for funding to investigate the determinants of energy demand and to explore alternative means of increasing supply under the Research Applied to National Needs program (RANN).63 This support for energy-­related applied science was the impetus by which disparate approaches to fuel conservation would be transformed into a far-­reaching set of scientifically informed policies that sought the improved conservation of energy resources. Though initially outside the remit of the National Science Foundation, by 1970 economics would receive the greatest amount of federal government support of all the social sciences. This was thanks in part to RANN, which allowed the budget for federal support for social science to triple.64 Increasingly, well-­f unded econometricians would come to play a central role in the science of energy resource conservation as practitioners sought to remodel the US energy economy.

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In the 1980s, political scientist Martin Greenberger noted the strange effect the energy crisis had affected upon the discipline’s understanding of the relation between energy and the economy. He wrote: “Early in the crisis, there was a prevalent view promoted by many in industry that reduction in the rate of increase of energy use would impair the U.S. economy.”65 However, as oil prices quadrupled following the embargo, with knock-­on effects on the price of related fuels, Greenberger noted a new “notion gradually took hold.” By the end of the decade, econometricians increasingly modeled energy as just one aspect of economic growth and policymakers increasingly accepted the idea that “reduced energy growth need not stall economic progress.”66 The idea of that economic growth required energy had been shaken.

Institutionalizing Energy Determinism Martin Greenberger was not alone in this belief. In 1978 the economist Sam Schurr had argued that the study of energy and the economy using formal econometric methods, a “new art, scarcely more than five years old,” was not only novel but transformative. Perhaps for the first time, such models indicated that “economic growth can be substantially separated from energy growth.”67 The novelty of this development was clear if one appreciates that for much of the twentieth century, North American energy policy had been based—­both implicitly and, at times, explicitly—­on the idea that energy use and economic growth were tightly coupled. Since 1935 the Federal Power Commission (FPC) had been committed to ensuring “ample supplies of power at low cost” as part of the New Deal era’s emphasis on social equity and development.68 Fears of energy resource scarcity was a central justification behind the National Resources Policy pursued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, even if there was little evidence of this dearth at the time.69 The iconic hydroelectrical dams of that era arguably provided an “outlet for human labour,” rather than satiating a public’s unmet demand for energy.70 But there were certainly distributional inequalities to overcome. The Rural Electrification Administration, following a development strategy established by the Tennessee Valley Authority, enabled the provision of low-­cost hydroelectricity to this hardscrabble region of rural America, helping to affirm a sense of energy’s determinative role in postwar economic development.71 A second wave of interest in the question of energy and resources was prompted by the upswing in consumption that began in the 1950s, when US resources were depleted first by the war effort, then by the Marshall Plan, and then by the resource intensity of the Korean War. President Harry S. Truman launched a commission to investigate the future of what was referred to as

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Materials Policy. The Paley Commission—­named for its chairman, broadcaster William Paley—­involved an extensive survey of the “free world’s energy and resource base in an effort to ensure that in the event of an all-­out war at any time in the next 25 years, will the United States and its allies have enough fuels and other forms of energy to support full economic mobilisation and maximum fighting strength.”72 Despite raising the specter of resource scarcity, however, the Paley Report had forecast that the noncommunist nations’ resources needs would double over the next twenty-­five years, a requirement that would commit the United States, as this bloc’s self-­anointed leader, toward a future of inexorable economic growth, an expansion fueled by ever-­greater energy use and throughput of other country’s raw materials.73 It was this emphasis on growth, one reviewer noted, that distinguished “the Paley approach” to that of the institutionalism associated with the New Deal.74 But if the Paley Report committed the United States to a future of ever more growth, it did so in a way as much aligned with the institutionalism of the New Deal as it did with the belief in competitive efficiency that was characteristic of neoclassical economics. For example, the report praised the “considerable progress” pro-­rationing policy had made in avoiding waste in the petroleum and natural gas sectors, citing a study that suggested 50 percent more oil had been recovered in the policy’s twenty-­year lifetime than would have been achieved in the absence of such a regulation.75 There was also some discussion of the potential provision of solar energy, but a mere seven pages it was drowned out by the report’s emphasis on mineral resources.76 Demand-­ side reductions were also largely disregarded, with predicted increases in automobile efficiency offering the only notable exception.77 While a central tenet of neoclassical economics was evident in the report’s assertion that scarcity could be governed by the price mechanism: material shortages would lead to price increases, which revealed the “real cost” of further consumption. This unit would reflect the cost of labor, the impact of technological efficiency, and total global resource availability. If resources became scarce, costs would increase so as to deter absolute denudation.78 In effect, the Paley Report called for ramped up New Deal–style conservationism alongside, where appropriate, a freely operating price mechanism, approaches which in concert would allow the prolongation of the resource base North America and its allies depended on.79 Paley’s well-­publicized views led the Truman administration to establish a permanent independent research group, Resources For the Future (RFF), in Washington, DC, in 1952. This organization would meld conservationism with national defense. The majority of its financial support initially came from the Ford Foundation, which was

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seen as a bulwark against overt government interference. This interstitial position, neither fully private nor fully public, remains a characteristic of think tanks, even if RFF avoided such a title.80 One of the most important early publications RFF produced was a longitudinal study published in 1960 that addressed the relation between energy and economic growth. Energy in the American Economy: 1850–1975 was lead authored by former wartime National Bureau of Economic Research economist Sam Schurr, who offered a detailed survey of the nation’s energy resource use over the past fifty-­five years and then forecast the prospects for the next twenty. A striking finding was that between the years 1940 to 1955, US energy use had grown by 3.5 percent per year, closely mirroring the average annual economic growth rate of the period, 3.7 percent. Schurr’s study was more nuanced than this headline suggested, as his data showed how the energy intensity of production had fallen as fuel was used with greater efficiency, which meant this correlation faltered further back in time. The overall message, however, was that over the past century, energy use and economic growth had been tightly coupled, outside of periods of marked technological progress.81 From an institutionalist perspective, however, no clear conclusion about the relation between energy and economic growth could be reasonably drawn from Schurr’s study, as it could be argued that this correlation had been constructed by federal policies. Given that both the rate of petroleum production and importation was constrained by a plethora of policies for much of this period, and that electricity prices were kept below the market rate by utilities, as an acknowledgement of their somewhat monopolistic position (also a remnant of the equitable aims of the New Deal era), it was impossible to say if the tight coupling of energy use and economic growth indicated the energy-­ determined nature of economic growth or a policy-­engineered correlation in which subsidized power acted as an unrecognized engine.82

Calculating Energy Indeterminism Thanks to the work of historian Timothy Mitchell, the economist Robert Solow’s post-­crisis reappraisal of Harold Hotelling’s forgotten 1931 publication on the economics of exhaustible resources is now well-­k nown. Strongly mathematical, Hotelling had argued the best way to conserve oil was to allow its price to rise with interest rates. At a certain point it would become more profitable, in the long run, to leave oil in the ground than exploit it. Less well-­ known is that Hotelling had described pro-­rationing and other “prohibitions against oil and mineral development” as “publicly ordained inefficiency,” as it distorted the ability of interest to govern the best rate of petroleum exploitation.83 Unfortunately for him, his publication coincided with the discovery

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of the East Texas Oil Field in 1931. The resulting glut of oil that entered the market made Hotelling’s idea about the relationship between inflation-­driven prices and oil supply nonsensical.84 Following the oil crisis of 1973, Solow picked up Hotelling’s argument in a lecture given to the American Economics Association, in an attempt to discredit calls for interventionist energy policy in the wake of the oil embargo. While important, Solow’s renewed advocacy for interest rates as a conservation mechanism tells only part of the history of the economics profession’s reaction to the energy crisis. The crisis had itself created new knowledge in regard to the “price elasticity” of energy and the “optimal distribution of resources” that predated Solow’s pronouncement. Far from affirming the determinative role of energy in human affairs, by embellishing these two facets of econometric reasoning with empirical evidence, the crisis undermined any simple belief in a determinate relation between energy and economic growth. As Stanford econometrician James Sweeney noted at the time, for economists, the energy crisis had been “a natural experiment” that provided an empirical demonstration, to some at least, of “the sensitivity of energy consumption to prices” in the absence of market interventions. The price shock, the fourfold increase in oil prices the embargo caused, had affirmed that energy was an “elastic” good: as prices went up, demand had fallen.85 This idea, that price rises caused consumers to seek substitutes or forego consumption, had been accepted in neoclassical economic theory since the late nineteenth century.86 But given the influence of progressive and institutionalist economics, and the conservation movement and the New Deal they inspired, a belief in energy’s determinate role had been firmly enshrined in policy.87 To understand how the public’s demonstration of energy price elasticity was affirmed by econometric reasoning, I turn to one of the decade’s most influential economists, the Dutch-­American economist Tjalling Koopmans. In 1948, while employed at the RAND Corporation, a Californian think tank, Koopmans had developed an econometric method for demonstrating the optimal allocation of resources in situations, such as that of military spending, in which market forces were not free to operate. His method used a set of linear equations which listed the given resource inputs and the ratios at which they could be combined. Commodities could be combined in various productive “activities,” represented by coefficients reflecting various real-­world constraints, from which a vast number of variations in “output” could be derived. By calculating the output values of all possible input ratios and activities at each stage of production, the “optimal” allocation of resources in a given system could be arrived at. Given the sheer number of calculations that had to be carried out in such an operation, linear programming of this kind ben-

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efitted from the use of newly available electronic computers. However, “optimality” was a criterion that could only be defined according to perspective of the analyst. For instance, the method could be used to maximize or minimize a given input or output over time.88 In the case of energy resource conservation, this meant that to achieve an optimal outcome, Koopmans noted, such calculations had to simulate the “decentralization of decisions concerning activity levels.”89 By its very definition, a centralized decisionmaker, such as the Department of Defense, could not hope to effectively intervene at all levels of production. In proposing the idea of econometric simulacra of decentralized decision-­making, Koopmans’s method reversed the logic of institutional economics by suggesting a given institution could be remodeled according to the principle of optimality, rather than those formulating economic theory having to accommodate institutional peculiarities in their work.90 Linear programming, as Koopmans’s approach became known, had clear implications for energy resource conservation. In the pro-­rationing era, the economics of energy had less to do with the abstractions of neoclassical economics than the specificities of legal precedence, institutions, geology, and politics.91 Useful economic knowledge came from economists such as Zimmermann, who stressed the determinant role of specific institutional arrangements and legal precedence in shaping economic dynamics.92 His fellow German émigré, economist-­agronomist Siegfried Ciriacy Wantrup, provided one demonstration of the impact that Koopmans’s mathematical approach had on those addressing the problem of resource conservation. Writing from Berkeley’s Agricultural Experiment Station in 1961, Wantrup argued for “resource planning,” the idea being that the institutions which determined resource use should be rearranged so the value derived from their consumption could be maximized.93 In effect, in his schema the economics of resource conservation policy were reversed. Instead of accommodating institutional peculiarities, Wantrup argued institutions should be restructured so their collective interactions worked to reduce rates of resource consumption below the level that they would have otherwise occurred at. In effect, he advocated linear programming as a means of resource conservation.

The New Politics of Energy Resource Conservation Writing in 1963, Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse, two economists working at RFF, noted how two notions of conservation had been unhelpfully conflated in the past. The first notion was that of the Progressive Era idea of scientific resource management, which had led to the interventions of the New Deal. The second form of conservation was the econometrician’s notion of optimizing the use of a scarce resource by allowing decentralized decision-­makers to

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calculate the optimal use rate and allocation of this resource over time.94 The earlier form of conservation implied the need for economic planning, while the second was more in line with the tenets of a free and competitive market. They wrote at the tail end of the second Red Scare, when central planning was seen as something Soviet. In this context Barnett and Morse provocatively described interventionist conservation as if it were part of a wider revolution against the “philosophy of the self-­regulating market,” adding, for extra clarity, that “Marxism was another European part of that revolution in ideas.”95 In equating interventionist conservation to the revolutionary Marxism of the United States’ Cold War enemy Barnett and Morse gave a clear indication of the degree to which the US intellectual climate had become hostile to centralized and interventionist policies. In some way, this ideological turn was partly underscored by developments in economic thought. Koopmans was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1975, and two years later his notion of optimal resource found itself applied to the ongoing energy crisis at the behest of the federal government.96 In 1977 the economist was selected by the Carter administration to lead a major simulation exercise called Energy Modeling for an Uncertain Future, which was part of a large-­scale effort to address the long-­term problems posed by growing energy demand. Working under the aegis of the newly established Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems (CONAES), Koopmans took a prespecified projection of desired future gross national product, and then used this as the basis for the computation of six different “plausible paths” for the future of North American energy use to the year 2010. For each scenario, the simulation’s base data remained the same, only the energy resource price and income the elasticities of demand would vary with each model run.97 Within this framework, two operations were carried out. The first used linear programming to, in Koopmans’s words, “simulate the behavior of a competitive market economy.”98 In effect, equations acted as decision-­makers, seeking substitutes and optimal configurations of productive inputs. The second operation involved the calculation of the long-­run analysis of elasticities of demand over time, a value that was a function of consumer income, prices, and quantities of energy consumed. These exercises indicated that between 1975 and 2010, the United States could reduce its energy demand by 10–20 percent whilst reducing GNP growth by only 1 or 2 percent. In effect, the CONAES model suggested energy demand could be significantly decoupled from economic growth. Reductions of 60 percent of final energy use in 2010 were estimated to reduce GNP by only between 2 and 20 percent, depending on whether the price elasticity of demand for energy ranged between 0.5 and

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0.25.99 Thanks to the uncertainties of the oil crisis, a wide range of elasticities were assumed credible. Addressing the American Economic Association in 1978, Koopmans argued that the CONAES model, and the more well-­k nown and well-­publicized Ford Foundation Time to Choose study, which came out in 1974, on the future energy demand, had been similarly underwritten by econometric linear programming,100 demonstrated an “important trait of the neoclassical model”; such a model, Koopmans told the assembled audience, “does not postulate one sole primary resource”; in fact, “any primary input to production can be substituted to some extent for any other.” This meant, “In this view ‘the energy problem’ is not one of just saving energy regardless of the cost of other resources. It is rather one of seeing to it that the increasing real cost of domestic energy extraction and supply, and the increased market power of OPEC, are—­over time—­reflected in the real prices of primary energy forms relative to other primary inputs.”101 If the “real” price of energy were allowed to emerge from out of the competitive churn of the market, consumers would be encouraged to conserve and find substitutes or scarce energy sources. Koopmans offered a very clear statement of the new approach to energy resource conservation. In his view the problem was not so much shortages of specific fuels or substitutes, but the inability of a policy constrained market to reconfigure the different components of the economy to efficiently accommodate any shortages in a specific input, such as that of a specific energy resource. To advocates of this new conservationism, the problem of energy resource conservation could no longer be attended to by the state, instead it required the disciplining forces of a liberalized market. This modeling was just one part of the wide-­ranging CONAES project, which brought hundreds of experts of differing views together, and was greatly delayed. The final publication was a foot-­high pile of printed matter, and appeared only in 1980, as President Ronald Reagan came to power.102 The Republican president’s belief that the energy crises had not been caused by “a shortage of oil” so much as a “surplus of government” found a supportive quantitative ally in the results of Koopman’s model, and the justification it provided for liberalization of energy and resource markets.103

An Unrecognized Transition? There was something distinct about the economics of energy resource conservation in the 1970s. By contextualizing the development of these ideas over the long twentieth century, this chapter has offered a wide-­ranging genealogy for the now commonplace injunction that we can best save energy via increas-

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ing the efficiency of its use. This stood in contrast to the production-­centered approach that had dominated for much of the first half of the century. In contrast to the empirical richness of this prior institutionalist conservation, a new econometric approach to modeling conservation allowed the various components of the energy economy to be understood as heterogenous parts of a single interacting system.104 This systematization of the dynamics of energy demand gave econometricians a conceptual basis from which discrete “closed worlds” could be constructed via computational models, representations of real-­world systems within the parameters of energy resource policy could be tested.105 These models also offered an authoritative means of quantifying how much energy could be conserved via a given policy, information useful to both policymakers and the public. In light of such models, the relation between energy and economic growth was cast as less determinate (or more elastic) than many in the discipline had previously thought. This discovery of energy indeterminism proved consequential. This new economics of energy resource conservation attested that federal control over the price and supply of fuels resulted in suboptimal forms of use. For optimality to occur, a mechanism that aggregated the decisions or feedback of myriad individual energy users had to be constructed. For many advocates of energy saving, a liberalized market for energy (and other resources) appeared to be the solution. As such, it is evident that the pursuit of energy resource conservation provided an important strand of a more comprehensive program of neoliberal thinking, though one underwritten with a technocratic, and in this case an energy resource-­conserving rationale. The liberalizing imperative that this move enculturated suggests not only that energy conservation is a worthy subject of energy historical inquiry, but that close attendance to its shifting logics can serve to illustrate wider trends in both the history of economic thought and economic history. In our fossil fuel–wracked present, the idea that the free operation of the market can act as a vast energy resource conserving system continues to have a potent appeal. It offers those making energy and climate policy a seemingly painless solution to reducing our energy dependencies. If such efficiencies are not translated into material reductions in fossil fuel use, however, true conservation will remain elusive.

Part III A STALLED TRANSITION? Nuclear Energy’s Dilemmas and Possibilities

As oil use was surging across North America and Europe, another energy was emerging that promised to liberate humanity from energetic limits entirely. Nuclear power, distinct from chemical forms of energy like wood, coal, or oil, released energy by splitting atoms at a molecular level. In 1954 Lewis Strauss, head of the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), famously captured the nuclear utopianism gripping the world when he proclaimed electricity would soon be too cheap to meter. The upshot: the high energy societies on both sides of the Atlantic would be able to continue their growth trajectory ad infinitum. Or so many hoped. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, this energy transition ran aground on a number of shoals, including cost overruns, high interest rates, accidents, expanding regulatory oversight, and, above all, grassroots protests. In retrospect, historians often portray nuclear energy as a transition that never came to fruition. Where oil and coal both surpassed major thresholds of global supply within a single generation, first 10 percent, then 25 percent, then 40 percent, nuclear energy barely even crested the first of these. It has historically been an expensive source of electricity, and few new reactors have come online in Europe or North America since the 1980s. Nevertheless, nuclear power profoundly and irreversibly transformed

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societies throughout Europe and North America, changing the way people understood key aspects of social experience, ranging from the role of experts in government to the meaning of technological progress to new temporalities that reached far beyond human life spans. Nuclear power, better than perhaps any other energy source, illustrates how energy transitions defy quantification and reach beyond the economy into other spheres of life.1 Already in the 1930s and 1940s, as the first major experiments in splitting atoms were becoming well-­k nown, science fiction writers began cultivating the hope that nuclear energy could solve humanity’s problems. David Dietz, a science editor for Scripps Howard News Service, predicted people would soon fuel their cars not with gasoline but with a vitamin-­sized “pellet of atomic energy” that could last a year.2 But when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 to bring a violent war to a violent end, fears of nuclear proliferation swamped hopes for a new world based on the atom. Until the mid-­1950s, nuclear meant “the bomb,” nuclear research was devoted to military affairs, and all things nuclear were rigidly controlled by governments with access to this new technology: the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.3 Atomic utopianism returned in the 1950s. In the midst of an arms race, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to offset the image of the United States as warmonger, announced in 1953 his Atoms for Peace initiative at the United Nations, claiming a step toward global development by making fissile materials available for civilian energy programs around the world. The following year the Soviet Union shocked the world when it connected a nuclear reactor to the electricity grid for the first time. Then in Geneva, at the First International Conference on Atomic Energy in 1955, the presiding officials portrayed nuclear power as nothing less than a third major rupture in humanity’s progress, one that would rival the agricultural and industrial revolutions.4 Developing atomic electricity on a commercial scale, however, proved to be an immense challenge that required cooperation across borders and along transnational axes. Nuclear development unfolded in two spheres that corresponded with the lines of the Cold War. To the West, the United States, as the architect of the bomb, took the lead in nuclear research. The country’s first commercial reactor illustrates how complex systems like energy networks are profoundly shaped by technological momentum. In 1950 the US Navy began designing a reactor to power submarines using water as a moderator. When the Duquesne Power Company started constructing America’s first grid-­ linked reactor near the former coal capital of Pittsburgh, they worked with the military engineer who had overseen the naval project, and used the already established naval technology. Because of the head start the light-­water reactor

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enjoyed from military research, this model became the first commercialized civilian nuclear reactor in the United States (second in the noncommunist world, after Caldor Hall in England). Although Great Britain, France, and West Germany all tried to develop their own reactor technology—­for economic reasons as well as for prestige—­the quantity of the United States’ investment, combined with its near monopoly on enriching uranium, meant that by the 1970s, nearly every Western European country converted to the light-­water model. This convergence was facilitated by groups within these countries that actively sought out American assistance. They feared that the “the atomic revolution [would] burst the archaic character” of their economies if Europe did not keep up with the United States.5 But their continent, they believed, remained too fragmented and impoverished after World War II to carry out such a revolution on its own. Beginning in 1955 European notables visited the United States, returning with plans for a massive atomic investment program that would also advance a parallel political project to integrate the Western half of the continent. The European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) was the result, the third institution of European unification alongside the European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Market. And while Euratom never lived up to the hope vested in it, the agreement opened the way for bilateral uranium deals between America and Western Europe.6 Western Europe’s nuclear development, in other words, developed in the shadow of the American superpower. A parallel process of technological momentum and path dependency evolved in Eastern and Central Europe, as Sonja D. Schmid illustrates in chapter 9. Much like their neighbors to the West, communist states hoped to modernize their economies through nuclear power and secured technical aid from the Soviet Union to build commercial reactors. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany all hoped to achieve greater energy independence through this technology, but eventually they became mired in new relationships of dependence and debt with their patron to the East, beholden to Soviet reactor designs as well as Soviet control over the uranium enrichment and reprocessing cycle. This dependence persisted, even after the collapse of communism in 1989. Except for the former East Germany, these states kept most Cold War–era reactors running, and serviced them with components that came from either Czechoslovakia, which was a major subcontractor for the Eastern Bloc’s nuclear sector, or Russia itself. In Eastern as in Western Europe, nuclear power as a dream of energy independence remained only partially fulfilled. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, moreover, the nuclear energy transition was thoroughly a product of scientists and the state. Indeed, the extent of state initiative was unprecedented in energy history. The state acted as a

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nuclear energy entrepreneur rather than just an institution establishing the rules of commerce and investment.7 While the rise of oil was assisted by states through geopolitical protection and generous subsidies, which shaped the incentives facing private enterprise, oil companies still initiated key technological developments that made petroleum so pervasive. In the 1950s and 1960s, by contrast, nuclear power was pushed by scientists and government officials against the wishes of sectors that would later become central to the atomic industry. Most importantly, electrical utilities in both Europe and the United States were reluctant to spend the vast sums needed to advance this risky new technology at a time when coal, natural gas, and oil seemed abundant and cheap. As a result, in every country with a nuclear industry, the state put up astounding levels of initial investment, offered incredible financial guarantees, pushed its own ideas about reactor technology, and assumed huge risk in underwriting the costs associated with insuring a potential accident, a risk that was so high to be literally incalculable and thus uninsurable without the state. By the early 1960s, the argument of atomic utopians in the 1950s—­t hat nuclear technology would pay dividends in the future, not only through inexpensive electricity, but through export possibilities, technological spinoffs, and the development of human capital—­became a truism among government officials and scientists alike.8 Beyond the state’s role in breaking new barriers to push through an energy transition, nuclear power also transformed the very way citizens thought about political representation, biological reproduction, spatiality, and temporality, as Natasha Zaretsky illustrates in chapter 10. Contemporaries began to realize that radiation from bombs or power plants could cause fetal mutations, producing complex political debates around the rights of the unborn. Radiation, moreover, did not stop at political boundaries, meaning that no single country had the capacity to control it. Nuclear energy thus broke the limits of political citizenship as it had traditionally been conceived through the nation-­state, forcing people to consider future generations as well as other countries that could suffer without ever splitting an atom themselves. As Zaretsky points out, nuclear power marked a new phase of the Anthropocene by radically expanding politics, making citizens realize they had responsibility for processes that reached beyond the present generation and beyond their political community, a development that climate change would expand still further in the 1990s and 2000s. In the United States, the year 1979 marked a turning point for nuclear energy following an accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania. A full meltdown was avoided, but the confusion and disinformation coming from the federal and local governments sparked protests throughout the coun-

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try. After 1979, no new nuclear plants were ordered in the United States, and in Europe only a handful were commissioned (mostly in France) after an even worse nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl in 1986. There, a core meltdown sent a cloud of radiation from Ukraine north to Scandinavia, where it was first noticed by Swedish scientists, before it descended to Central Europe and caused panic across the continent. Governments struggled to ascertain the details of the accident and its potential damages, losing the confidence of many citizens, who received competing information from different authorities about whether it was safe to go outside, to eat foodstuffs that may have been exposed to radiation, or whether populations should remain on full lockdown. The disaster seemed to vindicate ideas published that same year by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck about the dawn of a new “Risk Society,” where the dangers of industrial modernity were generating “irreversible threats to the life of plants, animals, and human beings,” threats that were “no longer limited to certain localities or groups, but rather exhibit a tendency to globalization.”9 But in fact, the nuclear transition began to stall even before 1979 in both North America and Western Europe on the twin obstacles of high costs and grassroots resistance. The oil shock of 1973 had spawned huge plans to expand nuclear capacity in all atomic nations. France began a major new reactor campaign in the early 1970s, and West Germany placed nuclear power at the heart of its Energy Programs of 1973 and 1974. In the United States, reactor orders peaked during these two years, with ninety-­nine new contracts for power plants. The AEC forecasted that by the year 2000, the United States would have a thousand reactors in operation, requiring it to issue a new permit every week for twenty-­seven years. But the lack of a standardized reactor design, increasingly complex regulatory oversight, and the surging costs of capital—­ arguably the key determinant of the entire price tag for building such capital-­ intensive projects—­led the cost of reactors to soar, and with it the price of electricity produced from uranium. By the 1980s, coal-­powered electricity was almost universally cheaper than nuclear power. Meanwhile, new revelations about acceptable radiation levels and safety standards emerged. Radiation, heat pollution, and storage increasingly seemed to endanger local communities. Citizens thus began protesting states’ nuclear agendas. Demonstrations at Wyhl (1975) and Brokdorff (1976) in West Germany; Seabrook, New Hampshire (1976), in the United States; and Malville (1977) in France drew tens of thousands of people and forged transnational connections among protestors.10 As Dolores L. Augustine illustrates in chapter 11, this emergent antinuclear movement realized it needed counter-­expertise to push their agenda in the political sphere and in the courts against government-­f unded, pro-­nuclear experts. The nuclear transition underscored to the public just how politicized

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scientific expertise had become, and in response an entirely new strata of independent energy research institutions emerged during the late 1970s and 1980s. From the Eco-­Institute in Freiburg, Germany, to the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, these new organizations called on Europeans and Americans to rethink nuclear power in particular, and energy consumption and production in general. In West Germany they provided legal, economic, and scientific expertise that helped the antinuclear movement win court battles and strengthen regulatory regimes for reactors. Stricter licensing procedures forced longer building times. Such regulation combined with high interest rates and reduced energy demand after the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks to make atomic power economically uncompetitive. Between 1979 and 1983, West Germany and the United States commissioned their last reactors, and France and Great Britain dramatically slowed their pace of construction. From the 1980s on, the new counter-­experts would themselves transition, expanding beyond nuclear energy to take the lead in pushing for a different sort of energy transition, away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies to fight the growing threat of global warming. The chapters in this section point to larger conclusions about how the history of the incomplete energy transition to nuclear power can help us rethink the energy shift underway today. In chapter 9 Sonja D. Schmid underscores how there is no fast track to energy prosperity, how energy transitions take time, but also how transitions can create unexpected entanglement that pose new problems. The states of Eastern and Central Europe hoped to achieve energy independence from fossil fuel imports by building their own nuclear industry with Soviet assistance. But in the process, they came to depend on Soviet fuel refinement, expertise, and equipment. Like nuclear power at mid-­century, renewable energy today suggests the prospect of energy independence, and in fact this rhetoric surrounds green energy. Yet the components and rare minerals required for solar panels and batteries raise their own challenges, since many of these inputs come from countries that European and American leaders consider to be geopolitical rivals, above all China. Natasha Zaretsky’s chapter, meanwhile, is a powerful reminder of the intergenerational problems raised by certain kinds of energies. Atomic power raised the specter that humanity might forever alter the earth’s ecosystem in a way that damaged the unborn and future generations. Such fears were powerful catalysts for the pushback against nuclear power, and helped mobilize social groups, such as conservative Christians, who had little in common with liberal or radical antinuclear protesters. Today, could similar concerns about the threat to the unborn from global warming bring together groups that might otherwise have little in common? Lastly, in chapter 11 Dolores L. Augustine

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illustrates how utterly crucial expertise has been to advancing or stalling the emergence of new energies. In West Germany, new counter-­experts not only mobilized knowledge about the danger of atomic energy, but more importantly, they wielded that knowledge in the court of public opinion to build alliances and achieve desired outcomes—­namely, an end to new reactor construction. How can a similar widespread, political mobilization of knowledge about the dangers of fossil fuels be achieved today? And what would be required for such mobilization to have the same effect as antinuclear knowledge did in the 1970s and 1980s?

nine

NUCLEAR ENERGY AND THE DREAM OF INDEPENDENCE The Case of Eastern Europe

Sonja D. Schmid

At a time when some nations have decided to abandon nuclear energy as not worth the risk of severe accidents, others embrace it—­either indifferently, for a lack of viable alternatives, or deliberately, as a rational option to combat climate change. Gone are the days of enthusiasm for energy “too cheap to meter” and a way to bring about rapid progress and modernization by relying on “atoms for peace.” One thing that has retained its relevance in the twenty-­first century is the concern over energy security, and the fear of depending on an energy monopolist who might use their power to achieve political ends. Suffice it to mention here the Russian decision to cut gas deliveries to Europe in 2009 over a dispute with Ukraine, and the European Union’s ongoing plans to reduce its dependence on Russian gas.1 Nuclear energy, likewise, has turned out to be a dead end in terms of energy independence. Nations that received Soviet technical support in creating their nuclear industries in the 1960s and 1970s are finding it difficult to cut the ties still connecting them to Soviet reactor designs, Russian enrichment services, and even waste management. Moreover, Russia’s nuclear state corporation, Rosatom, has without a doubt maintained and perfected its expertise in all things nuclear, making it an attractive choice for both nations that are looking at replacing their older generation reactors (such as Hungary and Bulgaria), and nuclear newcomers

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that find Rosatom’s financing model for the twenty-­first-­century version of the 1970s “turn-­key” nuclear plant persuasive (such as Turkey and Bangladesh).2 Conventional wisdom has it that Russia, and formerly the Soviet Union, utilized (and still utilizes) its wealth of resources and its monopoly on delivering them to exert political pressure. Resource access and supply dominance have often been linked to abuse and even extortion, most prominently with reference to the 1970s oils crisis, when a monopoly of oil producers took the rest of the world hostage by cutting back on oil deliveries. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had come under Soviet control after World War II, and Moscow explicitly dictated their political order. Beyond the political realm, however, they shared a vision of rebuilding their war-­torn economies, of modernizing their societies, and of harnessing the power of science and technology to accomplish these goals. Energy, then, and particularly nuclear energy, cannot be explained by reference to price and efficiency alone. These were important factors that Soviets and their Eastern European allies considered, but nuclear energy also promised a bright, modern future. Rapid socioeconomic transformation opened up new opportunities for Eastern European citizens. The Soviet emphasis on education, modernization, and progress was compatible with hopes and needs of many CEE elites.3 The deep-­seated belief in the modernizing power of science and technology was widespread, even beyond the socialist camp. Nuclear energy in particular emerged as the symbol of progress and modernity in the 1950s, and capitalist and communist leaders alike pursued nuclear energy even before the idea of an independent energy supply became a dominant concern.4 Following World War II, the Soviets established subsidized oil and gas deliveries to their European allies, and while there is no denying that they often used their resource monopoly strategically, the extent and effectiveness of putting this position of power to work in the nuclear realm seems to have been strangely underutilized. As several scholars have pointed out, CEE nations benefitted tremendously from Moscow’s clumsy and lackluster attempts to barter raw materials for other goods, resulting in a net subsidy to their countries.5 To a surprising extent, Moscow “got played” by its allies when it came to energy policy. Under the guise of maintaining regime stability at home, Central and Eastern European nations successfully extracted concessions from the Soviets that were not only valuable in terms of technical assistance but also substantial in terms of financial commitment and generosity of expert support. How did this perverse situation play out in the emerging nuclear power sector? To varying degrees, and largely based on the damage done by the war, Central and Eastern European nations embraced nuclear energy early on. Few of

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them had domestic resources, and they had soon found themselves in complete economic dependence on the regional hegemon for oil and gas deliveries. In addition to its modernizing promise, nuclear energy suggested an alternative to this increasingly precarious dependence, but more importantly, it seemed to offer a fast lane toward progress and modernization. The world was still trying to understand the connections between civilian and military nuclear programs, and how to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Soviet leaders were particularly concerned about President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative as a proliferation risk, and went about assisting their allies with great hesitance and caution.6 Keeping a relationship of dependence—­on fuel supplies, and spent fuel take-­back arrangements—­was one way of curbing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet, in a fascinating example of creatively subverting colonialism, Central and Eastern European nations managed to put pressure on their Soviet counterparts to commit to massive technical assistance, first by providing CEE research institutions with research reactors, and second by constructing full-­scale power reactors for electricity production. Even though these programs were slow to come to fruition, in part because the Soviets were still struggling to get their own nuclear industry off the ground, eventually four of the Socialist People’s Republics—­t he German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria—­started operating Soviet-­ designed nuclear power reactors. In addition, high-­voltage transmission lines were installed to transmit electricity from dedicated nuclear power reactors within Soviet Ukraine to Central and Eastern European power grids. By the time the oil crisis hit the Western world, CEE was already well on its way to supplementing, with plans to replace, its electricity generating industries with nuclear. The oil crisis, then, made the realization of ambitious nuclear programs even more of a priority. What was not well understood at the time, at least not by everyone, was the fact that just like fossil fuel plants, nuclear reactors also need fuel. It may last longer and “burn” cleaner, but it still had to be produced, and this process of uranium enrichment was one of the most closely guarded, and increasingly regulated parts, of the nuclear fuel cycle. Since CEE nations used Soviet-­designed reactors, their only source of nuclear fuel was the Soviet Union. So, despite hopes for energy independence, nuclear power only modified existing relations of energy dependence.7

Nuclear Energy and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance Central and Eastern Europe was no homogeneous space. The recipients of Soviet nuclear assistance jealously watched each other’s bilateral agreements, and for almost two decades steadfastly resisted attempts to integrate nuclear cooperation among themselves. Nuclear assistance from the Soviet Union was

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an addition to ongoing cooperation among Soviet allies in the region as part of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). This organization had been established on January 25, 1949, with six founding members: Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union; the German Democratic Republic joined in 1950.8 Starting in 1953, CMEA members set up an institutional framework that included an executive committee, a secretariat, and various specialized commissions. Regular conferences brought together party and government representatives of member states. In 1955, after the first treaties on nuclear cooperation had been signed, the Warsaw Pact military alliance was founded.9 Together, these two organizations sealed Soviet-­Eastern European political and economic integration. Trade within the CMEA was divided into three broad categories: energy and raw materials, machinery and equipment, and consumer goods.10 CMEA goods were priced according to a formula that was supposed to eliminate the unpredictable fluctuations of the world market.11 Most importantly, energy and raw materials were typically traded below world market prices, while machinery and equipment, although usually of inferior quality, were traded above world market prices. The Soviet Union mostly exported raw materials and energy, and imported machinery and equipment, which amounted to a net subsidy for Eastern Europe. Starting in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had started to deliver growing amounts of oil to Central and Eastern Europe at prices well below world market.12 At the time, this seemed advantageous to both sides: CEE received cheap energy, and the Soviets got a security “buffer zone” between the capitalist West and the homeland. To maintain this buffer zone, the Soviets had to keep Central and Eastern European economies stable. As has been argued elsewhere, this amounted to a quite effective colonial practice: instead of struggling to govern internally weak colonies, the Soviets supported economic prosperity to secure political stability and loyalty.13 Over time, however, the costs of such “empire maintenance” became a substantial burden on the Soviet economy, and Soviet leaders repeatedly attempted to reduce this liability. But while CMEA trade played only a minor role in the Soviet economy, Central and Eastern European economies, by contrast, relied almost exclusively on cheap Soviet oil, and on subsidized sales of equipment and machinery.14 Starting in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev began calling for increased economic integration within the CMEA, following the example of the European Economic Community (EEC), which had been established in 1957. But CMEA member countries successfully rejected his plans. Their economies benefited from the existing arrangement to such an extent that instead of trying to reduce their trade dependence on the Soviet Union, they sought to extend

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it.15 Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Soviets complied and dropped their plans. Significant reforms of inner-­bloc economic integration were postponed until 1971, and even then remained half-­hearted.16 The Soviets were certainly aware that their trade subsidies to Eastern Europe were potentially a powerful “institutional mechanism for linking trade and foreign policy variables.”17 But several scholars have found that despite the Soviet Union’s obvious leverage, CMEA members behaved surprisingly autonomously in their economic strategy.18 No doubt Central and Eastern Europeans were getting better at taking advantage of poorly motivated Soviet negotiators, loopholes in legal documents, and the inefficient monitoring of how agreements were actually implemented.19 But they also learned to turn their weakness into an effective bargaining position: only tangible improvements in living standards, they argued, would ensure the public’s compliance, whereas an economic downturn—­the certain result of reduced Soviet subsidies—­ would threaten the authority of loyal Central and Eastern European elites.20 By emphasizing the relevance of strong economies for political stability in the bloc, they successfully transformed the question over assistance to Eastern Europe into a matter of Soviet security. In the words of Hope Harrison, “The tail boldly wagged the dog.”21 This strategy allowed Eastern Europeans to put pressure on the Soviet Union in the nuclear sector as well.

Negotiating Nuclear Cooperation Soviets and Eastern Europeans shared a belief in the significance of modernization, and the conviction that science and technology were instruments of progress. Progress and modernization, then, justified both unprofitable exports, and increased economic and political dependence on the Soviet hegemon. Eastern Europeans perceived nuclear energy as desirable for a number of reasons, including a modicum of energy independence. They not only initiated and maintained cooperation with the Soviet Union, they also benefited from Soviet expertise while pursuing in some cases rather idiosyncratic design preferences.22 In hindsight, the Czechoslovak choice of a reactor design that would not require continued Soviet enrichment services could be read as a deliberate effort to increase their technical, economic, and political autonomy. But it could also have been much more random, and based on Czechoslovak scientists’ familiarity with, and therefore preference for, a heavy-­water design. Romania, true to its maverick image within the Eastern Bloc, tried to get their hands on Western designs, and eventually hammered out a deal with Canada to build CANDU reactors behind the Iron Curtain.23 Central and Eastern European nations correctly assessed Soviet oil and gas supplies as a potential tool of political influence (while oil prices remained

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subsidized, the Soviets did eventually raise gas prices). By adding nuclear energy to their portfolio, Eastern Europeans hoped to decrease their dependence on Soviet oil and gas, while the Soviets saw nuclear technology as a possible means to strengthen inner-­bloc ties, and to further demarcate their sphere of influence. In other words, while the cultural significance accorded to nuclear power may have dominated early Eastern European nuclear aspirations, the prospect of greater energy independence was a close runner-­up. That this goal proved elusive had to do both with the absence of an existing industrial base to support domestic nuclear industries, and also with a limited understanding of the scale and complexity of the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Nuclear power relies on large and complex infrastructures—­from heavy engineering to fuel supply, from highly specialized support industries to adequate transmission grids. A nuclear power reactor typically provides continuous baseload electricity, and it requires constant demand for the energy it produces. Load-­following features were nothing that industry planners in the 1950s and 1960s worried about: their goal was to meet ever-­growing demand for electricity. Also, nuclear power plants require significant capital investment up front, and even under the best of circumstances, they take several years to build. In addition, certain parts of the nuclear fuel cycle are considered potentially dual use—­that is, there was a chance to weaponize nuclear material.24 National, regional, and international policies to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons were being negotiated just as the demand for nuclear power peaked in CEE, and the emerging nuclear nonproliferation regime further constrained access and options for newcomers to the nuclear energy field.25 Encouraged by Soviet directives, most Central and Eastern European nations assumed that they would develop independent nuclear industries. By the time these initial plans gave way to a more sober assessment of the magnitude of investments required for the development of a domestic nuclear industry, CEE states found themselves stuck in new relations of dependence and debt that ruled out alternatives to Soviet designs and services.26 Therefore, even after the NATO embargo on trade with the Soviet Bloc was gradually alleviated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet Union remained the dominant source of nuclear technology within the CMEA.27 The Soviets, in turn, were also balancing multiple goals vis-­à-­v is their Eastern European allies: they wanted political stability, but they were also trying to stem a system of technical assistance that quickly turned out to be a major drain on their resources, in addition to an influx of inferior quality barter goods. And while Soviet planners recognized CEE states’ desire for nuclear technology as so strong that some countries even considered applying for assistance under the United States’ Atoms for Peace program, they had to bal-

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ance requests for assistance with the effort to get enough resources allocated to the Soviet domestic nuclear power program, which was struggling to gain a foothold among a myriad other energy policies. Eventually, by the mid-­1950s, the Soviets signed bilateral agreements with their CEE allies, committing to supplying research reactors, isotopes, and relevant expertise.28 Agreements for power reactors followed a year later, but construction took so long to be completed that in some cases it caused manifest crises among the allies. In the German Democratic Republic, the first power reactor built with Soviet assistance was completed in 1966; in Czechoslovakia, in 1972.29

Expansion and Control The years 1970 and 1971 brought significant changes for nuclear cooperation within the CMEA, as the subsidized inner-­bloc oil trade deteriorated. Tempted by hard-­currency sales, and with energy demands rising within the Soviet Union, Moscow began curtailing oil exports to Eastern Europe and replacing them with nonsubsidized gas deliveries. The imperative to diversify their respective energy mix thus took on a new urgency for Central and Eastern European states, even before the oil crisis.30 Cost projections for nuclear electricity looked favorable, even when compared to domestic fossil resources or imported Soviet oil and gas.31 Plans to raise the percentage of electricity generated in CEE nuclear plants ranged from 50 to 72 percent by the year 2000.32 Eastern European nuclear expansion was to be based on Soviet-­designed pressurized water reactors. In 1971 CMEA members signed a “Comprehensive program for the further intensification and improvement of cooperation and the development of socialist economic integration.”33 Two specialized organizations were created to ensure a reliable infrastructure for the nuclear industry: Interatominstrument was founded in 1972, and coordinated the manufacturing of high-­tech equipment for nuclear power plants. Interatomenergo followed in 1973; it managed all other tasks involved in the transfer of nuclear power technology.34 Following an agreement with the Soviet Union in 1970, Czechoslovak factories started producing all but the primary equipment for these reactors.35 The reactor vessel, as well as the steam generators, circulation pumps, measurement and safety systems, were manufactured in the Soviet Union, until the Soviet-­Czechoslovak cooperation agreement was extended in subsequent years. By 1974, Czechoslovakia had mastered significant challenges in reactor engineering, East Germany and Poland had specialized in precision instruments, and Hungary and Bulgaria in other nuclear equipment manufacturing.36 However, it was not until 1979 that an agreement was signed on “the joint production and mutual deliveries of nuclear power plant equipment for

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the period 1981–90.”37 This agreement was the biggest ever signed in any field of engineering in the CMEA.38 In addition to assisting Eastern Europe with building their own nuclear power plants, the Soviets also pursued a strategy of exporting electricity generated at nuclear plants inside the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe—­in exchange for a share in financing these plants. In 1982, 1984, and 1987, the first jointly financed nuclear reactors started operation in Ukraine. Half of the electricity produced at these nuclear power plants was earmarked for the Mir system—­a new set of high-­voltage transmission lines. Mir connected the Khmel’nitskaia station with the Polish city of Rzeszów, and from there with Czechoslovakia; the Southern Ukraine station near Odessa delivered electricity to Isaccea in Romania and Dobrudzha in Bulgaria.39 As a consequence, the Soviet Union’s electricity export to Eastern Europe nearly doubled in the period between 1980 and 1988.40 By 1986, the CMEA’s nuclear program had become so successful that despite the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the member states agreed to intensify cooperation in the period between 1991 and 2000.41 Czechoslovakia’s nuclear engineering sector, in particular, was prospering. In the six years from 1979 to 1985 alone, Czechoslovak engineers launched four pressurized water reactors at the Bohunice site (after shutting down the original heavy-­water reactor at that same site), two of them manufactured domestically. From 1985 to 1987, they started up another four domestically engineered reactors at Dukovaný (near Brno), and built, with Soviet support, eight more reactors (four at Mochovce, in the Slovak part of the country, and four in Hungary). Thus, while other CMEA countries like the German Democratic Republic were struggling to gain a foothold in the bloc’s nuclear market, Czechoslovakia effectively dominated it.42 The emergence of this regional monopolist was exactly what CMEA member countries had anticipated, and had hoped to prevent, by insisting on bilateral agreements with the Soviet Union, instead of furthering multilateral bloc integration. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later, and the Cold War ended, Eastern European nuclear industries found themselves cut off from their fuel supply and, no less relevant, their spent fuel management arrangements.

Post-­1 989 Developments Soviet nuclear assistance has left a lasting legacy for post-­Soviet Europe. Given the history of Cold War geographies on the continent, the nuclear reactors in Central and Eastern Europe had been created with a different set of norms and design decisions, and some of these features remained locked in, even as the CEE nuclear plants got disentangled from their Soviet origins. Once the

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Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, four formerly allied states—­the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia—­found their nuclear industries truncated. They lost access to Soviet expertise, fuel supply, and spent fuel take-­back arrangements. In addition, electricity demand plummeted as industries contracted and Eastern European economies plunged into depression. During the ensuing attempts by former Soviet satellite states to join the European Union, the debate over Soviet-­designed nuclear reactors took center stage, with rather surprising results.43 In the German Democratic Republic, after German reunification, all Soviet-­designed reactors, regardless of type, date of construction, or safety features, were unceremoniously shut down and dismantled. In Bulgaria, as well as in the two successor states to Czechoslovakia that had emerged after the Velvet Divorce in 1993, only the oldest versions of the Soviet-­designed reactors, six VVER-­440/­230s without reinforced concrete containment, were shut down (two at Bohunice in Slovakia, and four at Kozloduy in Bulgaria), whereas all other reactors, twelve VVER-­440/­213 (four at Dukovaný in the Czech Republic, two at Bohunice and two at Mochovce, both in Slovakia, and four at Paks in Hungary), and two VVER-­1000s at Kozloduy, Bulgaria, were certified to keep operating.44 Two additional VVER-­ 1000s at the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant in the Czech Republic were still under construction at the time. Their completion required an unprecedented hybridization with Western systems, due to the inaccessibility of Soviet parts and expertise at the time, as well as the lack of political desire to maintain those ties.45 In the end, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria successfully rejected the idea that all Soviet-­designed reactors were bad, and not only kept theirs operating, but positioned their nuclear technologies as part of their national identities. To this day, public support for nuclear power remains strong in these nations, and as of this writing, operating lifetimes have been extended for many of these plants, and plans are underway to build additional nuclear reactors.46 To a certain extent, the economic geographies that had congealed in the context of Soviet-­Eastern European relations, with Czechoslovakia emerging as one of the most important monopoly suppliers of specialized reactor engineering components, remained intact after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Specific factories and engineering cohorts continued to supply the East European nuclear industry, which relied on Soviet-­designed parts, even after their country’s accession to the European Union in the early 2000s. Ironically, Russian organizations that are direct successors to Soviet nuclear enterprises have made a comeback and are successfully bidding for Eastern European nuclear business.47

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Although Europe is facing new energy challenges today, including the increasing Russian presence, and prowess, on the energy market, there are few incentives for Russia’s nuclear state corporation, Rosatom, to use their economic advantage for geopolitical goals. As energy market analysts have argued, the nuclear business model is built on reputation and reliability, and politicizing Rosatom’s international activities would damage its heavily export-­oriented business model: “Any abuse of its position for political reasons would irreversibly harm the company’s business. Accordingly, Rosatom has [a] strong incentive to avoid any perception that its nuclear energy relationships are being leveraged to seek foreign and security goals.”48 In CEE, Rosatom further benefits from the path dependence in the nuclear business, where the experience with Soviet-­designed reactors, along with supporting industries, aligned educational programs, and training facilities, gives the Russian corporation a natural advantage over its competitors.49

•   •   • Eastern European states were distinct entities before the Soviet Empire absorbed them and, remarkably, this variation persisted, to varying degrees, throughout Soviet rule. Even during Soviet rule, Central and Eastern European leaders were able to make quite autonomous decisions with regard to their nuclear research and development. Some of these early decisions generated asymmetries in the distribution of nuclear expertise and provided CEE states the leverage to negotiate highly idiosyncratic deals with the Soviet Union. The Soviets’ emphasis on modernization through science and technology was compatible with European aspirations to resurrect their economies after World War II. The Cold War, however, prevented Eastern Europe from participating in the Atoms for Peace program, and the ambivalence toward the Soviet hegemon presented challenges for successful nuclear collaboration. Central and Eastern European leaders learned to appeal to the belief in scientific and technological progress that they shared, and to invoke Soviet security, as they initiated bilateral cooperation agreements with the Soviet Union. The Soviets’ desire for bloc stability prompted their engagement in ever more costly cooperation with their satellites, despite increasing criticism from economists at home. For CEE citizens, Soviet assistance with nuclear energy promised tangible improvements in the standard of living, but it came at the price of political autonomy and democratic liberties. Soviet nuclear technology transfer to CEE could have been a powerful instrument of Soviet power, but it was in fact much more ambiguous, and left unprecedented challenges for post-­Soviet Europe.

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While one can relate to a nation’s desire to keep their Soviet-­designed nuclear power plants up and running, instead of relying on fossil fuel imports from unreliable sources, the dream of energy independence remains unfulfilled: too tangled is the web of internationally controlled nuclear material, nuclear fuel designed specifically for the type of reactors operating in CEE, along with the need for enrichment services, specialized supporting industries, and expertise. Similarly, one of the perks of the CMEA nuclear cooperation agreements has been rendered moot by the events of 1989–1991: the spent nuclear fuel Eastern Europe had been sending back to the Soviet Union for reprocessing and disposal is now stuck at various nuclear power stations. Each and every one of the CEE nations that formerly relied on this fuel lease arrangement have to figure out ways to store, and eventually dispose of, their spent nuclear fuel. Just like their Western colleagues, they haven’t been very successful so far at confronting this challenge. In postwar Central and Eastern Europe, as in other places, nuclear energy promised a fast track to prosperity. Leaders of CEE states aptly exploited bilateral agreements with the Soviet Union to initiate nuclear technology transfer, and only reluctantly engaged in multilateral cooperation, dreading the emergency of a local monopolist. Early enthusiasm waned quickly, once it became clear that nuclear power plants took longer, cost more, and often presented more significant operational challenges than anticipated. Worse yet, rather than ending energy dependence on Soviet oil and gas, nuclear technology never completely replaced traditional energy systems, and merely altered relationships of dependency. The disintegration of the Soviet Empire in the final decade of the twentieth century led many CEE nations to a reassessment of their nuclear industries, particularly in the context of European Union accession. This reassessment has led to widely different conclusions in individual states, which substantiates the argument that CEE was a highly diverse, heterogeneous region, despite its various political and organizational connections. This diversity within CEE, combined with its highly idiosyncratic approach to nuclear energy, also supports a point this volume puts forth with regard to energy transitions: that the quest for energy security has never been achieved by replacing one form of energy with another. Instead, energy transitions occur when individual leaders, states, or alliances get serious about diversifying fuel supply, while carefully monitoring procedural transparency when negotiating long-­term energy commitments.50 Ultimately, trying to achieve energy independence in Central and Eastern Europe through reliance on nuclear fission has proven illusory at best, and delusional at worst.

ten

CONTAMINATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION Fetal Citizenship and Atomic Power in the Postwar United States

Natasha Zaretsky

The last half century of American political life has been shaped by the conflict over abortion. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, antiabortion activists have waged a painstaking war of attrition that has remade the national map of reproductive rights. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Americans lived in a country where abortion access was patchy and inconsistent. Today, there are two nations—­one where it is virtually impossible to obtain the procedure, and the other a sanctuary for those who wish to terminate their pregnancies.1 How did the antiabortion movement wage this war? And what has drawn its followers to the cause? Scholars have come up with a range of answers to these questions.2 But they agree that one of the movement’s most effective tactics has been to endow the fetus with the status of a person who can be seen and heard. Activists have fought to make the fetus visible, partly through a reliance on obstetric technologies like ultrasounds, fetal Dopplers, and heartbeat monitors. A movement slogan captures the underlying predictive logic behind the tactic: if the fetus can be seen, it can be saved.3 This construction of the fetal person has historical roots in the years after World War II. After 1945, the fetus became a legal, cultural, and political subject in American life for the first time. Historian Sara Dubow has shown how

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postwar transformations in visual and media cultures, medical technologies, and civil and criminal law contributed to the construction of the fetus as a rights-­bearing citizen.4 The concept of fetal personhood was also a distinct creation of the atomic age. That age was defined by atomic bomb detonations and weapons testing that released radioactive fallout into the atmosphere, and postwar biologists and geneticists soon discovered that the developing fetus in utero was uniquely vulnerable to radiation exposure. Part of what made this so frightening was that radiological injuries might not appear right away but could play out across long time horizons, lying dormant in the body for years and even decades. Radioactive isotopes and effluents also had the capacity to travel across space in ways that transcended territorial boundaries. The atomic age thus placed biological health at the center of the relationship between the citizenry and the state, while exposing the spatial and temporal limits of nation-­statist conceptions of citizenship. The unborn—­a term I use to refer to both the developing fetus and the fetus yet to be conceived—­emerged as a key player in this story. This chapter looks at three postwar moments when the unborn crystallized core questions about atomic age citizenship: the radiation scares of the late 1950s, the controversy surrounding nuclear power safety in the 1970s, and the Second Cold War of the 1980s. At each of these junctures, a range of state and non-­state actors—­policymakers, politicians, scientists, doctors, activists, intellectuals, and concerned citizens—­identified the unborn as atomic power’s most defenseless and vulnerable victim. What did it mean to live and die in the atomic age? As both industry defenders and critics puzzled through this question, they turned to the figure of the unborn in ways that anticipated the central role it would come to play in the abortion wars of the late twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. By exploring the atomic history of the unborn, I hope to bring the fields of energy history and gender history into dialogue by showing that reproduction is a crucial, but largely overlooked, linchpin between them.5 As the introduction to this volume makes clear, energy transitions are tethered to transformations in technology, infrastructure, landscapes, labor structures, governance, and political economy. But energy historians tend to overlook gender as a category of analysis, and gender historians tend to steer clear of the history of energy. In the postwar United States, however, the transition to atomic energy raised profound questions about the future of biological reproduction in an irradiated world. The birth of the atomic age, in other words, inaugurated new ways of thinking about women’s bodies, fetal bodies, and reproductive health.

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Postwar Atomic Power, the Radiation Scare, and the Unborn The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 represented not only a military rupture, but a psychological, cultural, and environmental one as well. Peace advocate Norman Cousins described this rupture well. The bombings, he wrote in 1945, released “a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown [which] has burst out of the subconscious and into the unconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”6 The advent of atomic power introduced the prospect of self-­induced extinction—­that is, the rendering of the planet uninhabitable by human alterations to the atmosphere. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that atomic weapons initiated a new chapter in what geoscientists call the Anthropocene, the moment when human activity became traceable in the geological record. While scientists continue to debate when the Anthropocene began, it is clear that the atomic age revealed that humans had the capacity to transform the air, the water, and the gene pool in ways that imperiled the ecological conditions required for species reproduction. As the dangers of the atomic age came into view, the nascent figure of the unborn began to embody this new existential species threat. While postwar scientists debated whether there was such a thing as a “permissible dose” of radiation—­t hat is, a safe threshold below which radiation did no harm—­it was evident from the beginning that atomic weapon detonations threatened fetal and reproductive health. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, biologists, geneticists, and radiologists who examined the bombing victims determined that radiation exposure was especially dangerous to fetuses, babies, and young children. Exposure in utero posed cancer risks, while children’s growing bones, organs, and tissues were more susceptible to the absorption of radioactive isotopes. Radiation exposure could also set in motion cellular mutations associated with birth defects, disease, and premature death. The Hibakusha, the Japanese term for the community of bombing victims, included babies who had been in utero at the time of the 1945 bombings.7 But in the United States, it was postwar atomic weapons testing that first sparked fears about the health effects of radiation exposure. By the 1950s, these tests were a routine if also unnerving feature of everyday life. Between 1945 and 1976, the military tested 588 nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, nearly a third of them aboveground.8 The testing of atomic weapons sickened and killed livestock, spread radioactive ash and rain, and deposited Strontium-­90 in wheat and milk. In 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order that created the Federal Radiation Council, and much as they had in Japan, biologists singled out young children, infants, and the unborn as especially vulnerable to radiological dangers.

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Radioactive fallout traveled unpredictable pathways. Between 1951 and 1962, fallout drifted from test sites in Nevada and the Pacific atolls over one hundred times. In 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission began receiving letters reporting that fallout was disrupting weather patterns around the world.9 In March 1953 stockmen in Utah blamed nuclear testing in neighboring Nevada for the deaths of over one thousand ewes and lambs. Strontium-­90, an isotope that mimics calcium and can lodge in the bones, posed a special problem. In 1957 traces of Strontium-­90 were detected in wheat and milk, suggesting that fallout had entered the food chain through cows grazing on exposed pasture. A government study published in 1959 found that in some parts of the country, the Strontium-­90 content in milk approached the proposed maximum permissible dose.10 This finding was troubling not only because exposure to Strontium-­90 increased the risk of bone cancer but also because the isotope had a half-­life of twenty-­eight years (a half-­life refers to the time it takes for 50 percent of an isotope to dissipate), thus posing a long-­term danger. Throughout the late 1950s, Congress received thousands of letters from citizens worried about the milk supply, scientists warned that radiation could cause leukemia and blood disorders, citizens groups conducted local studies on radiation exposure, and the Saturday Evening Post named radioactive fallout “the silent killer.”11 Both scientists and journalists stressed that babies and young children were on the frontlines of the radiological threat. Several studies found that children living near the Nevada Test Site had been exposed to Iodine-­131, another radioactive isotope that can lodge in the thyroid gland and cause thyroid cancer.12 These findings filtered into magazines ranging from the New Republic to McCall’s magazine, where articles appeared with titles like “Our Irradiated Children” and “Radioactivity Is Poisoning Your Children.” In 1961 a Public Health Service official in Albany, New York, received a phone call from a worried mother who had heard from a news report that there had been a tenfold increase in airborne radioactivity near her home. Her first question for the official was whether it was “safe to send her children to school.”13 By the late 1950s, the specter of American children endangered by an invisible threat hung over atomic weapons testing. But if children were endangered, the unborn were at even greater risk. Biologists and geneticists cautioned that the risks of radiation exposure were even more acute for the developing fetus than they were for the young. “A living organism is more sensitive to radiation damage in the early embryonic stage than at any other time in the entire life cycle,” explained one radiology expert.14 Fetal exposure to radioactive isotopes like Tritium and Cesium-­137 could cause birth defects such as microcephaly and mental disability, both of

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which had been diagnosed in Japanese babies who had been in utero at the time of the 1945 bombings. Radiation could also unleash multigenerational genetic mutations that might not appear at first but could manifest in the future. After the Castle Bravo test conducted at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, on March 1, 1954, geneticist A. H. Sturtevant predicted that the explosion alone would eventually exact a “genetic toll” on 1,800 children. “Every new bomb exploded will result in an increase in this ultimate harvest of defective individuals,” Sturtevant warned in baldly eugenicist language. In 1956 and 1958 the Genetics Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation explained that radiation could trigger mutations that could lead to an increase in what the National Academy of Sciences called “deformed or freakish children.” A follow-­up United Nations report from 1962 stressed that genetic mutations were irreversible: “Even if the mutation is in one gene, there is some harmful effect and that mutation will go through every generation until the line that bears it becomes extinct.”15 The report stressed that in contrast to somatic injuries, genetic injuries were intergenerational. “Man’s actions,” it argued, “can damage the genetic inheritance . . . once the genes have been altered, there is no changing them back.”16 As the National Academy of Sciences explained, a genetic injury would only fade out with the extinction of the genetic line. “Mutant genes,” it warned, “can only disappear when the inheritance in which they are carried dies out.”17 This fear of radiation-­induced mutations arose at a time when the fetus was under new visual and legal scrutiny. Before 1945, human fetuses had been displayed only at museums and world’s fairs. But between 1946 and 1953, photographs of the developing fetus were featured in magazines like Time and Life, allowing millions of Americans to “see” it for the first time. Meanwhile, in 1946, the US District Court for the District of Columbia heard the case of Bette Gay Bonbrest, a baby girl born in 1939 who had sustained serious injuries during her delivery by forceps. Her father sued the obstetrician for negligence, and the court established, “the right of a child to recover from harm incurred when it was a viable fetus in utero.” Establishing that “a child en ventre sa mere is regarded as a human being from the moment of conception,” the case overturned six decades of legal precedent and was quickly emulated by other courts. By 1960, eighteen states had awarded damages for prenatal injury.18 This growing legibility of the fetus became entwined with the rise of atomic power. A 1959 volume titled Atoms and the Law devoted over twenty pages to radiation and prenatal injury. The postwar cultural, scientific, and legal construction of the fetus emerged in a proto-­ecological field saturated with radiation.19

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the figure of the unborn was also seized on by activists within the growing movement against weapons testing. By the late 1950s, a diverse coalition was calling for a test ban. The coalition included pacifist organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, religious organizations like the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, and prominent public scientists-­cum-­activists like Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer. But the shock troops of organizations like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and especially Women Strike for Peace, established in 1957 and 1961, respectively, were white, middle-­class women who appealed to hegemonic conceptions of motherhood in order to legitimize their role in a male-­dominated public sphere.20 In the wake of McCarthyism, the appeal to motherhood—­sometimes referred to as “maternalism”—­provided test ban activists with political cover while giving the movement a religious inflection. The Catholic Church was especially vocal in its opposition. In his 1955 Easter Sunday address, Pope Pius XII condemned nuclear testing on the grounds that it threatened “that mysterious something which is deep down in every living thing” and warned of the “horrors of monstrous offspring.”21 As activists honed their arguments, they appealed to “the rights of the unborn” in order to convey a sense of urgency. Insisting that testing constituted an ethical Rubicon for the nation, they contended that it produced two distinct but parallel crises of political representation. First, because fallout did not follow any predictable path, it posed a threat to citizens beyond the territorial bounds of the United States. In 1958 Albert Schweitzer presented the dilemma: “Bomb testing harms peoples far from the sovereign territories of the nuclear powers—­endangering the lives and health of distant peoples.”22 From this, Schweitzer concluded that nuclear testing fell under the jurisdiction of international rather than national law, a claim that captured how earlier nation-­statist boundaries were becoming attenuated within the Anthropocene. “No nation has the moral right to take risks for other people without their consent,” explained a 1958 SANE pamphlet, “No nation has the moral right to contaminate the air and water and the food that belongs to other people.”23 Because testing posed a biological danger to people who had never consented to it, it constituted a form of what activists called “annihilation,” “extermination,” or “contamination” without representation. One SANE advertisement placed this question of consent at the center of the testing crisis: “We have every right to take such risks to ourselves as we wish in the pursuit of our own security. But we do not have the right—­nor does any nation—­to take risks, large or small, for other people without their consent.” “If we persist in an act that is actually or potentially hazardous to other peoples,” the

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advertisement continued, “we have the obligation to give them the complete right to participate in the processes of government and public debate inside our own nation.”24 The testing crisis followed a temporal course as well, and it is here that the unborn entered. Unlike somatic traumas, radiation’s genetic harms stretched into the future, ensnaring successive generations in its web. This meant that fallout posed a threat not only to the living but also to those who had yet to be conceived. As one Newsweek reader put it, “Once upon a time, war affected only those in the line of fire, now it reaches into the third and fourth generations.”25 The charge that fallout constituted a form of contamination without representation thus established an affinity between non-­US citizens and the unborn. Neither had political voice, and both were being placed at biological risk without their consent. In May 1958 Schweitzer published The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today: Statement with Reference to the Present Nuclear Crisis in the World, in which he singled out the dormancy of radiation as its “most sinister aspect” precisely because of its repercussions for those not yet here: “Years may pass before the evil consequences appear,” he wrote. “Indeed, incipient injuries may manifest themselves, not in the first or second generations, but in the following cycles. Observers in generation after generation, for centuries to come, will witness the birth of ever-­increasing numbers of children with mental and physical defects.”26 The ultimate crime of testing, Schweitzer suggests, is that it transports the reproductive process from the domain of the natural, the universal, and the predictable into that of the liminal, the volatile, and the uncanny.27 Soon, the figure of the unborn would be weaponized in the political fight over women’s reproductive rights. But it started out as a proto-­ecological creation of the atomic age. The figure took shape at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and then reappeared in the growing debate about routine weapons testing in the 1950s. Biologists and geneticists described the unborn as uniquely vulnerable to radiological injury, while testing opponents called for a ban on the grounds that the unborn lacked the capacity to give consent. In the late 1960s, nuclear power plants began to displace atomic weapons in the public debate over radiation. But the unborn continued to loom large. And when the worst accident in the history of US nuclear reactors occurred at Three Mile Island in 1979, atomic history and abortion history collided.

Nuclear Power, Three Mile Island, and the Politics of Abortion in the 1970 s With the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the debate over radioactive fallout from weapons testing faded from view. But the identification

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of the unborn as the paradigmatic radiological victim endured, even as public fears pivoted away from nuclear weapons to power plants. By the late 1960s, nuclear reactors were being licensed at a steady clip and as the industry expanded, critics feared that its boosters were downplaying the public health risks. One such critic was Ernest Sternglass, a radiation physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, who claimed that infant mortality rates were statistically higher in communities where reactors were located.28 Activists in the burgeoning antinuclear movement of the 1970s took such claims seriously and often portrayed infants and fetuses as the industry’s most vulnerable and defenseless victims. This sense of fetal endangerment intensified in March 1979 at Three Mile Island, the site of a partial meltdown and the most serious accident in the history of reactors in the United States. On the third day of the accident, Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh advised all pregnant women (and children under the age of five) living within five miles of the plant to evacuate the area. That advisory propelled pregnant women to the center of the nuclear crisis unfolding in central Pennsylvania. Worried expectant mothers began calling local radio stations, state agencies, and hospitals to find out if their fetuses were endangered. The calls were so persistent that one regional Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) administrator quipped, “We have heard from every pregnant woman in the area.”29 Obstetricians later reported that throughout late March and early April they had been deluged by phone calls from pregnant women asking whether they should abort their fetuses.30 One obstetrician recalled that the phone calls were so constant that routine office business was derailed.31 The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists and the American College of Radiology went so far as to issue a joint press release advising women in the region not to terminate their pregnancies.32 One might assume that these fears were quickly alleviated, since public officials were reassuring that while the partial meltdown had been frightening, it had never posed a serious threat to public health. But in the years ahead, the women who lived near Three Mile Island expressed ongoing dread about the accident’s health consequences, especially for future generations. Some mothers focused on radiation’s carcinogenic effects, wondering whether their children would one day get radiation-­induced cancers. Other women feared that their outwardly healthy children had sustained genetic damage that might one day manifest in children of their own, a fear that was fueled by reports of mutations among animals. As local dairy farmer Jane Lee reported at a May 1979 public hearing near the island: “We are experiencing problems in reproduction. We are experiencing problems with fowls. We are experiencing

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mutations. The young animals seem to be the most vulnerable—­rabbits, cats. The newly born of any size seem to be very vulnerable, including the calves.” Lee then detailed the human toll. Afraid of the accident’s future effects on pregnancy and childbearing, young women in her community had told her, “I can’t have any children now,” or “I’m thinking about having my child aborted.” “This, to me, is a horrible situation, because I am a woman.” Lee declared. “I have four children and I know what it means and how a woman feels to reproduce. This is her highest achievement and to be denied this achievement, to me, is a horrendous prospect.”33 Local women took seriously the warning that ionizing radiation was most damaging to “future unborn generations.”34 One mother speculated about her children: “Are they going to have damaged genes that could cause them to have defective children?”35 Another instructed her daughter to warn whomever she married that she had lived near the reactor at the time of the accident. “Isn’t it terrible,” she asked, “to have to worry about damage to unborn children from that monstrous plant?”36 Several women told the NRC that the most searing aspect of the accident was the question their daughters had asked in its wake: “Will I still have healthy, normal children someday?”37 The National Institute of Mental Health interviewed over three hundred mothers who lived near the plant and found that over 40 percent of them believed that the accident would unleash health problems in future generations.38 The Three Mile Island accident occurred at a time of growing vigilance surrounding fetal health. In the early 1960s, ultrasound exams were introduced as a routine obstetrics practice. In April 1965 Life magazine published “Drama of Life before Birth,” a photo essay by Swedish medical photographer Lennart Nilsson that charted the development of the human fetus. The issue sold eight million copies in its first four days on newsstands.39 This new visually mediated attention to the human fetus went hand in hand with the growing perception that it was vulnerable to environmental assault. In 1973 the University of Washington first identified fetal alcohol syndrome as a cluster of physical and mental birth defects associated with the expectant mother’s consumption of alcohol, and in 1981 the Office of the Surgeon General issued its first official warning about the risks of drinking alcohol during pregnancy.40 In 1977 the American Cancer Society used fetal sonogram images to reinforce the warning that smoking endangered public health.41 This growing attention to the imperiled fetus had political implications. By 1979, the war over abortion was escalating, and Pennsylvania was home to an active grassroots movement against expanding abortion rights. As early as 1969, Pittsburgh activists started People Concerned for the Unborn Child, the state’s first antiabortion rights group. In 1970 the Pennsylvania Catholic

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Conference (PCC) launched Pennsylvanians for Human Life, an educational group designed to rally support for abortion restrictions. The PCC adopted the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 definition of abortion as the functional equivalent of infanticide.42 By the early 1980s, several organizations had formed the Pennsylvania Pro-­Life Federation, a state affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee. Together, these groups put the state on the vanguard of the fight to roll back abortion rights.43 This was more than a legislative battle. It was a struggle over the question of what constitutes life itself, one that hinged on a new fetal imagery. As one popular movement slogan put it, “If there were a window on a pregnant woman’s stomach, there would be no more abortions.”44 Throughout Pennsylvania, antiabortion activists fought to gain a discursive monopoly over a term—­life—­t hat appeared to transcend politics altogether. How did the abortion struggle shape the community’s response to the Three Mile Island accident? There is no question that it was a salient feature of the Susquehanna Valley’s political landscape by 1979, as activists from throughout the state traveled to Harrisburg to meet with legislators and to protest on the steps of the capitol building. The three largest religious denominations in the region—­Catholicism, Evangelical Lutheranism, and United Methodism—­a ll condemned abortion, albeit to varying degrees. The Republican Party dominated the area, and by the late 1970s, grassroots activists were trying to make abortion a centerpiece of the party’s national agenda. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that the women who lived near the reactor (many of whom identified as Christian and conservative) had a unified or consistent position on the issue. On the contrary, even if they claimed to oppose the practice, a sizeable number of pregnant women considered abortion when they feared that their fetuses had been harmed from radiation exposure. If anything, the searing experiences of pregnant women who lived near the reactor affirmed rather than undermined the pro-­choice principle that women should control their reproductive lives. But these same women drew on the antiabortion movement’s grammar of sanctified human life and deployed it against the utility that owned the plant, against the government, and, in some cases, against the nuclear industry writ large. As one woman who had been pregnant at the time put it, “I am still unable to forget the total violation I felt when I realized my trust and faith in the Government had been betrayed.” She had come to believe that her unborn baby had been imperiled by an industry that was reckless and profit-­driven. “Growing inside me was God’s most precious gift,” she recalled, “and growing outside was an industry that lost sight of that precious life.”45 Her statement evokes what anthropologist Faye Ginsburg identifies as a central movement

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motif: “The violation of the boundary of the impregnated womb by male figures representing the profit motive.”46 In the years ahead, local women would mobilize this motif in their fight to decommission the plant. Five years after the accident, a photograph appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette of a woman holding up a protest sign featuring a baby picture. The message beneath read: “Make a Grave for TMI, not my baby.”47 At Three Mile Island, a grammar of life appealed to the figure of the unborn, not in the service of rolling back abortion rights, but to condemn the profit motive and the state. Part of why these women were able to do this was because the unborn had begun its political life as an atomic creation and never stopped being one. By the 1970s, this figure was routinely shuttling between the antiabortion and antinuclear movements. The abortion war was fueled by the horrific image of the fetal body made into trash, but it hardly had a monopoly on that image.48 Antinuclear activists often portrayed the human fetus as the industry’s most defenseless victim. Helen Caldicott carried a baby casket at antinuclear marches—­a symbolic act that might have just as easily appeared at an antiabortion rally.49 The shadow of endangered fetal life hung over both movements. The political power of the unborn was decades in the making. Before it animated the abortion war, the unborn had embodied questions about reproductive futurity that haunted the Cold War nation.

The Second Cold War and the Extinction Threat By the late 1970s, atomic fears pivoted yet again, this time away from the threat of power plants and back to the revived possibility of a nuclear armed conflict between the two superpowers. By the early 1980s, the nuclear power industry was in decline, while Cold War tensions were on the rise with the collapse of détente. Policymakers within the Reagan administration began to speak of a “winnable” nuclear war, raising public alarm that they considered such a scenario a rational possibility. By the early 1980s, activists from around the globe were calling on both superpowers to halt the nuclear arms race, creating what historian Lawrence Wittner has described as the most dynamic, international citizens movement of the modern era.50 The unborn again loomed large over disarmament activism. In 1982 Helen Caldicott helped to launch Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) after observing that it was women in her audiences who responded to her message with the greatest sense of urgency.51 In preparation for a May 1984 rally in Washington, DC, WAND wrote a letter to supporters urging anyone who was visibly pregnant to make the trip to the nation’s capital: “If you are expecting a baby between early June and mid-­September, or can recruit someone who is, please send your name and address and expected date of

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birth to WAND.” The letter explained the underlying rationale: “It is difficult to imagine ignoring the moral authority of a contingent of visibly pregnant women.”52 Religious leaders also appealed to the figure of the unborn as they spoke publicly about the nuclear threat. Many mainline Christian denominations supported disarmament, but it was the Roman Catholic Church that provided the movement with its most influential backing. In May 1983 the country’s Catholic bishops ratified a pastoral letter on war and the nuclear arms race titled “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” The letter described the arms race as “one of the greatest curses” on humanity and expressed support for a bilateral verifiable agreement to “halt” (not curb, a term that had appeared in earlier drafts) the testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons systems. The ratification of the letter constituted a watershed for the Catholic Church. “Many of the 50 million Catholics in the United States,” reported the New York Times, “consider the bishops’ action to be the boldest and most decisive step on social issues in the history of the American hierarchy.”53 Over a million copies were distributed at churches throughout the United States and the world. The letter made explicit the nascent links between atomic power and antiabortion politics by tethering the nuclear arms race to the practice of abortion. It described both as mutually reinforcing malevolent forces that threatened innocent lives and diminished their worth. The secular culture’s tolerance of abortion had dulled its collective sense of horror toward the prospect of nuclear war, the letter maintained. “In a society where the innocent unborn are killed wantonly,” the bishops asked, “how can we expect people to feel righteous revulsion at the act or threat of killing noncombatants in war?” The unintended loss of innocent human lives during conventional war, while tragic, could “conceivably be proportionate to the values defended.” But nuclear warfare was different because its weaponry was designed precisely to “kill millions of defenseless human beings.” There was no justification for a “direct attack on human life, in or out of warfare,” and abortion was just such an attack.54 Abortion emerged in the letter not simply as an analog to nuclear war, but as a gateway to it. According to one passage, “We must ask how long a nation willing to extend a constitutional guarantee to the ‘right’ to kill defenseless human beings by abortion is likely to refrain from adopting strategic warfare policies designed to kill millions of defenseless human beings, if adopting them should come to seem ‘expedient.’” The pastoral letter thus provided the bishops with an opportunity not only to weigh in on the escalating arms race but also to formulate what they called a “consistent ethic of life” that traversed

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genetics, abortion, capital punishment, modern warfare, and euthanasia.55 “Some see clearly the application of the principle to abortion, but contend the bishops overstepped their bounds when they applied it to choices of national security,” explained Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin (who had chaired the committee that wrote the letter) at a speech at Fordham University. “Others understand the power of the principle in the strategic debate, but find its application to abortion a violation of the realm of private choice. I contend the viability of the principle depends upon the consistency of its application.”56 In its attempt to articulate a consistent principle, the pastoral letter again placed the figure of the unborn at the center of the nuclear threat. The practice of abortion, it contended, had inured the nation to the mass killing of innocent people.

•   •   • The seemingly disparate issues of disarmament and abortion thus converged around the figure of the unborn. That figure had haunted both the radiation scares of the 1950s and the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. It surfaced yet again in the early 1980s, this time as a symbol of a systemic degradation of human life that tied the practice of abortion to nuclear proliferation in the era of the Second Cold War. At each of these atomic age junctures, critics evoked fetal personhood in order to convey a sense of urgency about the atomic threat. In the process, they helped lay the symbolic groundwork for the abortion wars that would soon explode to the surface in American life. With the end of the Cold War, the fear of nuclear annihilation receded and was largely—­t hough never entirely—­displaced by the fear of runaway climate change. But as one apocalyptic scenario has replaced another, the unborn continues to shadow ecological thought. This is because the atomic age ushered in a core revelation of the Anthropocene, namely that human activity can erode the ecological conditions that enable healthy species reproduction, thus opening the door to the extinction threat. After 1945, the unborn became the embodiment of that threat, enabling one of the most profound insights of environmental thought: harms to air, water, and land can extend indefinitely into the future. This insight about the temporality of environmental harm builds on what we already know about how that harm plays out across space and place. Thanks to the painstaking work of both activists and scholars over the last several decades, we know that it is disproportionally poor communities and communities of color that are in the path of environmental dangers such as industrial pollution, toxic waste, chemical exposures, and contaminated water.

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The unborn serves as a reminder that environmental injuries can be maldistributed across time as well. The antiabortion movement has weaponized this figure so thoroughly that it is easy to overlook both its atomic age origins and its constitutive role in current debates about climate change. But those debates revolve around the same urgent questions about intergenerational care and obligation that surfaced with the first detonations of atomic weapons nearly eight decades ago. While the unborn cannot speak, they possess the beating heart of the Anthropocene. It is well past time that we listened.

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THE RISE OF COUNTEREXPERTISE AND THE ANTI–NUCLEAR POWER MOVEMENT IN WEST GERMANY

Dolores L. Augustine

In the 1970s, just as West Germany seemed poised to greatly expand its nuclear power capacity, many of its citizens began flocking to an anti– nuclear power movement that was to become one of the most influential and successful in the world. West German elites saw the acceleration of the nuclear power program as a way out of the economic crises caused by the oil embargos of 1973 and 1976. Social Democratic chancellors Willy Brandt (1969–1974) and Helmut Schmidt (1974–1982) very much wanted to develop nuclear power as an alternative to petroleum but also to coal, which they viewed as dirty and dangerous. The first West German atomic power plant (in Kahl) had begun producing power for the grid in 1961, yet in 1972, a mere 1 percent of the energy used in West Germany was nuclear. Experts projected a rise to 15 percent by 1985 in a study conducted on behalf of the government.1 A planned wave of nuclear power plant construction, supported by all three major political parties, precipitated an unprecedented level of popular resistance. Decentralized yet well coordinated, the movement organized huge and cleverly designed protests against the building of nuclear power facilities in Wyhl, Grohnde, Brokdorf, and Gorleben, to name only a few of the sites. The political leadership had its pro–nuclear power experts, but the movement had counterexperts (Gegenexperten), as activists claiming expertise and a voice in policy debates were called. They marshaled and expanded alternative media 182

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outlets, reshaped the public debate, in particular claiming the right for the citizenry to weigh in on scientific and technical issues, and ultimately helped win widespread popular support for the Energiewende, or transition from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewables. Anti–nuclear power activism played a key role in the rise of the Green Party. The successes of the movement culminated in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to abandon nuclear power by 2022, made in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

The Role of Counterexperts “You can look for truth at the university, but here your job is to push through nuclear power,” Hans Matthöfer, who headed the West German Ministry of Research and Technology from 1974 to 1978, is supposed to have said to a physicist at the Jülich Nuclear Research Center. Antinuclear activist and physics professor Jens Scheer made this claim during a television talk show broadcast shortly after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Scheer went on to assert that another scientist at Jülich had said to his coworkers there, “Colleagues, the situation is serious. Speak out everywhere in favor of nuclear power. What you say doesn’t need to be true. What counts is that you say it loudly.”2 These quotations are unverifiable but reflect a central argument of the West German anti–nuclear power movement: that experts who claimed that nuclear power was safe were not to be trusted because they were careerists and opportunists beholden to the powers that be. This narrative fit into a general breakdown in trust in elites in West German society in the 1960s and 1970s. The anti–nuclear power movement’s answer was to turn to counterexperts. These were people (overwhelmingly men) who did not qualify as experts according to the usual criteria, which involve university degrees and professional standing. The term Gegenexperten appears to have been derived from Jürgen Habermas’s concept of Gegenöffentlichkeit, meaning “counter–civil society” or “alternative public sphere.”3 In the 1970s, the West German anti–nuclear power movement was vilified by segments of the media, political leadership, and society as radical and violent, leading to extreme polarization of the debate on nuclear power. Counterexperts helped the movement overcome its political isolation and provided texts and narratives that gave the very diverse movement a sense of focus and common purpose. This chapter focuses on the origins, development, discussion, and dissemination of counterexpertise connected with the anti–nuclear power movement. I understand this to be a body of popularizing literature that challenged the construction of scientific, technical, and (to a lesser extent) economic expert knowledge, rooted in a critique of how that knowledge was constructed, but also in science itself.

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Counterexperts demonstrated that it was possible to embrace science as a cognitive system while strongly criticizing the scientific establishment as a social and political entity. They provided scientifically grounded arguments and built bridges to the transnational activist realm. They drew primarily on arguments coming out of the US scientific and nuclear engineering communities. I refer to these US experts who were opponents of nuclear power as activist-­scientists or critical scientists rather than as counterexperts because they were credentialed scientists or engineers, many with tenured positions at US universities or jobs as technical or scientific specialists with government agencies or other scientific or technical institutions. Science—­often as presented by these critical US scientists—­provided the West German movement with a way to legitimize itself that ultimately helped it earn widespread public acceptance. Germans were particularly receptive to scientific arguments. Over the course of a century, Germany had advanced to the forefront in technoscience, encompassing research, industry, and education. In the post-­Nazi era, science appeared to provide both a path forward for a disgraced nation and a source of orientation in a world whose values had changed radically.4 Nuclear power initially fit into these narratives very well. In West Germany, average Germans visiting US Atoms for Peace exhibitions in the mid-­1950s, for example, proved to be very receptive to the idea that nuclear power offered a path toward technological and social progress.5 In Communist East Germany (which will not be discussed in this chapter), technological utopianism centered on nuclear power was particularly virulent and long-­lived in the political leadership and the media.6 In Western Europe, intellectuals increasingly engaged in severe criticism of science and technology. An example is Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss playwright who pointed to the culpability of scientists in the development of the atomic bomb in his 1962 play The Physicists. It took the frontal onslaught of counterexperts, however, to seriously undermine popular confidence in nuclear power in West Germany. This chapter asks how counterexperts gained legitimacy in the public realm, giving them the standing to challenge “expert opinion,” a concept they viewed as tainted by technocratic thinking and opportunistic alliances between political leaders, scientific and technical experts, and the media.7

The Birth of the Anti–Nuclear Power Movement and the Emergence of Counterexperts in West Germany Up until the early 1970s, science and technology hardly played a role in critical attitudes toward nuclear power in West Germany. Intellectual concerns about atomic energy were generally philosophical and nebulous in nature. Concrete

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attempts to prevent the building of nuclear power plants were initially rooted in local concerns, focused on the impact on agriculture or waterways. Scientific arguments about radioactivity came later. Historian Joachim Radkau contrasts this with the United States, where scientists and intellectuals played a leading role in the emergence of the anti–nuclear power movement.8 The order in which things happened seems to have made a difference: in West Germany, popular mobilization preceded the entry of science and ideology into the discussion, allowing the movement to grow deeper roots. What catapulted the West German movement from small town and rural beginnings onto the national and international stage, however, was precisely the amalgamation of local pride, regionally rooted environmentalism, science, ideology, and forms of direct action taken from the 1968 student movement and learned from French activists. These elements came together in the protest movement in Wyhl, a village in a winegrowing area of southwestern Germany. Government and industry formed an alliance to try to push through a large nuclear power project there. Local opposition was initially focused on the impact of changes to the microclimate that could adversely affect winegrowing. The 1975 occupation of the site where the nuclear power plant was supposed to be built called forth a massive reaction on the part of the state (Baden-­Württemberg) government. Rather than quelling the protests, huge police deployments gave rise to a large-­scale rebellion on the part of locals, students from the nearby University of Freiburg, and leftist groups. The occupation lasted seven months and became a model for other protests. It drew leftists and environmentalists across West Germany and beyond into the anti–nuclear power cause.9 This and other new social movements emerging in the 1970s evinced a tremendous “hunger for factual information,” which spawned educational initiatives and “counterinstitutions.”10 The goal was to empower activists and the general public through education. The Wyhl occupiers set up a makeshift school that organized courses and talks concerning nuclear power. Students at many universities organized “teach-­ins” and study groups that focused on technical and scientific issues.11 The anti–nuclear power movement, along with other new social movements and older parties of the so-­called New Left, published large numbers of books, newspapers, magazines, brochures, and flyers on their own printing presses. They had their own distribution networks, anchored, among others, to universities, event venues, and leftist or environmentalist bookstores. In 1977–1979, for example, Susanne Beyerler and Andreas Sochynski made an anti–nuclear power documentary titled Strahlende Zukunft (Radiant Future). It was widely distributed and shown in both commercial cinemas and countercultural institutions, such as the Arse-

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nal in Berlin, a movie theater purchased in 1970 with the help of contribution from many independent film directors and producers.12 Expanding popular understanding of nuclear power through education was essential because, as one brochure put it, “Every additional bit of information limits the possibility of manipulation and strengthens resistance against the atomic state.”13 In his influential work Der Atomstaat (The Atomic State), journalist Robert Jungk (1913–1994) warned that the expansion of nuclear power would necessitate a security apparatus that would undermine democracy and spawn a dictatorial system.14 Empowerment through education was very much on his mind. “Should journalists study physics?” he asked in a 1975 article, to which he answered, yes.15 Activists felt that informing the public would help them to recognize state and industry propaganda as full of falsehoods. Environmentalist and anti–nuclear power groups went to some lengths to counteract state-­sponsored media blitzes and public relations campaigns aimed at winning the support of the citizenry for planned nuclear power stations.16 For example, the Aktionsgemeinschaft für Umweltschutz Darmstadt (Action Committee for Environmental Protection of Darmstadt, West Germany) published a brochure in which it debunked, point by point, claims made concerning nuclear power in an exhibition at the information center of the Rhenish-­ Westphalian Power Corporation (Rheinisch-­ Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG, or RWE) in Biblis, West Germany. The booklet analyzed each panel, explaining how seemingly simple, objective diagrams and explanations obscured the risks involved in the production of nuclear power. For example, this 1977 brochure contained an explanation of how the failure of the cooling system could precipitate a reactor core meltdown.17 Even publications of highly doctrinaire Far Left factions, such as the Maoist Communist League, went into scientific and technical issues.18 Where did they get their information? Here, the emergence of counterexpertise was crucial. West German counterexperts tended to be activists with some technical or scientific background, but not specialists with degrees in fields related to nuclear power. A good example is Holger Strohm, author of the widely read and highly influential book Friedlich in die Katastrophe (Calmly into the Catastrophe), which was published in 1973.19 In addition to other publications, he appeared on television programs and in documentaries. Self-­taught in the area of nuclear power, Strohm was a popularizer who synthesized technical and scientific studies, making them accessible to a broader public. By contrast, most West German scientists did not engage in debates about nuclear power. Viewing themselves as apolitical, they concentrated on their

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specialized work and their careers. The exceptions provide insight into the hurdles faced by those who tried to combining a scientific career with anti– nuclear power advocacy in West Germany. One such is Jens Scheer, a leftist physicist. He was not at all exposed to the critique of nuclear power during his graduate studies or in his first years as a physics professor at the University of Bremen in the early 1970s. During a stay in the United States, he was converted to the anti–nuclear power cause by people he met there. A member of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), which was Maoist in orientation at that time, he was suspended from his professorship from 1975 to 1980 under the West German Anti-­radical Decree of 1972 and the 1976 prohibition of speech advocating violence. During this time, Scheer became a very active and visible activist in the anti–nuclear power movement, giving speeches, participating in demonstrations, and publishing a widely read brochure aimed at debunking the pro–nuclear power arguments of the government and industry. He continued this activism after his reinstatement and return to his academic career.20 Klaus Traube, a top nuclear power expert and executive, also ran afoul of the authorities because of contacts in leftist circles. As the director of the company that was developing the fast-­breeder reactor in Kalkar, he was (illegally) placed under surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the West German domestic security agency. This caused an uproar when the news magazine Der Spiegel uncovered this operation in 1977. Traube left the private sector and became an important anti–nuclear power activist.21 The number of West German scientists and technical specialists who were willing to work together with opponents of nuclear power was very small, however. The need for true experts sympathetic to the movement became clear in connection with a series of court cases. One of the crucial factors that aided opponents of nuclear power in West Germany was the role of the courts in adjudicating the safety of new nuclear power plants. This had been established by the Atomic Law, which was first promulgated in 1959 and underwent a long series of revisions in succeeding years. Anti–nuclear power organizations sought to stop construction of nuclear power plants on numerous occasions through both legal and extralegal means. In 1976 a major anti–nuclear power umbrella organization, the Bundesverband Bürgerinitiativen Umweltschutz (Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives on Environmental Protection), surreptitiously obtained copies of two government-­sponsored studies on reactor safety and published them.22 The administrative court of Freiburg made major safety issues raised by that report the basis of questioning of expert witnesses at hearings in 1977. The Wyhl activists were not able to find German

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engineers or scientists willing to testify on their behalf. They did, however, fly in several US scientists who were on their side. Ironically, it was the testimony of supposedly pro–nuclear power engineers and scientists that convinced the court that the Wyhl project should be halted temporarily. This episode, however, convinced many activists of the importance of counterexpertise.23 This led Wyhl activists to found the Eco Institute of Freiburg (Öko-­Institut Freiburg) in 1977. It became one of the most important institutions that provided the anti–nuclear power movement with technical and scientific expertise, along with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (Institut für Energie-­und Umweltforschung), founded in 1978 in Heidelberg, and the Katalyse Institute, also founded in 1978, in Cologne. These institutes—­staffed mainly by activists who had a scientific, technical, or other specialized university training—­represented a first step in the direction of professionalization of environmental activism in Germany.24 The West German counterexperts were popularizers and bridge builders, but the initial leap from scientific or technical work to public debate generally took place outside of Germany, often in the United States.

Radiation and Human Health in US Activist Science and West German Counterexpertise American expertise had a significant impact on the development of counterexpertise in West Germany. The authority of US activist-­scientists who occupied prestigious positions in the American research establishment carried considerable weight in West Germany, particularly since West German scientists often remained silent. As an early developer and a larger country, the United States had more experience with nuclear power, making informed American voices worth listening to. This included US counterexperts and environmentalists such as Amory Lovins, who raised the specter of the use of nuclear power leading to dictatorship in a high-­profile Foreign Affairs article in 1976. He was an early advocate of renewable energy.25 Why were US scientists and engineers more likely than their West German counterparts to become active in the movement to block nuclear power? The reasons are multifaceted. Environmentalism took off as a mass movement a few years earlier than in West Germany. Protests against the building of a nuclear power plant in Bodega Bay, California, began in 1958.26 Antiwar activism during the Vietnam War brought protests to college campuses, pulling in not just students but also junior (and sometimes senior) faculty. “Activist scientists”27 were not just concerned with the war but also with weapons research, the nuclear arms race, and nuclear power. The tenure system in the United States seems to have provided a greater measure of protection of academic

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freedom. In West Germany, on the other hand, scientists and engineering professors operated in a more hierarchical system. To be promoted, they had to secure an appointment at a different university. In addition, they looked back on a Nazi past that had greatly encouraged conformity and insistence on abstention from politics. The self-­understanding of regulatory agencies and institutions in West Germany—­such as the Society for Reactor Safety—­a lso seems to have been more uniformly statist and proindustry than those in the United States at that time. Scientific and technical findings that became part of the arsenal of the anti–nuclear power movement originated in several different fields: research on the impact of radiation on human health in the fields of genetics, epidemiology, and other areas of biomedicine, and engineering work on the design and construction of reactors, redundant safety features and devices, as well as government oversight of nuclear power safety. Research on radiation exposure goes back to the 1920s, but the most important US research was conducted on the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This study focused on the genetic impact of radiation exposure—­t hat is, cellular changes that would produce genetic defects in the next generation. This reflects the early twentieth-­century preoccupation with genetics, eugenics, and race. In the 1950s, the focus shifted to the somatic impact of radiation—­t hat is, the impact on the exposed individual; for example, in the form of radiation sickness or cancer. Up until the early 1950s, the orthodoxy was that radiation exposure below a certain, fairly high level (or “threshold”) posed no danger to human health. Critical pioneers in this field did not receive much public recognition. The British medical researcher and epidemiologist Alice Stewart pointed to the incidence of leukemia in children exposed to low doses of radiation in the womb. In the United States, geneticist Liane Russell conducted important work on genetic mutations in mice due to prenatal radiation exposure.28 Scientific interest in low-­dose radiation exposure increased in the 1950s due to atmospheric atomic bomb testing (which ended in 1963). Bomb testing drew the US physicist Ernest Sternglass into the public sphere. He first came to the attention of the general public in the United States as a proponent of the thesis that aboveground nuclear testing increased infant mortality as well as childhood leukemia and cancer.29 In 1971 he asserted that nuclear power plants emitted enough radiation to substantially increase the infant mortality rate. Fellow scientists held his calculations to be highly inaccurate. John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, employees of the US Atomic Energy Commission’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, revised the figures downward, but confirmed the link between low-­dose radiation,

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chromosome damage, leukemia, and many sorts of cancer. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) staunchly rejected these findings. The two defended themselves publicly, leading to a career-­ending public battle. Scholar Ioanna Semendeferi, however, believes Gofman and Tamplin made a valuable contribution to the field. In particular, they showed that there was no threshold of radiation exposure below which there was no risk of cancer; rather, even a very low dose is associated with a small increased risk of cancer. After being forced out of their jobs at Lawrence Livermore, Gofman and Tamplin brought their case to a popular audience in Poisoned Power: The Case against Nuclear Power Plants.30 Gofman returned to academia, but Tamplin appears to have devoted himself to full-­time public antinuclear advocacy.31 In West Germany, geneticists and biomedical researchers were fully versed in the impact of radiation on the human genome and health but did not draw politically relevant conclusions from their work or bring it to the attention of the general public. Historian Alexander von Schwerin attributes this reticence to German scientists’ relationship to the state, established in the Nazi period, but also to the importance of state funding for scientific research through the German Research Foundation.32 It is therefore hardly surprising that US activist-­scientists played an important role in the development of counterexpertise in West Germany. In preparing for the hearings regarding the suit to halt construction on the Wyhl nuclear power plant in 1977, activists flew Sternglass in from the United States to testify.33 Gofman and Tamplin were widely quoted in influential anti–nuclear power works by Holger Strohm and other counterexperts as well as in the popular press.34

Criticism of Nuclear Power Plant Safety among US Activist-­ Scientists and German Counterexperts Much of the early criticism of reactor safety came from within the ranks of the Atomic Energy Commission. Employees expressed serious concerns regarding emergency reactor core cooling systems in a 1967 report and at AEC hearings in 1973–1974. The Union of Concerned Scientists (founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 to resist military research at universities during the Vietnam War) also spoke out concerning these safety issues. UCS cofounder Henry Kendall, a nuclear physics professor at MIT and later Nobel Laureate, was quoted in a 1974 article in the New York Times Magazine as saying: “The radioactive accumulation in a large power reactor is equivalent to the fallout from thousands of Hiroshima-­size nuclear weapons. . . . Consider, for example, that 20 per cent of a reactor’s radioactive ma-

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terial is gaseous in normal circumstances and, if released to the environment in one way or the other, could be swept along by the winds for many tens of miles to expose people outside of the reactor site boundaries to what could be lethal amounts of radioactivity. The lethal distance may approach 100 miles.”35 In hindsight, such a scenario may appear very unrealistic. However, it is quite possible that Kendall was referring to the possibility of a catastrophic event—­ for example, one caused by sabotage, bombing, or an airplane crash. One of the American controversies that had the most impact in West Germany concerned WASH-­1400, “The Reactor Safety Study,” published in its final form in 1975. The AEC intended for this report to serve both as a study of safety of nuclear power production and as a means to reassure the public and increase acceptance of nuclear power. Some considered WASH-­1400 to be a major achievement in the area of risk assessment, and some still share in this evaluation. It pioneered the use of computerized methods for calculating the overall risk of nuclear reactor accidents. The instrumentalization of the study’s results, however, undermined confidence in its objectivity. The study’s simplistic summary both aided in communicating with the public and presented an obvious target for critics of nuclear power. A particular source of ridicule was the oft-­quoted conclusion that a person was about as likely to be killed by a meteor hit as to be killed in a nuclear power plant accident. The Union of Concerned Scientists was one of its leading critics. Kendall was quoted in Der Spiegel as saying, “The arrogance with which the AEC speaks of safety angers me.”36 On the other hand, WASH-­1400 enjoyed widespread acceptance in government and industry circles across the globe. 37 The West German anti–nuclear power movement was breaking into the national scene just as the controversies over WASH-­1400 were intensifying in the United States. In 1976 the West German Institute for Reactor Safety completed two risk studies (IRS 290 and IRS 293) that discussed the worst-­ case scenario, in which the entire contents of a reactor core were released into the environment, as well as other very serious accidents. The publication of these studies by a major environmentalist organization (mentioned earlier in connection with the Wyhl court case) caused something of an uproar in West Germany. In 1976 the government commissioned a study modeled on WASH-­1400, which was completed in 1979. To challenge the credibility of this report, the Eco Institute of Freiburg published a German translation of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ rebuttal to the report.38 One of the greatest weaknesses of the methodology of WASH-­1400 was that probability can be used to calculate risk if data is available on all the relevant factors. The full range of causes of nuclear power plant failure, however,

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was, and is, unknowable. This fundamental uncertainty was encapsulated in the term Restrisiko (residual risk). According to scholar Matthias Jung, the term was first used by political leaders, such as the West German science minister, who in 1970 used it to denote unforeseeable risks (such as human error) that made it inadvisable to build a nuclear power plant in an urban area.39 By contrast, in 1978 West Germany’s highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, ruled that the public had to accept a certain, small residual risk.40 Opponents of nuclear power, however, argued convincingly that it was up to the citizenry how much risk they were willing to tolerate. Risk became an important topic of public consideration. Sociologist Ulrich Beck argued that the risks involved in nuclear power were so great that neither the state nor science could protect the public, though they tried to conceal this fact. Risk, he argued, was bringing about a fundamental reordering of society. He saw a possibility for a democratization of the decisionmaking process regarding risk. Thus, his writing encouraged counterexpertise in a general way, though what he seems to have had in mind was not popular engagement in scientific and technical issues, but a greater place for ethics, philosophy, cultural values and political will in decisionmaking.41

The Growing Legitimacy of Counterexpertise in West Germany During the 1970s, counterexperts and activist-­scientists were increasingly invited to testify before government panels: Strohm before a committee on environmental protection of the Bundestag in 1972, Sternglass and an AEC colleague at the 1977 Wyhl court hearings, and 1979 hearings on Gorleben, which resulted in the decision not to build a nuclear reprocessing plant there. The Three Mile Island nuclear accident took place during the Gorleben hearings, adding to the impact of critical testimony. The inclusion on the Gorleben International Review Panel of figures such as Amory Lovins and Walt Patterson, a Canadian physicist and environmentalist, broke the usual pattern of inviting token counterexperts to hearings packed with nuclear power supporters.42 The makeup of a Bundestag commission, charged with putting together recommendations for future energy policies in 1980, was much more diverse than in past practice. Some members reacted very positively to testimony from Lovins, who presented his proposals for a transition to what he called a “soft energy path” (i.e., replacement of nuclear power and fossil fuels with renewable energy sources).43 Perceptions of the legitimacy and authority of counterexperts, as well as their media presence, was much enhanced by the rise of the Green Party. In turn, the slowly increasing acceptance of the anti–nuclear power movement

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and growth of environmentalism helped the Greens overcome the 5 percent hurdle and move into the Bundestag (Parliament) in 1983 and become coalition partners in a state government (Hesse) in 1985. As sociologist Rucht has pointed out, the rough-­and-­tumble of the political world helped both Greens and counterexperts to hone arguments and identify important issues. The Green Party also provided financial resources for research and opportunities to carry out studies on specific issues.44 The Chernobyl nuclear disaster took these developments to a higher level. The disaster vindicated the anti–nuclear power movement. It also weakened trust in the West German political leadership and the experts it worked together with. Many West Germans felt that Chancellor Helmut Kohl and allied Christian Democratic state governments did not respond adequately to the danger to human health posed by the airborne spread of radioactive particles from the Chernobyl explosion. Standards for admissible levels of radioactive contamination in food and milk varied greatly and seemed laxer in places where Christian Democrats ran the state government.45 Germans from across the Federal Republic turned for advice to Joschka Fischer, a leading member of the Green Party and minister for the environment and energy in Hesse. He, along with several longtime West German counterexperts, were much in demand as public spokespersons.46 A debate on the popular West German talk show Drei vor Mitternacht, taped and broadcast shortly after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, reflects the growing authority of counterexperts in that period. Till Bastian, a physician and head of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, argued that the government had raised the level of radioactive iodine that was permissible for milk so as to benefit the milk industry. When a government spokesman tried to defend official standards, the moderator asked, “Can you exclude [the possibility] that political and economic considerations played a role?” 47 In defending Kohl’s policies regarding Chernobyl, Christian Democratic and government spokesmen argued that the “experts” knew best. Social Democratic politician Jörg Kuhbier responded by casting doubt on the objectivity of the experts. Those who supported nuclear power, he argued, were the ones who were continually being asked to write reports on reactor safety. This recognition of their expertise then led to all sorts of opportunities, such as grants. Opponents of nuclear power were largely shut out of this system, and so they were not considered experts.48 The Chernobyl nuclear disaster brought about greater recognition than ever before of the arguments of counterexperts. At the same time, a professionalization of counterexpertise was taking

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place that in a sense turned counterexperts into experts. Particularly significant was the proliferation of environmentalist think tanks. As early as 1980, the Eco Institute of Freiburg published a book that outlined a proposal for an Energiewende, or turn away from both nuclear power and fossil fuels. This was to be made possible by energy conservation, energy efficiency, and development of renewable energy sources.49 Shortly after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Federal Economics Ministry commissioned a study on what the short-­ and long-­term consequences of the abandonment of nuclear power would be for West Germany. The Eco Institute collaborated on it with the Institute for Ecological Economic Research (Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung), an environmental think tank and consultancy nonprofit founded in 1985. Their report, released in August 1986, drew on modeling carried out by a broad range of research institutes and consultancy firms. The report presented a comprehensive vision of how West Germany could adjust within the span of ten years.50 In addition, the Eco-­Institute released a report to the public, conducted an antinuclear petition campaign, and published a book edited by Joschka Fischer that advocated the shutdown of nuclear power plants.51 Fischer, then minister of the environment in the state government of Hesse, also commissioned a report on the possibilities for an end to nuclear power in West Germany.52 At that time, the political and economic forces arrayed against such a move were overwhelming. Counterexpertise inspired long-­term changes, however, particularly the development of alternative energy sources. This lay the foundations for a true Energiewende. Initially, the initiative came from below. “Tinkerers and idealists” set up the first wind farms.53 Farmers became involved in the production of biomass energy. Political scientist Carol Hager has shown how a grassroots movement to develop solar power sprung up in the Kaiserstuhl region (where Wyhl was located), giving research and development of renewable energy a decisive push. Inspired by these initiatives, Adolf Goetzberger was able to establish the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in 1981, despite the hostility of industry.54 The state also played a crucial role, however, mandating in 1990 that big energy corporations buy up energy produced by small-­scale renewable energy producers at a set, above-­market rate.55 In time, major corporations also became involved in renewable energy production, particularly the building of wind farms along the North Sea coast and the southward transmission of this wind energy via Südlink or Sued.link (South Link), a major infrastructure project. Thus, activists, capitalists and political leaders together created the preconditions for Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power. According to the

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Working Group on Energy Balances (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Energiebilanzen e.V.), the percentage of power generated in Germany by renewables rose from 3.4 percent in 2000 to 28.9 percent in 2020, while that of nuclear power fell from 34.7 percent to 18.1 percent over the same period.56 Professionalization and institutionalization of counterexpertise brought tremendous successes but also profoundly changed it. Did these developments destroy counterexpertise and its insistence on greater public participation in major decisions regarding science and technology?

•   •   • Counterexpertise was the product of a particular time and set of historical circumstances. A rapidly expanding anti–nuclear power movement sought scientific and technical self-­education that would allow it to stand up to the seemingly unassailable alliance of state, energy industry, and scientific establishment. West German scientists and engineers were very reluctant to take a public stand against nuclear power. Counterexperts filled the gap to a certain extent, but it should not be forgotten that many members of local anti–nuclear power groups also contributed to counterexpertise. Study groups at universities, particularly in the sciences and engineering, not only worked through published technical and scientific literature and pooled notes and handouts from their classes—­they also collectively wrote brochures, printed on small presses owned by activist organizations. These circulated in an alternative public realm, of which the anti–nuclear power movement was an important part. A robust leftist microcosm was of central importance to the development of counterexpertise, but so were mainstream West German media and the transnational circulation of ideas. West German news magazines, newspapers, television, and radio invited counterexperts to participate in public debates on nuclear power. Each of three nuclear disasters—­Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—­increased counterexperts’ media presence. Debates in other countries, particularly the United States, on issues of reactor safety and effects of low-­dose radiation, had a major impact in West Germany, often translated—­literally and figuratively—­by counterexperts, for the benefit of a West German audience. The professionalization and institutionalization of counterexpertise made it more effective. These trends can be seen in the founding of research institutes and increased consultancy work for the state, the evolution of the Green Party from a social movement to a conventional political party, and the par-

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ticipation of state and industry in the building of renewable energy infrastructure. These developments helped prepare a path for the Energiewende (energy transition) that became official German policy after reunification. Counterexpertise evolved into a new kind of expertise, making it less of a democratizing force. And the debates of the 1970s and 1980s did not settle the fundamental scientific issues, which remain contentious in the present day. However, counterexperts showed how it was possible to take account of both values and science, and to reconcile popular discontent with pragmatic policymaking.

Part IV THE TRANSITION OFF FOSSIL FUELS Challenges and Possibilities

In the last twenty years of the twentieth century, Europe and North America further entrenched their fossil fuel systems. Both continents displayed a remarkable stability in their overall energy mixture during this period compared to previous decades. By the 1990s, the oil shocks seemingly belonged to history, while the danger of nuclear catastrophe receded in the years before the Fukushima nuclear disaster as new reactors stopped coming online in many countries. For contemporaries, after the momentous fall of communist regimes between 1989 and 1991, these were halcyon days. The “end of history” had seemingly arrived: liberal market democracy spread eastward in Europe, as did the European Union; market reforms pushed by the United States and international institutions expanded around the world and into previously sheltered sectors; and a new set of ideals that aspired to recast society in the image of the market became doctrine, those of neoliberalism. But beneath this Panglossian veneer, a danger of immense proportions was growing. Global long-­term temperatures consistently exceeded their historical average. The world was warming, and the carbon generated by the fossil fuel systems of North America and Europe, and later East Asia were to blame. As we now know, between the year of the first report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990 and 2020—­just thirty years—­humanity has pumped as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as in all of previ197

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ous recorded human history. Scientists took notice. It was during the 1980s and 1990s that climate experts began warning politicians that global warming would have catastrophic effects. The desire for an energy transition away from fossil fuels, in other words, mounted. But how could such a transition succeed—­one in which the state would have to play a major role—­during an era of neoliberalism that seemed to constrain states more than ever before?1 Knowledge about global warming was not new in the 1990s. In 1896 the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius had suggested that carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuels could warm the atmosphere. As the Great Acceleration advanced in the 1950s and 1960s, more and more scientists called attention to these concerns.2 As Benjamin Franta illustrates in chapter 12, in 1959 one of the world’s leading physicists, Edward Teller, warned oil industry representatives that the current rate of burning fossil fuels would likely lead the ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise. The growth of the ecology movement in the 1960s and 1970s brought these concerns to a broader public, generating interest in using solar, wind, and geothermal power as a way to preserve the environment. When the oil shock hit in 1973, it seemed to open a window of opportunity to transition off fossil fuels. Governments devoted more attention to renewables. In the United States, the Department of Energy began issuing large grants to improve wind turbines, while President Jimmy Carter’s National Energy Plan placed a high priority on developing solar photovoltaics, creating the Solar Energy Research Institute in Colorado. Denmark made great strides in wind power technology. West Germany launched a new energy research program dedicated to renewables, while environmental groups involved with the anti-­nuclear movement began sponsoring solar exhibitions.3 But as Eva Oberloskamp illustrates in chapter 13, the discourse around renewables in the 1970s made it difficult to argue for a wholesale transition. Political elites often placed renewables into the same category as nuclear energy and saw their importance less in solving climate change than in overcoming issues of security or resource exhaustion. Many of these new research programs were run by nuclear institutes, and renewables still received far less funding than atomic research. Government officials, moreover, doubted whether solar or wind would be economically competitive before the year 2000. And when renewable energy projects did take on political importance, it was because people believed they could empower local communities, not because they could solve global warming. In his influential essay on soft energy pathways from 1976, Amory Lovins, a leader in the movement for appropriate-­ scale technology, mentions carbon and rising temperatures just once in passing. He devotes the bulk of his article to showing how energies like wind or

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solar would be more socially benevolent than existing systems because they could overcome concentrations of capital and power.4 Renewables, in fact, made little headway in the 1970s. The energy transition of this decade was not away from oil, but rather toward non-­OPEC sources of oil.5 Here the signature project was Great Britain’s exploitation of North Sea hydrocarbons. New oil from this region broke the power of OPEC to determine supply, contributed to an oil countershock that led petroleum prices to plummet, and helped end the decade of energy crisis that had begun in 1973. After 1982 the development of renewables collapsed as the oil countershock eroded the economic precondition of high energy prices that had made wind or solar seem viable in the first place. Oil, questioned as a reliable source of energy in the 1970s, emerged in the 1980s more entrenched than ever, and so too did the carbon emissions that came with it. Meanwhile, new political administrations came to power that adopted the ideas of neoliberalism—­a political doctrine that idealized markets and called for a powerful state to shatter obstacles to private enterprise. Blazing the trail was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who used the low price of oil and gas to help break the coal miners’ strike that gripped Great Britain in 1984 and 1985. She portrayed the new era of low-­priced oil as a victory for the market. And she used the energy sector as the cutting edge of her broader privatization agenda, selling off state shares in British Petroleum (BP), one of the largest oil companies in the world and a strategic asset since 1914. The rest of Western Europe followed Britain’s lead in privatizing most state-­owned oil companies and later many utilities. Meanwhile, in the United States, President Ronald Reagan dismantled the renewable subsidies erected by President Carter and accelerated the deregulation of oil and natural gas prices begun by his predecessor. Energy was becoming liberalized, which benefited the incumbent system based on fossil fuels.6 Nevertheless, renewables took one critical step forward with the United States’ Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978. Where utility monopolies could previously prevent other electricity providers from operating in their markets, PURPA forced utilities to buy electricity from alternative, cost-­competitive sources and feed this into the grid. PURPA was intended to promote free enterprise. But shortly after it passed, California granted major tax credits for wind producers, unleashing a boom in turbine construction. Firms from across the world, above all Denmark and West Germany, flooded into Southern California to take advantage of a market that, by the mid-­1980s, accounted for over 90 percent of global wind capacity. When the subsidies were withdrawn California’s “wind rush” collapsed, but not before turbine

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technology advanced, and before political parties in Europe came to see PURPA as a model for promoting renewables in a period of neoliberalism.7 If the 1980s saw the rise of neoliberalism, this decade also witnessed the science of global warming take major strides and enter the political mainstream. In 1981 Jim Hansen, an astrophysicist working for NASA, published a widely read report that gained coverage on the front page of the New York Times, arguing the planet was already warming. In 1983 the National Academy of Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency both issued warnings about global warming. The Reagan administration dismissed this as alarmism, but the climate reports kept coming. At a conference in Austria, scientists for the first time called on governments to actively prevent future warming. In August 1986 the cover of Der Spiegel, West Germany’s most influential magazine, portrayed the Cologne Cathedral underwater because of sea rise caused by global warming. Then, on June 23, 1988, after an incredible heat wave ripped across the United States, Hansen testified before Congress that, with 99 percent certainty, climate change was underway. That same year the United Nations created the IPCC, which issued its first major warning in 1990.8 The fossil fuel industry had been conducting its own climate research for decades, and as Franta illustrates in chapter 12, it used that research to fight these claims tooth and nail with tactics that ranged from denial to obfuscation and lobbying. Franta shows in damning detail how the fossil fuel industry’s knowledge of global warming predates the politicization of climate in the 1980s. Following the formation of the IPCC, however, Big Energy mobilized. In 1989, Exxon, the world’s largest multinational oil corporation, began working to undermine climate science. It joined other oil majors like Shell and BP, alongside a range of megacompanies that relied on petroleum and coal—­such as DuPont, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—­to form the Global Climate Coalition. Through such front organizations with innocuous names, the energy industry and its allies contested climate science, arguing that temperatures were not actually rising, that even if they were humanity was not to blame, and that in any case carbon dioxide was a boon to life. They paid a range of counter-­scientists, many of dubious academic pedigree, to dispute the models of the IPCC, and they even engaged in ad hominem attacks on leading climate scientists in a strategy of “shoot the messenger.” The United States became ground zero for climate denialism, home to a dense network of climate change–denying institutions that were well-­funded by fossil fuel capitalists, above all David and Charles Koch, brothers with some of the largest privately held hydrocarbon assets in the world. But Europe, too, boasted its own climate change denialists, many of whom would feed into the right-­wing populist

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surge after 2010. They portrayed the international campaign to slow carbon emissions as a global plot to raise taxes and impose regulations. Taking a cue from American discourse, for instance, Jean-­Marie Le Pen of France’s National Front cut a watermelon in an effort to depict environmentalists as green on the outside and red—­communist—­on the inside.9 Nevertheless, by the 1990s, the scientific community was reaching a consensus that atmospheric warming was real, and that it was global pollution problem number one. With the consolidation of scientific research, the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and the Kyoto Accords in 1997, international pressure for a transition to renewables to explicitly fight global warming gained momentum. The denialist case even weakened for a time, as some of the leading global oil companies conceded that climate change was real, and began to advocate for market solutions like emissions trading, voluntary offsets, or carbon capture and storage.10 But as Oberloskamp illustrates in chapter 13, the discourse and the policy surrounding renewables differed greatly from country to country, depending on the strength of environmental parties and a range of other factors. In Great Britain, politics remained dominated by the three traditional parties—­ Conservatives, Labor, and Liberals—­that had governed the country since 1900; no environmental party every gained real influence. The same went for the United States, where the electoral system made it difficult for third parties to enter politics. In France, a Green Party formed in the 1980s, but before 1997 it remained marginal because it could not carve out space for itself on the Left. West Germany, by contrast, was the only large industrial country in Europe and North America that saw an environmental party go mainstream. Originating with West Germany’s anti-­nuclear movement, the Green Party gained a foothold on the Left in the 1980s as the Social Democrats migrated to the center. They entered Parliament for the first time in 1983, and later joined a ruling coalition in 1998.11 As Oberloskamp points out, the strength of Germany’s Greens overlapped with a large swath of medium-­sized firms that made components for solar panels and wind turbines to create social pressure for a transition toward renewables. This culminated in major legislation passed by the Greens and the Social Democrats in 1999–2000 that, inspired partly by PURPA, radically expanded support for electricity produced by wind, solar, and biomass, and sparked a renewable boom in Europe. Despite the surge of interest in wind and solar in the 1970s, the emergence of a scientific consensus about global warming in the 1980s, and the momentum that some countries exhibited for renewables in the 1990s, by 2000 a green transition remained mostly a vision. Energy transitions have historically required strong state support; even oil, the energy that seemed to arise the most

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organically, required government aid across a range of fronts. But before 2000, neoliberal ideas and institutions placed a powerful check on the type of aggressive government action required to jumpstart an energy revolution. The World Trade Organization hampered efforts to cultivate domestic wind or solar industries behind tariffs.12 At the same time that Germany was promoting renewables, the European Union was liberalizing its electricity markets and making the current cost of electricity generation—­not its future cost or its environmental impact—­t he main criteria in determining which energies would thrive, disadvantaging solar and wind. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, continued to cultivate an apparatus of obfuscation that strove to undermine the scientific consensus of climate change, and that succeeded in capturing the ears of a major party in the world’s largest economy, the United States. At the dawn of a new millennium, then, the hope, the science, the technology, and increasingly the urgency for a renewable transition had arrived, but the political will was still to be created. Nevertheless, the chapters in this section suggest cause for hope. Franta shows exactly what advocates of green energy are up against: a powerful network of denial and dissimulation that works tirelessly to discredit climate science and to slow the shift off fossil fuels. His chapter reminds us just how much of a battle—­politically, economically, and rhetorically—­it will be to reduce fossil fuels to the levels advocated by the IPCC. But he also reveals how the fossil fuel industry actually understands, and admits internally, that their business model of burning coal and oil leads to global warming. In a public sphere that today is increasingly characterized by post-­truths, a glimmer of hope comes with the knowledge that some institutions of climate denial admit that fossil fuel–driven global warming is real. Knowledge is on the side of a green transition, but that knowledge must be effectively mobilized and deployed to make a difference. Oberloskamp’s comparative study of renewables, meanwhile, shows how a sustained, deep-­ rooted, grassroots movement profoundly shaped the course of German energy policy, helping this nation inaugurate a global breakthrough in renewables by the year 2000. Local political mobilization, in this case, mattered immensely, and advanced an energy transition that likely would never have developed through markets and price signals alone. This gives grounds for optimism, and suggests the potential for grassroots energy movements in other nations, or on a transnational level, to help push a green transition on an even larger scale.

  t welve

A FUTURE FORESEEN AND TRANSITION DELAYED Big Oil and Global Warming, 1959–1986

Benjamin Franta

The planet has warmed, on average, by about one degree Celsius since the nineteenth century1 and is potentially headed toward three more degrees by the end of this century.2 With each fraction of a degree comes new sea levels, diseases, droughts, heat waves, and storms. In 2003 Europe experienced a heat wave that killed an estimated seventy thousand people.3 At four degrees Celsius of warming, this heat could occur, on average, every year.4 The last time the planet was that warm, seas were hundreds of feet higher.5 Four of the five known mass extinctions in Earth’s history (beyond the one occurring today) were associated with changes in greenhouse gases; the end-­Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago, for example, began with carbon warming the globe by five degrees Celsius and ended with 97 percent of life gone.6 Summarizing global warming in degrees obscures reality, since a degree of global warming bears little relationship to our conceptions of temperature. Analogizing to a fever (“a fever of three degrees Celsius is dangerous”) is not quite apt, since fevers are part of staying healthy and eventually go away. The stages of cancer might offer a better analogy: today we are at stage 1 and are barreling to stage 4. The consequences of global warming we experience today and foresee for the future were often predicted by fossil fuel companies in the 1980s and ear-

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lier. They had good reason to pay attention, understanding global warming as a side effect of their lucrative products. Yet that knowledge did not prevent the industry from promoting ever-­greater use of fossil fuels or denying in public what it privately acknowledged as true. As a result, more fossil carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere since 1988—­after fossil fuel companies understood the impacts of their products and began forming worldwide campaigns of denial and delay—­t han in the entire previous history of humankind.7 This chapter focuses on the period before 1988—­before climate change denial was created on a mass scale and most of history’s fossil carbon was burned. Global warming grew as a scientific concern in the 1950s and after and presented fossil fuel companies with a dilemma: promote an energy transition or impede it? The petroleum industry was informed early on of the connection between its products and global warming and responded first by carrying out research on the problem while, for the most part, remaining silent about it in public. As public concern over industrial pollution grew throughout the 1960s, Big Oil developed a public relations strategy of weaponizing science, selectively advertising corporate research to gain credibility with scientists and policymakers and to reassure the public that pollution problems were being solved. As the scientific consensus around the expected timing and magnitude of global warming solidified near the end of the 1970s, and Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute established research programs on carbon dioxide, with internal memos revealing that the main purpose of these efforts was to cultivate the public credibility needed to influence future regulation in ways favorable to the industry. The companies placed special attention on predicting when global warming from fossil fuels would be detected and fossil fuel controls proposed. Exxon and Shell compiled detailed projections of global warming and its consequences, including sea level rise, ocean acidification, flooding, intense heat, human migration, and habitat destruction. Yet the companies refused to take responsibility for preventing the damage from their products and instead chose to promote further fossil fuel production for as long as possible, even at the cost of deceiving the public about one of the most consequential industrial impacts in human history. In the early 1980s, Exxon predicted that major legislative proposals for reducing fossil fuel emissions wouldn’t emerge until the end of the decade, and the company was right. When such policies were eventually proposed, fossil fuel companies in the United States and around the world responded with coordinated campaigns of obstruction through industry groups like the Global Climate Coalition and the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association.8 Today, the replacement of fossil fuels has been in-

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tentionally delayed for over three decades, with permanent consequences for life on the only planet known to sustain it.

An Unexpected Warning In November 1959, the American Petroleum Institute (API) held a centennial celebration of the US oil industry at Columbia University in New York City. The event was attended by approximately three hundred people, including leaders from the oil and gas industry, and one of the keynote speakers for the event was the renowned nuclear physicist Edward Teller.9 Teller’s speech, titled “Energy Patterns of the Future,” was mostly a promotion of nuclear power. Yet among his reasons for moving beyond fossil fuels was the prospect of anthropogenic global warming and sea level rise. He explained: Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. . . . . But I would  . . . like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. . . . . Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. . . . . The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect . . . . It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.10

During the question and answer session that followed, Teller was asked to “summarize briefly the danger from increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in this century,” to which he responded: “At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 percent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 percent, by 1980, 8 percent, by 1990, 16 percent, if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be two de-

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grees Fahrenheit or only one or five.” “But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.”11 Teller’s estimate was prescient: by his accounting, the global atmospheric CO2 concentration in 1990 would be around 360 parts per million, close to the actual concentration that year of 354 parts per million.12 In his speech, Teller referenced measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, presumably referring to ongoing research by scientist Charles Keeling. Keeling’s key measurements would not be published until the following year, 1960, but Teller appears to have been aware of the work in progress.13 Given rising greenhouse gas concentrations, the question was not whether global warming would occur, but how much—­and how soon.

Confirming the Threat By the mid-­1960s, global warming had made its way onto the US federal government’s radar. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee produced an extensive report warning that a 25 percent increase in carbon dioxide concentrations could occur by the year 2000, that such an increase could raise globally averaged temperatures by 1.1–4 degrees Celsius, that melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rapid sea level rise could result, and that fossil fuels were the clearest source of the pollution.14 Three days after the report was published, API president Frank Ikard addressed the industry at its annual meeting in Chicago, stating, “The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.”15 He went on to describe the report’s findings: One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts. The report further states, and I quote: “ . . . the pollution from internal combustion engines is so serious, and is growing so fast, that an alternative nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”16

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Perhaps prompted by the report’s stark warnings, the API hired the Stanford Research Institute, a private research consultancy affiliated with Stanford University, to assess the state of science surrounding various air pollutants, including carbon dioxide.17 The assessment endorsed the findings of the White House’s report, summarizing that “significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes . . . there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.”18 The links between fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, and the eventuality of global warming were not in doubt, the scientists reported, as “past and present studies of CO2 are detailed and seem to explain adequately the present state of CO2 in the atmosphere.”19 Rather, what was missing was work on “air pollution technology and . . . systems in which CO2 emissions would be brought under control.”20 Thus, by the end of the 1960s, the petroleum industry was not merely aware of the connection between fossil fuels and global warming—­it had been warned by its own scientific consultants.

Growing Awareness, Selective Silence, and a New Strategy By the late 1960s, at least some within government and the industry began discussing the need to replace fossil fuels with other sources of energy in order to prevent global warming.21 In 1969, at the 90th Congress of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, Victor Erickson, from the US Department of Commerce, discussed “potential effects of air pollution regulation on manufacturing,” telling the industry audience the time was ripe to consider the effects of carbon dioxide: The immediate future of pollution control is clear. There will be more of it. We are in a catch up phase, which may last five or ten years or more . . . In the meantime new pollutants or new effects may be discovered . . . The fears of the environmental scientists are pertinent here. If, for example, we are faced with the problem of a warming of the earth from the ‘hot house’ effect of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere or with the cooling of the earth from particulates cutting out the radiation of the sun, entirely new approaches may be needed . . . These are matters to be watched and researched. They will raise major economic issues and it is not too early to be thinking about them.22

At the same conference, David Evans, from the Colorado School of Mines, reviewed the conclusions of the White House’s report from 1965, including potential warming by the end of the century and subsequent “disastrous” sea level rise. He also noted that particulates from industrial pollution had a

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cooling effect, which at the moment appeared to be greater than the warming effect of carbon dioxide. Evans observed, however, that the short-­term effect of particulates did not negate the long-­term, cumulative warming effects of carbon dioxide and called for the energy industry to practice “enlightened self-­interest” and “take the lead” to “prevent the pollution of the atmosphere and oceans.”23 At the next year’s conference, in 1970, the program included contingency planning for a low-­carbon energy system by the year 2000,24 and the year after that, a member of the Federal Power Commission warned the industry audience in a keynote address, “We have an environmental crisis that poses hazards for our air, water and food supply.”25 Another speaker from the US Department of the Treasury noted that to address atmospheric pollution, “Future demands may be met by systems which are not dependent on fossil fuels.”26 Even a dialogue between oil producers from the United States and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in 1974 included a warning from Canadian politician Donald S. MacDonald of the “awakening concern about our environment, especially the threat of damage to the biosphere from the development and consumption of extractive resources and, particularly, fossil fuels.”27 Despite awareness within the industry of the threat posed by global warming, the API exhibited public silence. In 1967 the trade association’s chairman, Robert Dunlop, testified to Congress on why the development of electric vehicles was unnecessary, saying, “We in the petroleum industry are convinced that by the time a practical electric car can be mass-­produced and marketed, it will not enjoy any meaningful advantage from an air pollution standpoint. Emissions from internal-­combustion engines will have long since been controlled.” He went on to describe efforts to control pollutants, including carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, and hydrocarbons, but omitted mention of carbon dioxide.28 The following year, in 1968, the API published Facts about Oil, a booklet that was part of its “petroleum school program” for junior and high school students.29 By then, API materials were being used in 80 percent of American schools,30 and Facts about Oil, like Dunlop’s testimony, was silent on the issue of carbon dioxide, promoting an energy future of unfettered petroleum growth. The API told students that by the year 2000, oil and gas consumption in the United States would more than double, water energy would hardly grow at all, and solar and wind energy would be negligible. Under a section titled “New Energy Sources,” the API focused solely on shale oil and tar sands, and the booklet heaped praise on the industry for its efforts to tackle air pollution.

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Despite the climatic warning the API received that year from its own consultants at the Stanford Research Institute, the API’s public education materials were written as if the greenhouse effect didn’t exist. The closing years of the 1960s had not been kind to the petroleum industry in terms of public relations. Oil companies, the API ruefully assessed, were seen as “big and powerful, unresponsive to public demands, and insensitive to environmental considerations.”31 Public awareness of industrial pollution and its effects on human and environmental health had burgeoned, and various environmental and health problems had become associated with fossil fuels, from smog to carbon monoxide to acid rain. Global warming was but the latest entry in the growing list of negative fossil fuel side effects. In response, the API developed a public relations plan. The industry would portray itself as working toward solving environmental problems (which were largely caused by its own products) and turn the nation’s growing environmental awareness to Big Oil’s advantage. “Individual companies should consider the environmental story as part of their institutional advertising programs,” the API’s Committee on Public Affairs encouraged, urging that any environmental solutions found by the industry “should be widely publicized.”32 In the absence of solutions, “an API-­sponsored advertising campaign highlighting the industry’s effort in air and water pollution control, and the magnitude of the research effort being employed” was recommended. It was a win-­w in strategy: if the industry managed to clean up its mess, it could take credit, and if not, it could still take credit by telling the public how hard it was working on research. Pollution and science could be used for advertising. The API also formulated a strategy of promoting fossil fuel inevitability, recommending that its members emphasize that “modern man is dependent on oil” and “huge amounts of energy will be required” for the continued growth of the US economy. 33 The implication was that vague concepts like modernity and the economy, not oil companies, were to blame for pollution. Thus, by 1970, the API had conceived two mainstay strategies for deflecting concerns about pollution: advertising research to portray the oil industry as a partner in the fight for a clean environment, and shifting the blame by equating fossil fuels with energy more broadly and civilization itself. Without a solution to global warming that favored fossil fuels, however, the API would largely ignore its existence in public. Thus the API’s vice president for environmental affairs, Peter Gammelgard, in a hearing on the Clean Air Act in 1970, told Congress, “When burned completely, hydrocarbons produce just two byproducts, water vapor and carbon dioxide—­neither of which has any significance from an air quality standpoint.”34

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Exxon Buys Credibility In the late 1970s, as scientists solidified their findings on the potential magnitude of global warming and the need for action, the petroleum industry increased its focus on climate. Exxon began a research program around 1977, when company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee, “There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.”35 Black also informed the company’s leaders that doubling the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration would lead to global warming of two to three degrees Celsius, with two to three times more warming near the poles, and that as a result “some countries would benefit, but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed.”36 The scientist warned that it could only be five to ten years before “changes in energy strategies might become critical.”37 In 1979 Exxon produced an internal report (marked proprietary information) by summer employee Steve Knisely titled Controlling the CO2 Concentration in the Atmosphere. The report noted that uncurtailed fossil fuel use would lead to “dramatic climate changes” in the next seventy-­five years, and that preventing significant climate changes would require “dramatic changes in patterns of energy use,” including leaving fossil fuel reserves unexploited. “Only about 20% of the recoverable fossil fuel could be used before doubling the atmospheric CO2 content,” Knisely calculated.38 The report emphasized uncertainty surrounding the precise impacts of global warming but nonetheless concluded, “The potential problem is great and urgent.”39 Unless limits were placed on fossil fuel production, Knisely noted, “Noticeable temperature changes would occur around 2010 as the concentration reaches 400 ppm. Significant climatic changes occur around 2035 when the concentration approaches 500 ppm.” By 2050, the preindustrial concentration of CO2 would double, causing “dramatic climatic changes in the world’s environment.” Knisely’s predictions have so far been accurate: atmospheric CO2 concentrations passed 400 ppm in 2013.40 The report considered three scenarios and their implications for Exxon: one in which fossil fuels were used without limit, another in which the CO2 increase would be limited to 75 percent above preindustrial levels (510 ppm), and another in which the CO2 increase would be limited to 440 ppm, “assumed to be a relatively safe level for the environment,” Knisely wrote. The report found that to achieve the relatively safe concentration, nonfossil energy sources would need to be substituted for coal beginning in the 1990s and supply 50 percent of world energy by 2010. Neither shale oil nor coal could become major

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Figure 12.1: Global warming predicted to arise from unrestrained fossil fuel use, from an internal Exxon report in 1979. The difference between the dashed and solid lines indicates Exxon’s estimate of global warming already occurring at the time of publication. Source: Steve Knisely, Controlling the CO2 Concentration in the Atmosphere, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, October 16, 1979, fig. 4.

energy sources. Carbon dioxide emissions would need to peak in the mid-­ 1990s and decline thereafter. Knisely’s report made clear that the CO2 emitted by Exxon’s products posed serious negative side effects for humanity, and that if those effects were to be limited, the company’s business plans would soon need to change. The following month, one of Exxon’s scientists, Henry Shaw, wrote an internal memo stressing the company “should determine how Exxon can best . . . influence possible legislation on environmental controls.” Shaw pointed out that environmental groups had already attempted to curb the production of fuels from coal and tar sands due to their high CO2 emissions and suggested that a scientific research program would arm Exxon with “reliable and credible data” to counteract similar efforts in the future.41 Shaw made clear the importance of controlling the public narrative. “It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program in . . . atmospheric science and climate because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed. . . . We should be prepared for, and [be] ahead

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of the government in making the public aware of pollution problems.” Shaw recommended a “small task force” be formed to analyze the climate problem and that outside consultants be invited to inform Exxon of the ecological consequences of its products, suggesting atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider, then at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and later at Stanford University, as the best candidate to lead the initiative. Schneider ultimately did not hold the post, but Shaw’s choice illustrates the intermingling between Exxon’s research efforts, described internally as a public relations campaign, and influential climate scientists in government and academia.42 The main purpose of Exxon’s climate research program—­to cultivate the credibility with policymakers, scientists, and the broader public needed to influence fossil fuel policy—­was alluded to in numerous internal documents. In 1980, for instance, Exxon public relations executive Ed K. Wiley distributed an internal memo on the company’s climate research, saying the work was “significant to Exxon since the build-­up of atmospheric CO2 could impose limits on fossil-­f uel combustion,” and that research was “an excellent vehicle to help achieve the corporate objective of improved recognition of Exxon as a center of scientific and technological excellence.”43 In October of that year, Exxon scientist Henry Shaw, who advocated internally for the establishment of the research program, participated in a workshop of the National Commission on Air Quality, editing the text of the workshop’s findings to emphasize uncertainty and undermine calls for action by replacing phrases like “predicted,” “will probably result,” and “almost surely will occur” with lower-­certainty terms such as “possibly,” “rudimentary,” and “may occur.”44 Exxon’s research program essentially followed the public relations advice given by the API a decade earlier: By showcasing apparent efforts to counteract the pollution caused by its own products, the company could purchase public credibility, gain access to the drafting of government assessments, and move public policy in the company’s preferred direction.

A Watchful Eye at the American Petroleum Institute By 1979, the API had formed its own climate change task force, which included Shaw as well as representatives from other major oil companies such as Texaco (now Chevron) and Standard Oil of Ohio (now part of BP).45 Initially named the CO2 and Climate Task Force and renamed the Climate and Energy Task Force in 1980, the group’s internal memos again show how it viewed climate research as a strategic tool to influence regulation rather than a program to advance science per se. One memo from Raymond Campion, an Exxon scientist, recommended the group not conduct original climate research, because “the industry’s credibility on such issues is not high at the present time, and

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should an API study indicate no serious CO2 problems, the results would be greeted with skepticism.”46 Moreover, Campion wrote, the US Department of Energy and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (bodies the public did trust, he noted) had held a workshop in April of that year (which Shaw had participated in) and would soon issue a report concluding that CO2 would pose no catastrophic hazards for the next one hundred years. (Campion’s confidence turned out to be misplaced: the report concluded that global warming posed severe risks and called for corrective action.) Without the need to fight regulation nor the credibility required to reassure the public, Campion saw no reason for research, although he did recommend the task force monitor climate work by outside groups. Campion reiterated his recommendations in another memo later that year, recommending that the API monitor government and academic research, but stating there was no need for the industry body to engage in research of its own since there were no pending regulations to ward off. Although the greenhouse effect was in fact being discussed in Congress, he noted, most of the negative attention for the time being was on coal rather than petroleum.47 The API prepared a background paper on the effects of CO2 for distribution within the industry, and Campion offered revisions that reveal the industry’s outlook on climate science at the time. “We are now in a cooling phase,” he stated, “and will not revert to a warming trend until 1990. It is not likely that any ‘warming’ effects of CO2 will be apparent until at least the year 2000, and probably beyond this time. At that point, these ‘warming effects’ would be superimposed on a cyclic warming trend (non-­CO2 related) which would be additive, worsening the effect. Therefore,” he concluded, “it is unlikely this [warming] effect will be ‘noticeable within the next twenty years,’” as the API background paper had warned. Campion did not question the links between fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, and global warming. Rather, he was concerned with when the rest of the world would notice. In 1980 the industry task force invited John Laurmann from Stanford University to give a presentation on CO2 and climate.48 The meeting, which lasted for seven hours, included representatives from the API, Exxon, Texaco (now Chevron), and Standard Oil of Ohio (now part of BP). Laurmann discussed the various facets of the climate problem, including climate modeling, socioeconomic impacts of global warming, and how energy sources and policies would affect CO2 emissions. Despite the lack of complete certainty on all fronts, his warning to the industry was straightforward. Current fossil fuel production trends, Laurmann said, would produce global warming of 1 degree Celsius by 2005, 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2038, and 5 degrees Celsius by 2067. Global warming of 2.5 degrees would have “major economic consequences”

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and bring “world economic growth to a halt,” while 5 degrees Celsius would cause “globally catastrophic effects.” Laurmann concluded with the question, “Time for action? Market penetration time theory says there is no leeway.” Thus, in 1980, the API’s invited expert warned of catastrophe—­and indicated that the need for action was urgent.

Exxon and Shell Foresee Our Present and Future As the 1980s continued, so did private industry research of global warming. In 1981 Exxon’s Corporate Planning Department asked ER&E to assess whether global warming could influence the company’s market projections out to 2030. Exxon scientist Werner Glass drafted a reply, speculating that climatic changes would occur by 2030, but that they would be “well short of catastrophic” and would not change the fossil fuel market fundamentally.49 Glass’s boss, Roger Cohen, director of ER&E’s Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Laboratory, was less optimistic. After reviewing Glass’s reply, he told Glass his assessment was “too reassuring,” saying, “It is distinctly possible that the CPD [Corporate Planning Department] scenario will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”50 As Shaw had pointed out in his reports, Cohen explained that “the global ecosystem in 2030 might still be in a transient, headed for much more significant effects after time lags perhaps of the order of decades.”51 (Shaw and Cohen were right about the time delay. As discussed by climate scientist James Hansen in 1985 and by others since then, due to the thermal inertia of the earth, around thirty to fifty years are required for increased CO2 levels to produce most of their warming effects.)52 Cohen’s memo was surreal: a senior Exxon manager observing over forty years ago that the business plans of his own company would spell catastrophe for much of the world’s population. In 1982 Cohen sent a summary of the company’s climate research to Alvin Natkin of Exxon’s Office of Science and Technology. Cohen explained that although it was certain that CO2 levels were increasing, it wasn’t yet possible to measure their effects, and assessing the threat of climate change required models of varying complexity. Despite the uncertainties, “over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged regarding the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO2,” Cohen explained. “The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-­industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5) °C. . . . There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations of the biosphere. The

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time required for doubling of atmospheric CO2 depends on future world consumption of fossil fuels. . . . It is generally believed that the first unambiguous CO2-­induced temperature increase will not be observable until around the year 2000.”53 The fact that Exxon’s research might draw unwanted attention to the company wasn’t lost on Cohen, but he argued that the benefits were worth the risks. “As we discussed,” Cohen wrote, “there is the potential for our research to attract the attention of the popular news media because of the connection between Exxon’s major business and the role of fossil fuel consumption in contributing to the increase of atmospheric CO2,” but nonetheless, the company scientist argued, research was necessary for business forecasting and “to provide Exxon with the credentials required to speak with authority in this area.”54 Later in 1982, Exxon’s manager of Environmental Affairs Programs, Marvin Glaser, sent a comprehensive summary of the company’s research on global warming to fifteen company executives and managers. Glaser’s cover letter stated the report was intended to “familiarize Exxon personnel with the subject” of global warming and “be used as a basis for discussing the issue with outsiders as may be appropriate. However,” Glaser continued, “it should be restricted to Exxon personnel and not distributed externally.”55 The report went into substantial detail on the effects of global warming, including the aridification of the American Midwest and impacts on food production. “In addition to the effects of climate on global agriculture,” the report warned, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” such as rapid disintegration of the Antarctic ice sheet and subsequent flooding of the East Coast, including Florida and Washington, DC. Despite these warnings, a course of climatological adaptations, such as low-­ water irrigation techniques, was emphasized, rather than cutbacks on fossil fuels. Citing a workshop held by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and the Department of Energy in 1979, the report bizarrely assured that climate change would not be “as significant to mankind as a nuclear holocaust or world famine.” All of this raised the issue of when Exxon would need to act. The report noted that nonfossil energy sources, such as nuclear and solar, “would need about 50 years to penetrate and achieve roughly half of the total market.”56 According to the same document, by 2030, fifty years in the future, atmospheric CO2 concentrations would be about 450 ppm, enough to produce warming of around two degrees Celsius.57 Thus, the company’s own analysis indicated that preventing significant global warming would require immediate action.

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Figure 12.2: Exxon’s 1982 projection of atmospheric CO2 buildup (left axis and curve) and global temperature rise (right axis and curve). Exxon envisioned a 3–4 degree Celsius temperature rise by the end of the twenty-­first century and calculated the long-­term effect of foregoing synthetic fuel development (dashed lines). As of 2022, Exxon’s projections have been remarkably accurate. Source: M. B. Glaser, CO2 “Greenhouse Effect,” Exxon Research and Engineering Company, November 12, 1982, fig. 3, p. 7.

Yet the report counseled delay and more research. Curtailment of fossil fuel consumption, it concluded, “Would undoubtedly seriously impact the world’s economies and societies.”58 Exxon’s internal report of 1982 recommended inaction despite acknowl-

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Figure 12.3: A schematic projection of global warming by Exxon in 1982. The company envisioned that global warming may already have begun (difference between dashed and solid lines) and that fossil fuels would cause Earth to depart its natural climatic range around the year 2000. Source: M. B. Glaser, CO2 “Greenhouse Effect,” Exxon Research and Engineering Company, November 12, 1982, fig. 9, p. 28.

edging the climatic changes its products would cause, as well as the possibility that global warming was already underway, as shown in figures 12.2 and 12.3. Without fossil fuel controls, the company predicted a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial concentrations by 2060, planetary warming of two to four degrees Celsius by the end of the twenty-­first century, and irreversible impacts worldwide. Exxon refused to act on its own to reduce or avoid the impacts of its own products, but what if it were forced to by government? Exxon considered this possibility, too, and predicted that the US federal government was unlikely to pursue climate policies until around 1989, when the Department of Energy was expected to finish a ten-­year research program on global warming.

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The industry had time to monitor, plan, and strategize, and between 1984 and 1989, Exxon helped oil companies around the world develop strategies to block climate legislation and treaties through the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association.59 Exxon wasn’t the only oil major assessing the looming climate problem. In 1986 Exxon’s Dutch cousin, Shell, completed its own internal assessment, marked confidential.60 The report, nearly one hundred pages with appendices, predicted a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the mid-­ twenty-­first century and a multitude of consequences, including a minimum of around one meter of sea level rise, possible disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (which, the company noted, “Would result in a worldwide rise in sea level of 5–6 m[eters]”), and in some parts of the world, a loss of fisheries and increase in “runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of low-­lying farmland.”61 The impacts would be far reaching. “More [than] 30% of the world’s population live within a 50-­k ilometre area adjoining oceans and seas, some even below sea level,” Shell’s report observed. “Large low-­lying areas could be inundated (e.g., Bangladesh) and might have to be abandoned or protected effectively.”62 “Changes in ecosystem stability, disturbance of ecosystem structure and function and even local disappearance of specific ecosystems or habitat destruction could occur.”63 Acidification of seawater could lead to the “disappearance of complete coral islands.”64 “Poorer countries would run the greatest risk” of agricultural impacts, since “their capacity to adapt would be the smallest.”65 Changes in air temperature would require “costly” adaptations, some of which “would drastically change the way people live and work.”66 Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels would have a “substantial impact on global habitability,” could require “adaptation, migration, and replacement,” and could lead to changes “the greatest in recorded history.”67 In such destruction, Shell also saw business opportunities. “Climatic change could alter the relative wealth of certain LDC’s [least developed countries] and lead us to examine the possibilities of expanding or contracting our business accordingly.”68 And if reforestation efforts were pursued to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, the report observed optimistically, “then there would be some call on companies, including Shell, with experience in tropical forestry.”69 Like Exxon, Shell refused to take responsibility for the planet-­w ide impacts of its products. “It will not be appropriate to take the main burden” for solving the problem, the report asserted, asserting that responsibility sat instead with governments and customers.70 Yet while placing the burden on government,

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the company also expected government action to be ineffective, stating that even though “it is possible to legislate for a reduction in fossil fuel use, it must be the case that any global reduction is most unlikely.”71 Thus, the report suggested that global warming would proceed as predicted, while cautioning the company had “very strong interests at stake” and “its own reputation to consider, there being much potential for public anxiety and pressure group activity.”72 Considering the compendium of disastrous impacts Shell expected, the public had good reason to be anxious, even if it didn’t yet know it.

•   •   • As Exxon predicted, legislative attention on global warming emerged in the late 1980s. In 1988 climate scientist James Hansen testified to Congress, telling the nation that anthropogenic global warming was underway, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a government-­sponsored conference in Toronto, Canada, called for a tax on fossil fuels and worldwide carbon emissions to be reduced by 20 percent by 2005.73 In 1989 the API and other corporate fossil fuel interests created the Global Climate Coalition, an industry alliance that would spread disinformation and block national and international climate policy for over a decade. Even years later, in 1996, API chairman and Exxon CEO Lee Raymond told the public that efforts to reduce fossil fuel use were “based on the unproved theory that they affect the earth’s climate” and that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate.”74 In 1997 API executive vice president William O’Keefe wrote in the Washington Post, “Climate scientists don’t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth.”75 And the same year, the Global Climate Coalition said there was “no convincing evidence that future increases in greenhouse gas concentrations will produce significant climate effects . . . the scientific community has not yet met the ‘burden of proof’ that greenhouse gas emissions are likely to cause serious climate impacts.”76 The industry cultivated climate change denial as a widespread belief, and the public remained unaware that the companies spearheading denial had actually spent decades secretly confirming what they now disavowed. Today, as global warming continues to accelerate, we see the internal predictions of companies like Shell and Exxon coming to pass. The necessary replacement of fossil fuels, which could and should have begun in the 1980s, continues to be delayed, at profound cost to humanity.

  t hirteen

RENEWABLE ENERGIES IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, 1970 s–1990 s Discourses, Contexts, and Policies

Eva Oberloskamp

Currently, both the United Kingdom and Germany claim to be pioneers of an ecological energy transition built upon the deployment of new technologies using inexhaustible natural sources.1 The emergence and expansion of renewable energies are nowadays often viewed as an answer to climate change. In fact, however, the question of renewable energies came up well before climate change became a political issue, and in quite different contexts: during the 1970s, energy policies had to face a complex set of new challenges, ranging from resource limitation to the unpredictability of world energy markets to environmental concerns. Many states began fundamentally reconsidering their policies. Most aimed for a pragmatic diversification toward more energy sources in order to be able to react to unforeseen developments in and needs of the energy sector. This often included an expansion of nuclear power, and insofar as it did, complied with visions of a transition to a preponderant usage of atomic power, which was advocated by nuclear experts. But at the same time, renewable energies began, at least to a certain degree, to attract new attention. Even though the political breakthrough of ecological energy transition concepts should be dated within the new millennium, the period

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under consideration constitutes a phase of transition that shaped essential contexts for present-­day efforts. The end of the analyzed period is marked by changes of government in both countries (1997 and 1998), which led the way toward concrete implementations of new energy policies. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how British and (West) German policymakers2 understood renewable energies and which political measures were actually adopted between the 1970s and the 1990s. The United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany are both highly industrialized European states, which traditionally heavily relied on coal, which deployed important nuclear programs in the decades after World War II, and which aspired to be global technological leaders in the field of nuclear power. In spite of these commonalities, however, the two states in many ways diverged from each other in terms of discourse and energy policy. Accordingly, notions of energy transition, which are nowadays pursued by the two countries’ governments, differ significantly, though both aim for an expansion of renewable energies. As for the United Kingdom, the concept is focused on a decrease in CO2 emissions and a coal phase out until 2024, but the United Kingdom continues to support nuclear power and to depend on natural gas. Even in the longer run, renewable energies are supposed to contribute only one part of the United Kingdom’s energy mix. In Germany, the term energy transition was initially directed toward a nuclear phase out, while the goal of reducing CO2 emissions was added subsequently. Germany has now opted against nuclear power and coal, but in fact continues to rely partly on fossil fuels (in particular lignite coal and natural gas), and to a rather limited extend even nuclear fuels, for energy generation. The realization of a comprehensive transition toward a system based predominantly on renewable energies still appears at issue in the short run.3 In the following, I analyze political discourses on renewable energies, the contexts that influenced these discourses, and outline the policies that resulted from this. In accordance with a present-­day understanding of the term, I shall designate renewable energies to mean solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal energy, and biofuels.4 The emphasis is placed on electricity production.5

Political Discourses During the 1970s, the thinking of British and West German policymakers about energy issues was largely dominated by the fundamental problem—­ raised by publications like the Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome and by the oil crises—­of how to sustain growth and wealth when faced with the finiteness of fossil resources. This view was based on underlying narratives

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according to which economic growth and energy consumption were closely interlinked,6 energy regimes were huge systems fed by big power plants, and the history of human energy use was structured by great transitions from one energy source to another: from wood to coal, from coal to oil and possibly from oil to nuclear fuels.7 Energy sources were judged in both the United Kingdom and West Germany according to their capacity to guarantee the security of sufficient energy supply as well as economically reasonable and socially acceptable prices.8 Environmental considerations existed and were sometimes given much rhetorical weight, but in the perceived conflict of objectives between economy and ecology, they were often of lower priority.9 In the United Kingdom, a further important assessment criterion for energy sources was their ability to allow for national energy independence.10 In West Germany, particular emphasis was placed on possible export opportunities for energy technologies,11 while this aspect seems to be given comparatively lower importance in the United Kingdom.12 Against this background, renewable energies were categorized by the political establishment in both states in a particular manner: First and foremost, they were often assessed according to their potential to replace other energy sources, above all finite fossil fuels.13 In that sense, they were often subsumed under the same category as nuclear power, the category of a nonfossil or new fuel. This categorization explains why research on renewable energies was often established at nuclear research facilities. Nuclear and renewable energies showed potential intersections insofar as certain emerging nuclear technologies—­t he fast breeder and nuclear fusion—­were also seen to be inexhaustible and thus to offer “independence from depleting energy sources.”14 Within the category of nonfossil fuels, initially renewable energies were often characterized as nonnuclear fuels. This multiple negation of nonfossil and nonnuclear, occasionally further supplemented by the notion of nonconventional fuel, was frequent in both the United Kingdom and West Germany during the 1970s,15 and points to the initial difficulty of classifying these energy sources according to positive properties. Subsuming nuclear power and renewable energies under one common category also meant that they were likely to be perceived as alternatives: an increased use of nuclear power would lower the importance of renewable energies and vice versa. In comparison to nuclear power, renewable energies were judged unfavorably regarding their potential contribution to the energy supply and their economic efficiency.16 These assumptions led British policymakers to relegate renewable energies to the role of either a “supplement”—­a technology that could be cost effective only in limited niche applications—­or an “insurance technology,” with

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the function of temporarily compensating for other fuels in case of unforeseen shortfalls, but which did not have to be cost competitive.17 It was argued that, “in an orthodox view of the future,” where energy supply would be based largely on coal and nuclear power, renewables would not be able to make a more far-reaching contribution than this.18 West German policymakers attached much importance to the export potentials of renewable energy technologies to “developing countries.”19 In the United Kingdom, the basic premises of this dominant political discourse on renewable energies were not seriously challenged by rival discourses throughout the 1980s. The political shift under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher since 1979, however, led to some reorientations: the importance of energy safety decreased because of “reduced expectations of economic growth, and of improvements in energy efficiency.” Furthermore, economic evaluation criteria, notably competitiveness and cost-­effectiveness, prevailed ever more over other considerations. Instead of aspiring to self-­sufficiency, the British government was now ready to rely on world markets for imports.20 This contributed to even lower potential being attributed to renewable energies, while the idea of an “insurance technology” became irrelevant. On the other hand, the growing importance of environmental concerns and also technological progress, which altered estimations of the applicability and costs of renewable energies, kept them on the political agenda.21 During the 1990s, their importance was reinforced by two factors: the decline of the British coal industry fueled by the Conservative government, and international climate policies. These new contexts overthrew “orthodox” energy future expectations and incentivized the British government to generally review its energy policy. Measures aiming at energy efficiency, an increased use of domestic natural gas, and the continued use of nuclear power were given great importance,22 but beyond that, the new constellation also entailed an altered appraisal of renewable energies: In the early 1990s, the Conservative government conceded that they “have the potential to make a significant contribution to UK energy supply in the next century,”23 and “towards reducing environmentally harmful emissions.”24 Furthermore, against the background of the sustainability ideal formulated on the United Nations level,25 they were now seen as “sustainable energy supplies” and a potentially relevant export technology.26 The main criterion for judgment, however, was cost-­effectiveness and the capacity to prevail in liberalized energy markets.27 After more than one decade of Thatcherism, the “government’s approach to energy policy” was “that, so far as possible, decisions should be left to markets operating in a competitive environment.”28 The liberalization ideal was underpinned through the

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argument that “competitive markets and sustainable development [were] two sides of the same coin, since they [were] both essentially about making the best use of resources.”29 Energy companies had to comply with a certain legal and regulatory framework in terms of environmental health. Yet, the British government during the 1990s did not take firm steps in order to internalize the external costs of energy production and thus assess the price of environmental degradation in economic terms. Against this backdrop, it was debatable whether markets could correctly evaluate renewable energies. In West Germany, the dominant political discourse on renewable energies began to be radically challenged during the second half of the 1970s by an alternative energy paradigm that was formulated and defended by actors emerging from the ecological movement, certain scientists, and certain members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Basically, this paradigm was motivated by the problem of how to sustain wealth if current patterns of economic and social activity tended to destroy the natural livelihood of human existence. It fundamentally questioned the underlying narratives of the old energy paradigm. In particular, it conceived the possibility of decoupling energy consumption from economic growth, and of creating decentralized energy systems with small private or collectively owned power plants. Crucial judgement criterions for energy sources were environmental soundness, and also social acceptability. Within the framework of this Energiewende (energy turnaround) paradigm, renewable energies were judged much more favorably, and concurrently, nuclear power was refused in principle. Combined with more efficient and economical energy consumption patterns and interim “clean” coal technologies, renewables were thought to be able to replace not only oil but also nuclear energy.30 Nevertheless, the initial energy paradigm remained dominant throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the approach of political decision-­makers toward renewables remained sceptical. Yet, the growing influence of alternative views was apparent within the political parties, the relevant ministerial bureaucracies, and the government.31 For example, the Federal Ministry of Economics took seriously scientific studies pointing to greater potential for renewable energies than initially assumed.32 Also, the consecutive updates of the Energieprogramm der Bundesregierung (Energy Program of the Federal Government) throughout the 1970s and 1980s put an ever-­growing emphasis on environmental soundness as an important evaluation criterion.33 The relevance of environmental considerations can also be seen in the gradual acceptance of the idea that the competitiveness of renewable energies depends on appropriately accounting for external costs.34

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Furthermore, fairly early on, West German political discussions mentioned possible applications for renewable energies beyond large-­scale power plants, which were to be fit into the traditional grid like coal or nuclear power plants.35 These tendencies in West German discourses were above all enforced through widespread and persistent societal scepticism against nuclear energy. This explains why the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which resonated much more in West Germany than in the United Kingdom, gave considerable new momentum to discussions on renewable energies.36 During the 1990s, international climate politics further reinforced the acceptance of discursive elements from the alternative energy paradigm. Even though, similarly to the UK case, the government emphasized the importance of energy efficiency, nuclear power, and gas, this new situation contributed to a political environment in which the potential of renewable energies came to be viewed in a more differentiated and positive way.37 Simultaneously, a certain influence of neoliberal thinking patterns led also in the Federal Republic of Germany to a shift in evaluation criteria applied to renewable energies. Even though German energy markets were going to be liberalized only at the end of the 1990s in response to European Union (EU) directives, there was a clear tendency since around 1990 to evaluate energy policy decisions according to their potential for strengthening the consumers’ freedom of choice, which was accompanied by at least the rhetorical abandonment of regulatory measures and a stronger emphasis on market mechanisms. This reflects a growing conviction that markets could best govern the choice of energy sources.38 The emphasis being put on the market conformity of policy instruments aligned with the efforts by the federal government to internalize external costs: though fruitlessly, Germany actively tried during the 1990s to achieve a consensus at the EU level for a CO2 tax. Concrete steps, however, aiming at accounting for environmental costs would come only after 1998 with the ecological tax reform of the new Social Democrat–Green government being implemented at the national level and the EU emissions trading system as of 2003. Measures for liberalizing and deregulating energy markets, which were offensively propagated since the 1980s by some economists39 and increasingly favored by the Christian Democrat–Liberal government coalition, had already been claimed earlier by advocates of renewable energies: For example, within the Federal Parliament’s “Future Nuclear Energy Policy” Enquete Commission, which sat from 1979 to 1983, advocates of renewable energies argued that the actual energy system heavily distorted markets and thus prevented the market entry of renewables. In light of this, they asked for the “establishment

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of market economy competitive conditions” in the energy markets.40 This argument was repeated by adherents of the Energiewende in parliamentary debates since the early 1980s.41

Energy Systems, Actor Groups, and Global Developments In the United Kingdom and in the Federal Republic of Germany, the initially dominant energy paradigm of the 1970s was rooted in strong path dependencies. First, electricity distribution systems had been organized as monopolies for decades. In the United Kingdom, the entire energy sector was centralized and “run by the state through integrated monopolies,” with the industries involved having been nationalized and mandated to state planning after World War II.42 In West Germany, private energy supply companies were organized in regional monopolies and subjected to public supervision. There was a certain decentralisation, however, based on the existence of several regional monopolists and of a great number of municipal energy utilities that were allowed to feed power into the grid.43 Second, both the United Kingdom and West Germany had strong coal industries, which seemed to be a more viable way of strengthening national independence than developing new energy technologies.44 Infrastructure investments in the coal sector had already been made in the past, subvention patterns were generally accepted, and the interests of the coal industry were politically strongly networked. Coal actually continued to account for the majority of electricity generation in both countries.45 In the United Kingdom, the recently discovered North Sea oil and gas reserves provided additional fossil resources. The low oil prices of the 1980s also decreased the urgency to harness new energy sources.46 Third, the trend toward large power stations was reinforced by the high degree of attention devoted to nuclear power. Even though this technology was in a number of ways unequally developed in the United Kingdom and West Germany, it was pushed massively in both by the state.47 Generally speaking, the structures of the British and the West German energy market impeded the launch of renewable energies, which at their actual state of technical development required decentralized and small-­scale structures, through high entry barriers and unequal support for different energy sources. Yet, the West German system seems to have been more compatible with renewable energies from the outset because of its decentral tradition of municipal energy utilities. In the British case, structural changes came into effect under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which seemed likely to provide a better framework for renewable energies: state monopolies were broken up, unequal subventions were decreased, and coal was existentially weakened. The progressive liberalization of energy markets during the 1980s and 1990s, how-

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ever, also involved elements that were detrimental to renewable energies, such as insufficient inclusion of external costs, a tendency toward further market power concentration, which raised entry barriers for new players, and weak investment reliability for new actors due to the strong market orientation.48 In the United Kingdom as well as in West Germany, the dominant energy discourse was initially sustained by a restricted set of actors and key institutions that linked economically powerful energy utilities with state-­f unded large-­scale nuclear research facilities and relevant political actors, and in the United Kingdom, with planning authorities as well. Within the more restricted area of renewable energies, narrow networks of established researchers and companies, among them energy utilities,49 nuclear research centers,50 and major corporations from the aerospace, aviation, heating engineering, machine construction, and construction industries,51 remained committed to the dominant energy discourses. Especially the energy utilities and scientific actors from the nuclear sector, as a part of this techno-­institutional complex, had interests in maintaining the prevailing system. It would be misleading, however, to assert that their convictions were directed exclusively by self-­serving considerations. The persistence of institutions and thought patterns, which led actors to believe that the only responsible way of assuring future prosperity lay in the further development of the existing system, was equally important. Initially, the dominance of major research and industry actors was accompanied by the systematic exclusion of critical alternative scientists, environmental organizations, and communal initiatives in the United Kingdom and West Germany.52 Such actors who challenged the dominant energy discourse emerged from the ecological and anti-­nuclear movements. In West Germany, they managed to gain a high degree of influence. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, their capacity to act as “disrupters of institutionalized arrangements” was much more restricted.53 The main reason for the comparatively minor political importance of British activists lies in opportunity structures shaped by the political and voting system, and in the social movements’ quantitative weakness. The latter can be explained through a variety of factors: There were considerably weaker structures in the British 1968 movement, and the classical Left-­R ight division absorbed potentials for social protests. Political culture was more moderate, and since protest movements were not pushed into a fundamental opposition, there emerged no strong group identity. For a complex series of reasons—­among which a particular watchfulness against totalitarian threats due to the National Socialist past stands out—­t he protests against nuclear power were much stronger and more radical in West Germany than in the United Kingdom.54 The ecological and anti-­nuclear movements influenced the political sphere

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in several ways. First, they worked as an extra-­parliamentary pressure group in favor of renewable energies—­in the United Kingdom more through lobbying political parties and participation in public inquiries; in West Germany as an increasingly powerful opposition to the overall establishment. Second, the movements led to the establishment of alternative research institutes. Particularly in West Germany, individual critical researchers and alternative institutes, like the Öko-­Institut (Ecological Institute) in Freiburg, with the societal pressure of a strong movement behind them, managed to gain growing official recognition and political attention.55 In the United Kingdom, the number and influence of alternative scientists was lower. Critical experts and new institutions, like the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales,56 advocated renewable energies, but political resonance was limited because there was no broad societal pressure. Third, new economic actors from the ecological movement appeared, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany. Within the scope of renewable energy technology engineering, those actors were small or middle-­sized companies who engaged in competition with large industrial groups and demanded equal access to state support.57 While large, established companies showed a tendency to lose interest in renewable energies as soon as state support stagnated or technical problems got out of hand, those smaller companies turned out to be more persistent.58 As for electricity producers, municipal utilities and cooperatives gradually began to claim their role in the renewable energy market by launching small projects.59 And fourth, only in West Germany did the ecological movement gain significant influence on the party system. A new political actor emerged, the Green Party, which first entered municipal, regional, and European politics and was then voted in to the Federal Parliament for the first time in 1983. One of its central concerns was the realization of the Energiewende. This added new intra-­parliamentary competition to the extra-­parliamentary pressure, which had significant effects especially on the biggest opposition party: The SPD started to develop its own ideas on the links between energy, environmental, economic, and employment policies starting in the early 1980s, and its discourse began to integrate elements of the alternative energy paradigm.60 The conservative Christian Democrats, too, felt the general societal pressure to account for ecological considerations.61 In the United Kingdom, the majority voting system, in addition to the relative weakness of British social movements, stymied similar developments. Further important influence factors in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany were first global discourses on the environment and “the limits to growth” of the 1970s,62 which drew attention to the finiteness

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of resources and of Earth’s ecological carrying capacity. This discourse was deepened and spelled out as an ideal type during the 1980s by the World Commission on Environment and Development, which coined the concept of sustainable development.63 United Nations climate policy emerged on this basis, starting in the late 1980s, and putting pressure on national governments to reduce CO2 emissions.64 This had the effect of increasing the importance of environmental considerations for evaluating energy sources, and thus changed the overall appreciation for renewables. In the United Kingdom, it was climate politics that finally put renewable energies back on the political agenda. In Germany, the United Nations conferences contributed to the development of more points of contact between the alternative energy paradigm and government positions.65 Second, neoliberal thought patterns gained far-­reaching general influence on energy considerations after the late 1980s. In the United Kingdom, the impact of neoliberal thinking can be quite clearly retraced. Nigel Lawson, who became energy secretary in 1981, initiated liberalization and deregulation reforms under the influence of researchers associated with the neoliberal think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.66 The latter had been founded in 1955 as the first think tank emerging from the activities of the transnational Mont Pèlerin Society and had massively contributed to Thatcher’s election victory in 1979.67 In the Federal Republic of Germany, the importance of transnational neoliberal discourses was more moderate by comparison, but nevertheless noticeable here, too. For instance, Juergen B. Donges and Olaf Sievert, chairman and member of the Unabhängige Expertenkommission zum Abbau marktwidriger Regulierungen (Independent Expert Committee on the Reduction of Anti-­Market Regulations), which sat from 1987 to 1991 and recommended a deregulation of German energy markets,68 were associated with the market liberal and internationally networked think tank Stiftung Marktwirtschaft (Market Economy Foundation).

Renewable Energy Policy Initially, the policy outcome in the area of renewable energies in the United Kingdom and West Germany was essentially restricted to research and development (R&D) programs. In 1974 the British government launched its Renewable Energy Programme, which was managed by the Energy Technology Support Unit, established at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell. In comparison to the funding for nuclear energy, the support earmarked for renewables was negligible, and approximately half of it went into wave power, which was considered to be promising due to Britain‘s long coastlines.69 As the attractiveness of wave energy was seen in the opportunity to

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construct large-­scale power plants, the program remained largely committed to the premises of the dominant energy paradigm.70 By the end of the 1970s, the opinion came to prevail that the production of wave energy was generally too expensive. The British Department of Energy thus turned to wind energy, for which British geography seemed promising, too. This technology was more advanced, and practical experience had already been gleaned in Denmark and the United States. Again, however, the corresponding UK program concentrated on large-­scale plants, especially on the construction of a 3.7 megawatt reference design turbine with a blade diameter of sixty meters, which was to be completed at Burgar Hill, Orkney, in 1987. The 1983 Energy Act, encouraging the private generation and supply of electricity and thus aiming to spur competition in electricity generation, implied only a minor attempt to ease market entry for renewable energies and in this regard remained largely ineffective.71 At the same time, budget restrictions and privatization efforts in the energy sector led to a decline in R&D funding.72 From 1989 onward, the UK government curtailed most direct R&D subsidies for renewable energies.73 The only existing support now was the Non-­ Fossil Fuel Obligation (NFFO) of 1990, which was a delivery program for nuclear and renewable electricity. Initially, it had been conceived with the main objective of subsidizing nuclear power, which had turned out to be difficult to privatize. In order to deflect objections from the European Commission, the UK government designed this instrument to include all nonfossil fuels. The NFFO obliged electricity distribution network operators to purchase renewable electricity from a specified number of companies. In the course of a competitive bidding, those companies that offered the lowest prices received contracts. The NFFO did not provide for feed-­in rates, but payments per kilowatt-­hour for the electricity supplied by renewable energy were agreed on through a case-­by-­case bidding process. In practice, the cost cap frequently turned out to be so low that companies had difficulties fulfilling their contracts. Thus, the effective support for renewable energies remained rather moderate until the end of the Conservative government in 1997.74 The West German government, too, launched an Energy Research Program that included renewable energies in 1974.75 Total expenditures on energy R&D were much higher here than in the United Kingdom, but the relation between nuclear and renewable energies remained rather similar. In total, however, West Germany spent significantly more money on R&D for renewable energies than the United Kingdom.76 Also, the West German program pursued a more diversified funding strategy: money was allocated more evenly to research on solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and geothermal energy, whereby various solar technologies received the largest share.77

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West German R&D funding was initially dominated by large-­scale projects.78 A goal in the field of wind energy, which was seen to have realistic potential in Germany, was the construction of large prototypes, which were to be run like regular power plants by energy companies after their commercialization. An outstanding example was the so-­called GROWIAN (GROße WIndANlage, Large Wind Turbine) project, which was the biggest wind turbine in the world upon its completion in 1983 (three megawatt, blade 100.4 meters in diameter), but later turned out to be a technological failure.79 Wind energy seemed acceptable to the established actors “only in so far as it could be integrated into the traditional power supply systems with their large power stations, regional monopolies and transmission grids.”80 In the second half of the 1980s, however, the situation began to gradually change. From 1986 onward, the funding strategy was realigned and came to include small-­scale decentralized wind energy projects, mostly defrayed by small collaborative operators and with the participation of medium-­sized engineering companies. Public funds for large-­scale projects declined.81 In the area of photovoltaic and solar thermal energy—­predominantly believed to bear little potential under German climatic conditions, and thus being considered in terms of export potential—­R&D supported both small-­scale applications for decentralized use in developing countries and large-­scale applications thought to be promising in southern countries with intensive insolation.82 Important changes occurred by the end of the 1980s, when, in addition to the R&D funding, the federal government began to increasingly encourage the use of renewable energies through measures aiming at demand stimulation and market introduction. These included broader support for demonstration plants and a program that offered loans at subsidized interest rates or installation subsidies. One pioneering measure was the 100 megawatt Wind-­ Program launched in 1989 and extended to a 250 megawatt Wind-­Program in 1991, which provided either investment grants or premiums for every kilowatt-­hour fed into the public grid, in addition to remuneration from utilities.83 Another measure was the 1,000 Roofs Program, which subsidized the installation of small photovoltaic applications on roofs to feed electricity into the grid. The most important step, however, was the Electricity Feed-­In-­Law adopted in 1990, which removed substantial impediments imposed by utility companies on power fed into the grid from renewable energies, and obliged them to purchase renewable electricity at set feed-­in rates. This new policy orientation was largely due to pressure coming from environmental actors; an important factor was the presence of a green party in Parliament. It is interesting to note, however, that renewable energy policy

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during the 1990s, too, stood in the contexts of liberalization tendencies. On the one hand, deregulation measures, such as the removal of subsidies for other energy sources or of impediments on power fed from renewables, were considered to be a requirement for their implementation. On the other, renewable energies were considered to enhance the choice for consumers. The European Economic Community (EEC) /­European Union (EU) played only a minor role in national energy policies, and renewable energies in particular, until the mid-­1990s. The EEC had launched an energy R&D program in the wake of the 1973 oil crises, and in this context, funds were available for renewables, especially in the areas of solar and geothermal energy.84 Major impetus from the EU came starting in the late 1990s, with the directives favoring energy market liberalization. Their national implementation would fundamentally alter the market conditions for renewables in the new millennium, as entry barriers and unequal subsidies were removed and competition was enforced. Broad exploitation of the potential of renewable energies requires far-­ reaching political measures aiming to restructure the energy system as a whole: it necessitates an adapted power grid with increased transport capacities, intelligent systems for balancing power supply and consumption, as well as new opportunities for storing electricity. Reasons for the cumbersome process of change lie both in the endurance of energy infrastructures and in the longevity of discourses.85 These aspects were specific in the United Kingdom and in the Federal Republic of Germany; on an overall basis, for a long time, policy measures in favor of such change were moderate in both. This is clearly reflected in statistics on the share of renewable energies in electricity production, which remained extremely weak in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, the renewable electricity output in proportion to the total electricity output rose from 1.8 percent in 1990 to 2.7 percent in 2000, and in Germany from 3.5 percent in 1990 to 6.2 percent in 2000. A decisive acceleration would come only in the new millennium: in the United Kingdom, the part of renewables in the electricity output reached 24.8 percent in 2014, due in particular to the massive expansion of onshore and offshore wind energy plants; in Germany, it amounted to 29.2 percent that same year.86 Sure enough, these statistics also reflect that the Federal Republic of Germany took more determined political steps, and that during the whole period the effective expansion of renewables advanced further here than in the United Kingdom.

•   •   •

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West German and British policymakers initially understood renewable energies against the background of a traditional energy paradigm focused on systems with large-­scale power plants, and the guiding principles of energy security and economic efficiency. The dominance of this paradigm rooted in path dependencies in the energy sector—­not least in the field of material infrastructure—­and specific actor constellations. Renewable energies were judged largely unfavorably, and political support was restricted to limited research and development programs. In West Germany, the dominant political discourse began to be challenged around 1980 by an ecologically motivated alternative energy paradigm, which conceived the possibility of larger energy saving potentials and of creating decentralized energy systems with small-­scale power plants. From this point of view, the potential of renewable energies was judged more favorably. The political influence of this new paradigm was due to the exceptional dynamics of West German social movements and to their uncompromising opposition to nuclear power. Furthermore, the general German tradition of decentralism and in particular of municipal electricity supply (with corresponding infrastructures) was important. Against this backdrop, the political discourse on renewable energies was gradually transformed, and the Federal government began to encourage their use through more vigorous measures aiming at demand stimulation and market introduction by the end of the 1980s. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, the comparatively weak social movements acted only as a moderate extra-­parliamentary pressure group. Their relative political irrelevance, a more widespread confidence in nuclear power, and the availability of domestic oil and gas resulted in the persistence of the old energy paradigm, which combined with the austerity and liberalization measures of the Conservative government since 1979 to condemn renewable energies to insignificance by the end of the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, in the light of United Nations policies for sustainable development and for CO2 reductions, but also of technical progress and of an increasing influence of neoliberal thinking, energy policies in both states experienced new dynamics. Renewable energies were now thought to possibly have greater potentials than initially assumed. Furthermore, in the United Kingdom, the mainly economically motivated decline of coal did its part to improve their position. In this situation, the German Christian Democrat– Liberal government maintained the support programs that had been launched in the late 1980s. The British Conservative government did not intensify its support for renewables; they were expected to assert themselves under free market conditions.

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German and British present-­day energy policies are very much shaped by the developments of the 1970s–1990s. They uphold older path dependencies, but also the variety of novel approaches which have been developed during that period. The interaction of different discourses coined the basic logic of policies, but at the same time, discourses were themselves a product of material structures and actor constellations. In a comparative perspective, certain key factors, which shaped discourses and renewable energy policies, stick out from the complex maze of contexts. Of particular importance were the comparative strength of the West German Green movement and Green Party, the fact that a significant part of the public supported a nuclear phase out—­both factors resulting from a specific, historically rooted German vigilance against totalitarian threats—­and the German tradition of decentralism. Nowadays, concepts of energy transition and thus the respectively envisaged energy mix as a whole remain quite different in the United Kingdom and Germany. In both, though, the large-­scale expansion of renewable energies still encounters obstacles, and the realization of an ecological energy transition continues to be a challenging project for the future.

notes

Introduction: Toward a New Energy History 1. C. Marchetti, “Primary Energy Substitution Models: On the Interaction between Energy and Society,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 10 (1977): 345–56. Quotations of Marchetti in Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 84–85; Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 338. On the IIASA, see Michael Hutter, “Ecosystems Research and Policy Planning: Revisiting the Budworm Project (1972–1980) at the IIASA,” in Planning in Cold War Europe: Competition, Cooperation, Circulations (1950s–1970s), ed. Michel Christian, Sandrine Kott, and Ondrej Matejka (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), 261–83. 2. Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables,” Scientific American 301, no. 5 (2009): 58–65; Mark Z. Jacobson et al., “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight All-­Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World,” Joule 1 (September 2017): 108–86; Vaclav Smil, Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (Washington, DC: AEI, 2010), 134–35, 147–48. 3. Bruce Usher, Renewable Energy: A Primer for the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 3, 4, 19; Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Nick Ismail, “Will Clean Tech Power the Fourth Industrial Revolution?” Information Age, August 30, 2018. 4. For instance, Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995); Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Fiona Venn, Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1986). 5. The most influential accounts of twentieth-­century Europe and America, for instance, pay virtually no head to energy. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000); Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes:

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A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996); Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue, These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). 6. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000); Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde, eds., The Future of Nature: Document of Global Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; Robert Emmet and Thomas Lekan, eds., “Whose Anthropocene: Revisiting Chakrabarty’s Four Theses,” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2 (2016); Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2013). The term Anthropocene does not appear in the index of two groundbreaking studies of global warming and environmental history from the early 2000s: Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003), and John Robert McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-­Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 7. William Cronon’s magnum opus on Chicago, for instance, deals with energy as a subcategory, while J. R. McNeill’s master environmental history covers energy in sub sections of chapters. See Willian Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); McNeill, Something New Under the Sun; see also Edmund Russell et al., “The Nature of Power: Synthesizing the History of Technology and Environmental History,” Society for the History of Technology 52 (2011): 246–59. 8. Kelly Levine, “Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Fossil Fuels and Cement Reach Highest Point in Human History,” World Resources Institute, November 22, 2013, https:/­/w ­ ww.wri.org/­blog/­2013/­11/­carbon-­dioxide-­emissions-­fossil-­f uels-­ and-­cement-­reach-­highest-­point-­human-­history. See also “Global Carbon Budget 2021,” Global Carbon Project, April 26, 2022, https:/­/­w ww.globalcarbonproject.org /­carbonbudget/­. 9. Stephen Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8; see also Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 9. 10. For instance, Malm, Fossil Capital; Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013); Christopher Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Toby Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 11. Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century

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(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: The Rise and Fall of International Financial Centres 1780–2009 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso, 2006); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 12. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); William H. Sewell Jr., “A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic History,” History and Theory, theme issue 49 (2010): 146–66; Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Kenneth Lipartito, “Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (2016): 101–39; Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 13. For instance, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017); Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021). 14. On energetics, see Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Berkeley, CA: Greystone Books, 2012), 136–42; Philip Mirowski, “Energy and Energetics in Economic Theory: A Review Essay,” Journal of Economic Issues 22, no. 3 (1988): 811–30. On the definition of energy as applied to economic theory, see Travis Bradford, The Energy System: Technology, Economics, Markets, and Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 5–12; figures from Vaclav Smil, “A New World of Energy,” in The Cambridge World History—­Volume 7.1. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present, ed. J. R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 178; “Energy Use per Person, 2020,” Our World in Data, https:/­/o ­ urworldindata.org/­grapher/­per-­capita-­energy-­use. 15. Jonathan Levy, “Appreciating Assets: New Directions in the History of Political Economy,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (2017): 1490–99; Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sven Beck-

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ert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 16. On finance, see Julia Ott, When Wall Street Met Mainstreet: The Quest for an Investors Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Johnathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018). 17. ExxonMobil, “2021 Annual Report,” https:/­ /­ corporate.exxonmobil.com/­ investors/­annual-­report#Businessfundamentals. 18. For the design and function of “offshore” operations, see Hannah Appel, The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 19. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry into the Progress of the Nation, and the Probably Exhaustion of our Coal Mines, 3rd ed. (London: MacMillan & Co., 1906), 1; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 2008), xv–xvi. On the problems of using such metaphors, see Rüdiger Graf, Oil and Sovereignty: Petro-­knowledge and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s, trans. Alex Skinner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 22. Figures from Fortune’s Global 500 List, http:/­/­fortune .com/­global500. 20. Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1998); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker and Co., 2002); Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging through History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Marjorie Shaffer, Pepper: A History of the World’s Most Influential Spice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013); Pietr Rivoli, The Travels of a T-­Shift in the Global Economy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009). 21. Christopher Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 22. See, for instance, Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); see also Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003); Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World (New York: Viking, 2009); Russell et al., “Nature of Power”; Thomas Finger, “Harvesting Power:

NOTES TO PAGES 11–12

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American Agriculture and British Industry, 1776–1900” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2015). 23. J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Archon Books, 1966). 24. Hughes, Networks of Power, introduction. 25. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative to the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); E. A. Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition form an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 26. Michel Callon, preface to Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); for instance, Hughes, Networks of Power; Raymond Stokes, Opting for Oil: The Political Economy of Technological Change in the West German Chemical Industry, 1945–1961 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Yergin, The Prize; James Bamberg, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1950–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 27. Exceptions include Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Martin Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Rolf-­Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001). 28. Robert M. Solow, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics,” American Economic Review 64, no. 2 (1974): 1–14; P. S. Dasgupta and G. M. Heal, Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 29. Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Modern Growth Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); William Sewell, “What’s Wrong with Economic History?” History and Theory 51 (October 2012): 466–76; Francesco Boldizoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 30. E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Wrigley, Sustained Growth; Roger Fouquet and Peter J. G. Pearson, “A Thousand Years of Energy Use in the United Kingdom,” Energy Journal 19, no. 4 (1998): 1–41; Roger Fouquet, Heat, Power and Light: Revolutions in Energy Services (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008).

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NOTES TO PAGES 12–14

31. Robert C. Allen, “Backward into the Future: The Shift to Coal and Implications for the Next Energy Transition,” Energy Policy 50 (2012): 17–23; Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 32. Roger Fouquet and Peter J. G. Pearson, “Past and Prospective Energy Transitions: Insights from History,” Energy Policy 50 (2012): 1–7; see also Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 33. These are cast as “incumbents,” which fight back through “sailing ship” or “last-­gasp” effects. See Roger Fouquet, “Historical Energy Transitions: Speed, Prices and System Transformation,” Energy Research and Social Science 22 (2016): 7–12; Roger Fouquet, “Path Dependence in Energy Systems and Economic Development,” Nature Energy 1 (2016): 1–5. 34. Pearson and Fouquet, “Insights from History.” 35. Arnulf Grubler, “Energy Transitions Research: Insights and Cautionary Tales,” Energy Policy 50 (2012): 8–16. On feedback loops, see Wrigley, Sustained Growth, introduction. 36. “Economists Statement on Carbon Dividends,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2019, https:/­/­w ww.clcouncil.org/­economists-­statement/­; John Asufu-­Adja et al., “An Eco-­modernist Manfesto,” http:/­/­w ww.ecomodernism.org/­. 37. Larry Sherwood, “100 Percent Clean Energy Goals: What Will It Take to Get There?” Renewable Energy World, January 17, 2019, https:/­/­w ww.renewableenergy world.com/­a rticles/­2019/­01/­100-­p ercent-­c lean-­energy-­goals-­what-­w ill-­it-­t ake-­to -­get-­t here.html. For the extended version, see Larry Sherwood, “100 Percent Clean Energy Goals: What Will It Take to Get There?” White Paper by Interstate Renewable Energy Council, January 2019. 38. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy; Malm, Fossil Capital; Jones, Routes of Power; Needham, Power Lines; Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). For early examples, see Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: the California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), and Tyler Priest, The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 39. Hecht, Being Nuclear; Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero, eds., Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Duccio Basosi, Giuliano Garavani, and Massimiliano Trentin, Counter-­ shock: The Oil Counter-­revolution of the 1980s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018); Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani, eds., Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Mac-

NOTES TO PAGES 14–15

241

Millan, 2018); Frank Bösch and Rüdiger Graf, eds., “The Energy Crises of the 1970s: Anticipations and Reactions in the Industrialized World,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014), 1–292; Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2016); Christopher Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 40. Peter J. G. Pearson, “Past, Present and Prospective Energy Transitions: An Invitation to Historians,” Journal of Energy History/­Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, April 12, 2018, http:/­/­energyhistory.eu/­node/­57. 41. Karen R. Merrill, The Oil Crisis of 1973–1974: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2007), 48; John C. Sawhill, Keichi Oshima, and Hanns W. Maull, Energy: Managing the Transition: A Report of the Trilateral Energy Task Force to the Trilateral Commission (New York: Trilateral Commission, 1978); Dennis Hayes, Rayes of Hope: the Transition to a Post-­petroleum World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); Barry Smernoff, Politics of the Energy Transition: Policy Trade-­Offs in an Inflationary Economy (Croton-­on-­Hudson, NY: Hudson Institute, 1977); Frank Laird, “Against Transitions? Uncovering Conflicts in Changing Energy Systems” Science as Culture 22, no. 2 (2013): 1470–89. 42. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene Shock, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2017), 101–2. 43. Thomas Turnbull, “Review: The Shock of the Anthropocene (Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, 2017),” Journal of Energy History/­Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, December 4, 2018, https:/­/­energyhistory.eu/­en/­reviews/­shock-­anthro pocene-­christophe-­bonneuil-­and-­jean-­baptiste-­fressoz-­2017. See, for instance, two very different approaches to energy transitions that both highlight this point. On Barak, “Three Watersheds in the History of Energy,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 440–53; Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 44. Lipartito, “Reassembling the Economic.” 45. Some examples of such deconstruction include Geoffrey Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Herman M. Schwartz, States versus Markets: The Emergence of a Global Economy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1994); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994). 46. Laird, “Against Transitions?” 150. 47. Clark Miller, Alastair Iles, and Christopher Jones, “The Social Dimensions of Energy Transitions,” Science as Culture 22, no. 2 (2013): 135–48.

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NOTES TO PAGES 16–22

48. Figures drawn from Michael Ratner and Carol Glover, “U.S. Energy: Overview and Key Statistics: Congressional Research Service Report, June 27, 2014; International Energy Agency statistics on coal: https:/­/­w ww.iea.org/­statistics/­coal/­. 49. Barak, “Three Watersheds; Freese, Coal; Nye, Consuming Power. 50. Thane Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Touraj, Bini, and Kaveh, Working for Oil; Elisabetti Bini, “Fueling the Cold War: Oil, Economic Development, and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy and the Mediterranean, 1945–1969” (PhD diss., New York University, 2011); Jones, Desert Kingdom; Dietrich, Oil Revolution; Andreas Malm, “China as Chimney of the World: The Fossil Capital Hypothesis,” Organization and Environment 25, no. 2 (2012): 146–77. 51. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser, and Pablo Rosado, “Energy,” Our World in Data, https:/­/­ourworldindata.org/­energy-­production-­and -­changing-­energy-­sources; Podobnik, Energy Shifts, 110–11; Nye, Consuming Power; McNiell, Something New; Kander et al., Energy in Europe; Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser, and Pablo Rosado, “CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Our World in Data, August 2020, https:/­/­ourworldindata.org/­co2-­and-­other-­greenhouse-­gas-­emissions. 52. This process revolutionized societies not only in the Global North but also in the Global South by creating new hybrid energy systems around the world and transforming the sinews of European imperialism. See Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Marks, Origins of the Modern World; Wrigley, Sustained Growth; Pomeranz, Great Divergence; On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (Berkley: University of California Press, 2020). 53. Brian Black, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 21–33; Jones, Routes of Power. On Burma, see Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 98–103. 54. Santiago, Ecology of Oil; Jones, Desert Kingdom; Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (New York: Verso, 2009). 55. Bini et al., Oil Shock; Garavini et al., Counter-­shock. 56. John Perlin, From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity (Ann Arbor, MI: Aatec Publications, 1999); Robert W. Righter, Wind Energy in America: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Robert W. Righter, Windfall: Wind Energy in America Today (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).

NOTES TO PAGES 25–29

243

Part I: The Rise of Oil and the Transformation of Coal 1. Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017), 81–82. 2. Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 344–46; Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 76. 3. Richard H. K. Vietor, Energy Policy in America since 1945: a Study of Business Government Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 9; Robert McNallym, “The Return of Boom-­Bust Oil Price Cycles,” World Energy 10, no. 39 (2018): 12–16. 4. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 2008), 151–89; Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Penguin, 2014), 232–54, 353–73; Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013); Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts, 47–48. 5. Vietor, Energy Policy, 30; Tyler Priest, “The Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 236–51; David Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of US Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Martin Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 100–101. 6. Edwin Black, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the Wrold to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006); Bernard Rieger, The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: the California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 7. Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts, 84; David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 178–79; J. P. Bardou et al., The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, trans. James Laux (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 172; Christoph Mauch and Thomas Zeller, eds., The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 8. Melosi, Coping with Abundance, 138–59; Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts,

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NOTES TO PAGES 29–34

82–84; Smil, Energy and Civilization, 271–72; figures from https:/­/a­ rlweb.msha.gov /­stats/­centurystats/­coalstats.asp. 9. Nye, Consuming Power, 187–216; Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 166; Melosi, Coping with Abundance, 199–216.

Chapter 1: The Oil from Our Soil 1. Henry Bérenger, Le pétrole et l’État (Paris: Flammarion, 1920), 179. 2. Note that historical surveys of the French oil industry tend to start just after World War I. See Eric D. K. Melby, Oil and the International System: The Case of France, 1918–1969 (New York: Arno, 1981), and André Nouschi, La France et le pétrole de 1924 à nos jours (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 2001). 3. On the transition from coal to oil in France, see Darryl Holter, The Battle for Coal: Miners and the Politics of Nationalization in France, 1940–1950 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 193–95, and Eric Kocher-­Marboeuf, Le Patricien et le Général: Jean-­Marcel Jeanneney et Charles de Gaulle, 1958–1969 (Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire Économique et Financière de la France, 2003). On this transition more generally, see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2014), and Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). 4. Scholars who have studied biofuels include Hal Berton, William Kovarik, and Scott Sklar, The Forbidden Fuel: A History of Power Alcohol (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Michael S. Carolan, “Ethanol versus Gasoline: The Contestation and Closure of a Socio-­technical System in the USA,” Social Studies of Science 39, no. 3 (June 2009): 421–48; Jenny Katarina Eklöf, Helena Ekerholm, and Erland Marald, “Promoting Ethanol in the Shadow of Oil Dependence: 100 Years of Arguments and Frictions in Swedish Politics,” Scandinavian Journal of History 37, no. 5 (December 2012): 621–45; August W. Giebelhaus, “Farming for Fuel: The Alcohol Motor Fuel Movement of the 1930s,” Agricultural History 54, no. 1 (January 1980): 173–84; Camille Molles, “Rétrospective sur un ‘carburant national’: l’alcool,” in Transports, territoires et société, ed. Nicolas Stoskopf et al. (Paris: Éditions Picard, 2011), 163–71; and Helga-­Jane Scarwell, “Du ‘super-­ternaire’ aux biocarburants,” in Biocarburants, les temps changent! Effet d’annonce ou réelle avancée?, ed. Helga-­Jane Scarwell (Lille, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2018), 61–81. Note that with the exception of the Carolan article, these scholars do not take very seriously the alcohol fuel’s challenge to oil, thereby not sufficiently historicizing and restoring conflict to the oil transition. 5. See, for example, Nouschi, La France et le pétrole, 89–94; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 14; Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene:

NOTES TO PAGES 34–37

245

The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2017); and Rüdiger Graf, Oil and Sovereignty: Petro-­knowledge and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s, trans. Alex Skinner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 19. 6. Edgar Faure, La politique française du pétrole (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1938), 140. 7. J. Couton, “Pour le vente du vin au détail,” Progrès agricole et viticole, October 4, 1931, 338. 8. Camille Molles, La fin du pétrole: Histoire de la pénurie sous l’Occupation (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 2010), 33. 9. Elf Aquitaine, Elf Aquitaine des origines à 1989 (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 15. 10. For an overview of French energy dependence in the modern era, see Christian Stoffaës, “L’obsession historique de la dépendance énergétique: données économiques,” in Pierre Guillaumat, la passion des grands projets industriels, ed. Georges-­Henri Soutou and Alain Beltran (Paris: Institut d’Histoire de l’Industrie et Éditions Rive Droite, 1995), 51–67. 11. Nouschi, La France et le pétrole, 37–40. Gregory P. Nowell discusses the power of the majors over the French state in Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 12. Richard F. Kuisel, Ernest Mercier: French Technocrat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 25. 13. For the creation of the CFP, see Mohamed Sassi, “The Emergence of the French Oil Industry between the Two Wars,” Business and Economic History On-­ line 1 (2003): 1–25. 14. For the “Anglo-­Saxon trust” discourse during the debates over the 1928 law, see, for example, “Commission d’enquête relative à l’organisation du monopole des pétroles,” Journal officiel de la République française, February 3, 1928. 15. Michel Grenon, Pour une politique de l’énergie: Charbon? Pétrole? Atome? (Verviers, Belgium: Des Presses de Gerard et Cie, 1972), 219. 16. “Conférence de M. Louis Pineau, Directeur de l’Office national des combustibles liquides faite au Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, le 1er mars 1925,” Annales de l’Office national des combustibles liquides, 1926, 21–22; and Kuisel, Ernest Mercier, 21–44. 17. Honora Mary Naughton, “The Ambiguous Partnership: ELF Aquitaine and the French Government, 1976–1986” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999), 51. 18. Bernton, Kovarik, and Sklar stress the role of the oil lobbies in sidelining ethanol in The Forbidden Fuel, 17–19. 19. See Michael S. Carolan’s analysis in “Ethanol versus Gasoline: The Contesta-

246

NOTES TO PAGES 37–40

tion and Closure of a Socio-­technical System in the USA,” Social Studies of Science 39, no. 3 (June 2009): 429–30. 20. Giebelhaus, “Farming for Fuel,” 175; and Vaclav Smil, Two Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 38. 21. Edgar Faure, La politique française du pétrole (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1938), 131. 22. José Bert, Un carburant national, l’alcool: Le problème technique, le problème économique, le problème politique (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1924), 13–14, and Pierre Marbeau, Le régime des alcools d’industrie et des alcools de bouche en France (Paris: Louis Arnette, 1932), 147. 23. Marbeau, Le régime des alcools, 150. 24. For example, used on its own, alcohol contained only two-­t hirds the caloric power as gasoline. See M. Louis, “Sur l’emploi des alcools méthylique et éthylique comme carburants,” Annales de l’Office national des combustibles liquides, March– April 1929, 185. 25. L.-­G. Numile, “L’alcool et l’essence français, carburant national,” L’économiste français, August 31, 1935, 261. 26. Faure, La politique français du pétrole, 131. 27. Ernest Naef, “L’armée et le “carburant national,” Revue militaire suisse 76 (1931): 30. 28. Giebelhaus, “Farming for Fuel,” 176. 29. Quoted in Marcel Rooy, Le carburant national: Étude sur le régime légal de l’alcool en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925), 7. 30. Bert, Un carburant national, 29. 31. Bert, Un carburant national, 52. 32. Léon Tabah, “Quelques précisions sur le problème sucre-­a lcool,” Population 3 (1949): 513. 33. Charles Pomaret, La politique française des combustibles liquides (Paris: Éditions de la Vie Universitaire, 1923), ii–iii. This information was found in Bérenger’s preface to the book. 34. Bert, Un carburant national, 89. 35. See, for example, David Strauss, Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-­ Americanism in Modern Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), esp. 157–74. 36. The quotes in this paragraph can be found in Charles K. Warner, The Winegrowers of France and the Government since 1875 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 128–29. 37. Gaston Defossé, La place du consommateur dans l’économie dirigée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941), 103–4.

NOTES TO PAGES 40–43

247

38. Ph. Gringberg, “Le régime des alcools et les branches organisées de l’économie agricole française,” Revue d’économique politique 52 (March–April 1938): 429. 39. On this topic, see “Régime de l’alcool employé à la carburation,” Annales de l’Office national des combustibles liquides, September–October 1930, 867. 40. “Régime de l’alcool: Nouveau carburant poids lourds,” Annales de l’Office national des combustibles liquides, November–December 1931, 1187–90. 41. Nouschi, La France et le pétrole, 98. 42. Anonymous, “Le problème de l’alcool carburant en France,” Revue française de l’énergie, April 1950, 233. 43. See the retrospective in Anonymous, “Le problème de l’alcool carburant en France,” 230–31. 44. François Caron, An Economic History of Modern France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 224. 45. See, for example, “L’alcool doit apporter sa contribution à la crise de l’essence,” Le Betteravier français, March 1949. 46. René Cercler, “Le marché du vin: Une défaite du dirigisme,” L’Information, April 23, 1953. 47. See, for example, Archives nationales (hereafter AN), CE/­429. Jean Choffel, “L’alcool-­carburant soulève les passions,” La Vie française, May 20, 1949. 48. Jean-­Raymond Guyon, Le régime économique de l’alcool (Bordeaux, France: Delmas, 1950), 22. 49. Mattei Dogan, “La représentation parlementaire du monde rural,” in Les paysans et la politique dans la France contemporaine, ed. Jacqeus Fauvet and Henri Mendras (Paris: Armand Colin, 1958), 207–27. 50. Ethan B. Kapstein, The Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and Western Politics since 1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 60; David S. Painter, “Oil and the Marshall Plan,” Business History Review 58 (1984): 359–83. 51. Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français: Histoire d’un divorce (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984). 52. Gabriel Taïx, “Étude du problème des économies d’énergie,” Journal officiel de la République française: Avis et rapports du Conseil économique, July 24, 1952; and “Étude des problèmes posés par les excédents d’alcool,” Journal officiel de la République française: Avis et rapports du Conseil économique, July 21, 1953. 53. Anonymous, “Le problème de l’alcool carburant en France,” 231. 54. AN, CE/­429. “Union routière de France,” December 12, 1949, 2. 55. J. Mistral, “L’alcool carburant est une mélange à explosion,” L’Auto-­Journal, February 15, 1953. 56. AN, CE/­429. “Union routière de France,” December 12, 1949, 2. 57. Marta Musso, “‘Oil Will Set Us Free’: The Hydrocarbon Industry and the Al-

248

NOTES TO PAGES 43–45

gerian Decolonization Process,” in Britain, France, and the Decolonization of Africa, ed. Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppsen (London: UCL Press, 2017), 68. 58. J.-­C. Colli, “La politique énergétique de la France,” Annales des mines, February 1969, 17. 59. For example, Jacques Pellissier, “La recherche du pétrole en France et dans l’Union française,” Revue française de l’énergie, October–November 1950. 60. Anonymous, “L’évolution du problème de l’alcool carburant,” Revue française de l’énergie, August–September 1950, 369. 61. Anonymous, “L’évolution du problème de l’alcool carburant,” 371. 62. Centre des Archives économiques et financières (hereafter CAEF), 4A/­ 2251/­1. Inspection générale des finances, “Note générale faite par M. Bonnet de la Tour, Pallez, et Saint-­Geours, inspecteurs des finances, sur le problème de l’alcool,” 1953, 31. 63. Alfred Sauvy, “Excédents agricoles et alcool carburant,” Bulletin des transports, August–September 1950, 592–95 64. Jacques Pellissier, “La recherche du pétrole en France et dans l’Union française,” Revue française de l’énergie, November 1950. 65. CAEF, B/­00557050. Letter from F. Bieuville, president of the General Confederation of Beet Growers, to Paul Ramadier, minister of finance, July 31, 1956. 66. AN, CE/­429. “Les raisons pour lesquelles le problème de l’alcool est actuellement posé,” n.d., but likely 1949. 67. Léon Tabah, “Le problème sucre-­a lcool et la population française,” Population 4, no. 2 (1949): 283–306. 68. For more on this topic, see Joseph Bohling, The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). 69. Alfred Sauvy, “Faits et problèmes du jour,” Population 5, no. 1 (1950): 8. 70. Le Monde, October 22, 1952. 71. French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), “Public Opinion Poll on the Topic of Alcohol Subsidies,” Sondages 1 (1955): 19. 72. See, for example, the beet lobby’s condemnation of the trade unions in “Les campagnes contre l’alcool,” Planteurs de betteraves, November–December 1949. 73. “Tourisme anti-­a lcoolique,” L’Auto-­Journal, March 15, 1953. 74. CAEF, B/­00559192. M. Lebreton, “Rapport fait au nom de la Commission de la production industrielle sur la proposition de résolution de M. Capelle et des membres du groupe du Centre républicain d’action rurale et sociale tendant à demander au Gouvernement de mettre en oeuvre une politique de pleine utilisation de tous les carburants de remplacement dont le territoire national peut disposer et notamment de cesser les exportations d’alcool,” Journal officiel de la République française: Conseil de la République, annex to the session of May 29, 1957, no. 685, 7.

NOTES TO PAGES 46–49

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75. At the beginning of the Fifth Republic, policymakers also shifted priorities from domestic coal to imported oil. 76. E.-­J. Dauphin, “Réflexions sur la réponse du Statut viticole et . . . la démocratie,” La Journée vinicole, August 28, 1953. 77. Henri Cayre, “L’agriculture présente du nouveau,” Alcool et dérivés, October 1952, 1. 78. C. Jaget, “Du folklore villageois au gangsterisme international,” Libération, May 10, 1975. 79. See Joseph Bohling, Power to the Republic: The Oil Crisis and France’s Pursuit of Energy Independence since the 1970s (forthcoming).

Chapter 2: The Politics of Creative Destruction 1. Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 133, 150, 256; Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 210; figures calculated from Peter Odell, Oil and World Power (London: Penguin, 1986), 120–21. 2. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-­Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Christian Pfister, “The ‘1950s Syndrome’ and the Transition from a Slow-­Going to a Rapid Loss of Global Sustainability,” in Turning Points of Environmental History, ed. Frank Uekoetter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 90–118; Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo, “Postwar Growth: an Overview,” in Economic Growth in Europe since 1945, ed. Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2; Kander et al., Power to the People, 252. 3. John Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe: The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mark Roseman, Recasting the Ruhr, 1945–1958: Manpower, Economic Recovery, and Labour Relations (New York: Berg, 1992). 4. On Germany’s relatively middling income level before 1945, see Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Allen Lane, 2006). On West Germany’s consumer and export economy as part national identity, see Werner Abelshauser, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte seit 1945 (Munich: CH Beck, 2004); Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgarg: Klett-­Cotta, 2006), 87; Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945– 1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87, 95; Mary Nolan, The Transat-

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lantic Century: Europe and America 1890–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Bernhard Rieger, The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte Deutschland sim 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014), 627–68. 5. Lignite coal in West Germany accounted for roughly 13 percent of total primary energy consumption in the 1950s, while hard coal accounted for over 75 percent. Michael Farrenkopf and Stefan Przigoda, eds., Glück auf! Ruhrgebiet: Der Steinkohlenbergbau nach 1945 (Bochum: Deutsches Bergbau-­Museum, 2010), 546. 6. Nathan Rosenberg, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016); Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017); Clark A. Miller, Alastair Iles, and Christopher F. Jones, “The Social Dimensions of Energy Transitions,” Science as Culture 22, no. 2 (2013): 135–48. 7. Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 8. Anthony Nichols, Freedom With Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany 1918–1963 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Alfred C. Mierzejewski, Ludwig Erhard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Mark E. Spicka, Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); James C. Van Hook, Rebuilding Germany: The Creation of the Social Market Economy, 1945– 1957 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 9. Bill McKibben, “A Future without Fossil Fuels,” New York Review of Books, April 4, 2019. 10. Christoph Nonn, Die Ruhrbergbaukrise: Entindustrialisierung und Politik 1958–1969 (Göttingen: Vandenoeck & Ruprecht, 2001); Martin F. Parnell, The German Tradition of Organized Capitalism: Self-­Government in the Coal Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Volker Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 1945–1973 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Petra Dolata, Die deutsche Kohlenkrise im nationalen und transatlantischen Kontext (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006). 11. First quotation Bergbau Archiv Bochum (BAB), 26, 67, H. Hembeck, “Ist die Kohle zu teuer?” Arbeit und Sozialpolitik 10, no. 10 (1956): 317–19; second quotation from Ludwig Erhard, Deutsche Wirtschaftspolitik: der Weg der sozialen Marktwirtschaft (Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag, 1962), 103; Werner Bonefeld, “Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism,” New Political Economy 17, no. 5 (2012): 633–56; Ralf Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany: Revisiting the Ordoliberal Foundations of the Social Market Economy,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin, ed. Philip

NOTES TO PAGES 52–54

251

Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 2009), 98–138. 12. Bundes Archiv Koblenz (BAK), B102, 5448, Boecker to Hessische Ministerium für Arbeit, Wirtschaft und Verkehr, November 5, 1953; David Painter, “Oil and the Marshall Plan,” Business History Review 58, no. 3 (1984): 359–83. 13. First quotation from BAB, 32, 4146, Auszug aus dem Entwurf des Protokolls der 45. Tagung des Ministerrats in Luxemburg, October 8, 1957; second quotation from Manfred Horn, Die Energiepolitik der Bundesregierung von 1958 bis 1972 (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1977), 201; Abelshauser, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 202; Bundesregierung, Stenographische Berichte, (BSB), “Energiebilanz des Bundesgebiet,” June 24, 1957; Bundesregierung, Kabinettsausschuss für Wirtschaft (KaW), 45. Sitzung on March 9, 1956; BAK, B136, 2506, “Zur Frage der künftigen Entwicklung des Energiebedarfs des Bundesgebietes und seiner Deckung,” January 4, 1956. 14. BAB, 32, 4146, Auszug aus dem Entwurf des Protokolls der 45. Tagung des Ministerrats in Luxemburg, October 8, 1957. 15. First quotation from BAB, 26, 67, Theobald Keyser, press conference of the UvRb on July 13, 1956; second quotation from BAB, 26, 67, Theobald Keyser, “Vor der Kohlendebatte im Bundestag,” FAZ, November 13, 1956; BAB, 160, 651, Helmuth Burckhardt, “Die Steinkohle im Wettbewerb,” lecture given in Basel, January 16, 1958; BAB, 26, 67, Helmuth Burckhardt, “Langfristige Kohlen-­und Energiepolitik.” 16. Heinrich Gutermuth, “Bergbauwirtschaft heute und morgen,” June 8, 1958, doc. 29 in Deutsche Energiepolitik seit 1945, ed. Martin Martiny and Hans-­Jürgen Schneider (Cologne: Bund Verlag, 1981), 125. 17. BAB, 32, 4146, Auszug aus dem Entwurf des Protokolls der 45. Tagung des Ministerrats in Luxemburg, October 8, 1957; BAB, 32, 4146, Keyser and Söhngen to Erhard, September 16, 1957. 18. “Kohlenkrise: Gute alte Zeit,” Der Spiegel, December 16, 1959; M. A. Adelman, The World Petroleum Market (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 357; Jahresbericht des Unternehmensverband Ruhrburgbau in Essen, 1958–60; BAK, B136, 2508, Burckhardt to Adenauer, October 30, 1959; BAK, B136, 2508, Burckhardt to Adenauer, October 30, 1959. 19. Heinrich Gutermuth, “Wirtschaftliches Stalingrad an der Ruhr,” speech from January 25, 1959, doc. 35, in Martiny and Schneider, Energiepolitik; Werner Abelshauser, Der Ruhrkohlenbergbau seit 1945: Wiederaufbau, Krise, Anpassung (Munich: Beck, 1984), 87–91. 20. First quotation in Bundesregierung, Die Kabinettsprotokolle der Bundesregierung (KpBr), 23, Sitzung, April 30, 1958; second quotation in Nonn, Ruhrbergbaukrise, 106. 21. Bundesregierung, KpBr, 45, Sitzung, December 3, 1958. 22. First quotation from BSB, 3; wahlperiode, 59, Sitzung, January 29, 1959; sec-

252

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ond quotation from Erhard, “Die Sorgen des Steinkohlenbergbaus,” in Deutsche Wirtschaftspolitik, 441; Parnell, Coal Industry, 101; Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 112. 23. Bundesregierung, KaW, 18, Sitzung, September 9, 1959; Parnell, Coal Industry, 101. 24. William J. Barber, “The Eisenhower Energy Policy: Reluctant Intervention,” in Energy Policy in Perspective: Today’s Problems, Yesterday’s Solutions, ed. Craufurd Goodwin and William Barber (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1981), 205–86; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 2008), 517–20. 25. Adelman, World Petroleum, 322–24, table III-­B-­1; Odell, World Power, 11, 94, 120; BAB, 26, 80, Report from ESSO, “Energiepolitik in Deutschland: Eine Bestandsaufnahme.” 26. Tyler Priest, “The Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 236–51; Martin Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 245; Albrecht Mulfinger, Auf dem Weg zur gemeinsamen Mineralölpolitik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1972), 250–78. 27. Emil Kratzmüller, “Die Investitionsproblematik der Mineralölwirtschaft unter Berücksichtigung der internationalen Verflechtungen,” in Investitions-­ und Finanzierungsprobleme in der Energiewirtschaft, ed. Theodor Wessels (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1968), 115–33; BAK, B102, 126250, E. Bockelmann and H. Streicher, “Ursachen und Wirkungen der veränderten Standortstruktur der Mineralölraffinerien in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland”; BAK, B102, 126250, H. Streicher to Schmidt in BWM, “Volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Mineralölraffinieren”; Mulfinger, Auf dem Weg, 67–68; Bundesregierung, KaW, eighth session of the committee on June 24, 1959, 97–100; Klaus-­Dieter Fischer, “Struktur und Entwicklungstendenzen der Energiewirtschaft in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Ordnungsprobleme und Entwicklungstendenzen in der deutschen Energiewirtschaft, ed. Fritz Burgbacher and Theodor Wessels (Essen: Vulkan-­Verlag, 1967), 61–107; “West Germany Report,” Oil and Gas Journal, December 31, 1956, 132–33. 28. Fischer, “Energiewirtschaft,” 76, 79, 89, 106; Farrenkopf and Przigod, Glück auf, 542; BAB, 26, 79, “Was Kostet eine Sichere Energieversorgung?” 29. BAK, B102, 126250, E. Bockelmann and H. Streicher (British Petroleum), “Ursachen und Wirkungen der veränderten Standortstruktur der Mineralölraffinerien in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Fischer, “Energiewirtschaft,” 103–6; Nonn, Ruhrbergbaukrise, 135–36; “Die Entwicklungstendenzen des Energieverbrauchs in Süddeutschland im kommenden Jahrzehnt,” DIW Wochenbericht, May 26, 1971, 157–60.

NOTES TO PAGES 57–59

253

30. BAK, NL 1229 Schiller, 176, Report from Energy Policy Unit from November 12, 1964; Fischer, “Energiewirtschaft,” 106; BAB, 26, 79, “Was Kostet eine Sichere Energieversorgung?” in WID: Energiewirtschaft, 6/­44. 31. BAK, NL 1229, Schiller, 176, “Zur Wirtschaftspolitik im Bereich der Energiewirtschaft,” April 23, 1965, and “1964 Jahresbericht: Rationalisierungsverband des Steinkohlenbergbaus”; Theodor Wessels, “Die Investitionen in der Energiewirtschaft m Rahmen der volkswirtschaftlichen Entwicklung,” and D. Müller, “Die Absatzlage des Steinkohlenbergbaus und ihre Rückwirkungen auf die Investitionspolitik der Bergbau-­Unternehmen,” in Investitions-­und Finanzierungsprobleme in der Energiewirtschaft, ed. Theodor Wessels (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1968), 12–31, 101–14; “Unternehmensverband Ruhrburgbau in Essen,” Jahresbericht, 1961–63, 58. 32. “Unternehmensverband Ruhrburgbau in Essen,” Jahresbericht, 1961–63, 42; Horn, Energiepolitik, 299; Müller, “Steinkohlenbergbaus,” 107. 33. Stefan Goch, “Der Weg zur Einheitsgesellschaft Ruhrkohle AG,” in Gluck auf!: Ruhrgebiet der Steinkohlenbergbau nach 1945, ed. Michael Farrenkopf and Stefan Przigoda (Bochum: Dt. Bergbau-­Museum, 2009), 289; Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 106–8; Heinz Kegel, “Die Künftige Bedeutung der Kohle,” July 6–7, 1961, doc. 40 in Martiny and Schneider, Energiepolitik; “Unternehmensverband Ruhrburgbau in Essen,” Jahresbericht, 1958–1960. 34. Schmidt’s report is reproduced in Farrenkopf and Przigoda, Glück auf!, 266; Parnell, Coal Industry, 111; BAK, B136, 7666, Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Sicherung des Steinkohlenabsatzes in der Elektrizitaetswirtschaft, April 6, 1966. 35. Quotation from BAK, NL 1229 Schiller, 176, DEA “Erklärung des Vorstandes,” July 1, 1965; “Stellungnahme der IGBE. . . .” Fall 1967, doc. 58 in Martiny and Schneider, Energiepolitik; Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 124–25. 36. Though the IGB leadership wanted such an enterprise to become “common property” of West German citizens, given the urgency of the situation they dropped this demand, accepting private ownership if it permitted strong worker representation. See Christoph Nonn, “Das Godesberger Programm und die Krise des Ruhrbergbaus. Zum Wandel der deutschen Sozialdemokratie von Ollenhauer zu Brandt,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50, no. 1 (2002): 71–97; Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 124–30; Goch, “Ruhrkohle.” 37. First quotation from BAK, NL 1229 Schiller, 176, excerpt from Schiller’s Speech in Munich, July 2, 1965; second quotation from from BAK, NL 1229 Schiller, 176, “Brief an die Kumpels: Vorstand der SPD nimmt Stellung,” November 4, 1964. On Schiller, see Alexander Nützenadel, Stunde der Ökonomen: Wissenschaft, Politik und Expertenkultur in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1974 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 131–32; BAB, 55, 983, Hermann J. Abs, Fritz Berg, Guenter Henle, Ernst Schnieder, Hans-­Guenther Sohl to Schiller, May 11, 1968; Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 124–29.

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38. BAB, 26, 80, Kurt H. Biedenkopf, “Energiepolitik nach dem Kohleanpassungsgesetzt.” 39. Theodor Wessels, “The Reorganization of the Hard-­Coal Mining Industry in the Federal Republic of Germany,” German Economic Review 8 (1970): 82; Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 145–61; Parnell, Coal Industry, 180; BAB, 55, 983, Ruhrkohle AG Vorstand to Kommission der Europäischen Gemeinscahften, August 22, 1969, 3rd attachment. 40. BAB, 32, 332, VEBA Geschäftsbericht über das Geschäftsjahr vom 1. Oktober 1967 bis 30. September 1968; BAB, 26, 80, “Ausführungen von Herrn Oberbergrat Keyser zur Hauptversammlung der Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-­A ktiengesellchaft”; BAB, 11, DEA, “Geschäftsbericht 1968,” DEA, “Geschäftsbericht 1969,” and DEA, “Betriebsbericht 1969, Vertraulich”; Horn, Energiepolitik, 102. 41. BAK, NL 1229, 176, Schiller excerpt from a speech given in Munich, June 28, 1965. 42. Abelshauser, Ruhrkohlenbergbau, 145–46, 149; Horn, Energiepolitik, 298–99. 43. Hermann Scheer, Energy Imperative: 100 Per Cent Renewable Now, trans. Joanna Scudamore-­Trezek (London: Earthscan, 2010), 35–36; Hermann Scheer, Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future, trans. Andrew Ketley (London: Earthscan, 1999), xiv–xv.

Chapter 3: Accounting the Dead 1. For a definitive account, see Bonnie E. Stewart, No. 9: The Farmington Mine Disaster (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2011); “78 Miners Entombed in Farmington No. 9 after Blast Rips Workings,” West Virginia Times, November 21, 1968; Ben A. Franklin, “The Scandal of Death and Injury in the Mines: Nobody Knows What the Cost of a Century of Neglect Has Been,” New York Times, March 30, 1969. 2. Barbara Smith emphasizes that rank-­and-­fi le organizing, particularly around black lung, had a deeper history both within the union and the community. The Farmington Mine disaster, nevertheless, remains a turning point. See Barbara Ellen Smith, Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 75–99. 3. Federal Power Commission, The 1970 National Power Survey: Part I (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971), I:1–4–I:1–5; transcript, “The Cherokee Shaft: The Story of Mines and Men,” ABC News, May 22, 1971, Miners for Democracy Records (MFDR), Walter P. Reuther Library for Labor and Urban Affairs, 63/­1; Robert Coles and Harry Huge, “Black Lung: Mining as a Way of Death,” New Republic, January 25, 1969; United Mine Workers of America President’s Office Records, Eberly Family Special Collections, Penn State University 29/­16.

NOTES TO PAGES 64–66

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4. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. 5. Ken Hechler, press release, January 5, 1970, reproduced in Ken Hechler, The Fight for Coal Mine Health and Safety: A Documented History (Charleston, WV: Pictorial Histories Publishing, 2011), 274–78. 6. US Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, “Coal Fatalities for 1900 through 2020,” https:/­/a­ rlweb.msha.gov/­stats/­centurystats/­coalstats. asp. The peak of coal mining fatalities, 1907, is a marginal outlier, representing the Monongah disaster, which occurred in the same coal seam less than twenty miles away from the Farmington Mine explosion, killing at least 362. However, the surrounding years, from 1905 to 1918, contain the highest fatality rates, measured in deaths per one hundred thousand miners, in US history. See Davitt McAteer, Monongah: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2014). 7. Charles River Associates, The Economic Impact of Public Policy on the Appalachian Coal Industry and the Regional Economy (Cambridge, MA: n.p., 1973), 11–12, 183; Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook, 1969 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971). 8. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003); Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016), xi–16. An important exception to coal’s domestic character in this period, however, was the connection between the military-­ industrial complex in the Sunbelt and the development of Indigenous coal reserves, with issues similar enough to the international oil situation that twenty-­five Indigenous nations, led by the Navajo, formed the Council of Energy Resource Tribes: what was called “Indian OPEC.” See Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); James Robert Allison, Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self-­Determination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nancy L. MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Katherine L. Turk, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). On the transformation of rights and power beyond the regulatory framework, see Robert C. Liberman, “Private Power and American Bureaucracy: The State, the EEOC, and Civil Rights Enforcement,” in The Boundaries of the State in US History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 259–94. 9. Alan Derickson, Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster (Ithaca,

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NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Mark V. Tushnet, The Rights Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2009); Nathaniel R. Jones, “Minorities and the Bill of Rights,” in To Secure the Blessings of Liberty: Rights in American History (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1993), 117–43; Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregation, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Turk, Equality on Trial; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7–9. 10. Josh Descaro, interviewed for “The Cherokee Shaft”; Lyndon B. Johnson, “Proclamation 3789—­National Coal Week,” June 15, 1967, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­node/­306160; Miner quoted in “The Condition of the Coal Miner,” NBC News, August 4, 1970, United Mine Workers of America, President’s Office Records, Eberly Family Special Collections, Penn State University, 29/­18. 11. US House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act: A Report with Minority, Supplemental, and Separate Views (to accompany HR 13950), 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, H. Report no. 91–563; Lyndon B. Johnson, “Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House Proposing the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1968,” September 11, 1968, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­ node/­237509. 12. Transcript of the Federal State Coal Mine Safety Conference, May 20, 1963; United Mine Workers of America President’s Office Records 196/­19; Letter from Kennedy to Udall quoted by Udall in his opening statement, 4. On the need for new laws, 6, 13–15; W. A. Boyle to Udall, March 29, 1968, United Mine Workers of America President’s Office Records 29/­14. 13. Jeanne Rasmussen, field notes from Hyden, Kentucky, January 1971, Jeanne Rasmussen Papers, Archives of Appalachia, Eastern Tennessee State University, 2/­32. 14. Ray Zell, “Well Balanced,” United Mine Workers Journal, January 15, 1967. 15. Remarks by Ken Hechler, December 12, 1968, reproduced in The Fight for Coal Mine Health and Safety, 87. 16. On slow violence, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Ben A. Franklin, “Angry UMW Insurgent Arnold Ray Miller,” New York Times, May 30, 1972; Ben A. Franklin, “West Virginia Miners Demand Black Lung Compensation Law,” New York Times, February 12, 1969. 17. Ben A. Franklin, “Shultz Is Assailed for Delaying Rules on Job Health and Safety,” New York Times, February 16, 1969; Franklin, “West Virginia Miners De-

NOTES TO PAGES 70–74

257

mand Black Lung Compensation Law”; Smith, Digging Our Own Graves, 114–26; Reuters, “12,000 Miners Join Wildcat Strike,” New York Times, February 26, 1969; Bennington quoted in AP, “Black Lung Is Target of Miners,” Boston Globe, February 23, 1969. For Hechler’s initial response to strike, see Carter Taylor Seaton, The Rebel in the Red Jeep: Ken Hechler’s Life in West Virginia Politics (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017), 217–19; UPI, “Federal Court Says It Lacks Power to Halt Mine Strike,” New York Times, March 2, 1969; Michael K. Drapkin, “Coal Strikes Seen Being Settled Soon; Impact Expected to be Felt for Months,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1969. 18. Dr. I. E. Buff, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, February 4, 1969; New York Times Editorial Board, “The Black Lungers,” New York Times, February 3, 1969; “Coal Miners’ Revolt,” New York Times, February 25, 1969; New York Times Editorial Board, “Progress on Mine Safety,” New York Times, March 5, 1969. 19. Derickson, 162. 20. US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Labor, Coal Mine Health and Safety, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, 4. 21. These bills were S. 355, S. 467, S. 1094, S. 1178, S. 1300, S. 1907, reprinted in US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Labor, Coal Mine Health and Safety, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, 7–447. 22. US Congress, Senate, Subcommittee on Labor, Coal Mine Health and Safety, 1969, 464. 23. Paul F. Clark, The Miners’ Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1981); National Independent Coal Operators’ Association, “Recommendations Concerning Rules and Regulations Governing Coal Mine Health and Safety as Found in Title 30, Part 75 of the Federal Register, Vol. 35, No. 61,” March 28, 1970, Miners for Democracy Records, 44/­11. 24. Ken Hechler, press release, January 5, 1970; Ben A. Franklin, “More Miners Protest Slayings; Utilities Coal Stockpiles Wane,” New York Times, January 7, 1970. 25. US General Accounting Office, Report to the Congress: Achievements, Administrative Problems, and Costs in Paying Black Lung Benefits to Coal Miners and Their Widows, Social Security Administration, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, B-­164031(4) (Washington, DC: US General Accounting Office, 1972), 1. On the coalfield SSA protests, see Richard Fry, “Making Amends: Coal Miners, the Black Lung Association, and Federal Compensation Reform, 1969–1972,” Federal History 5 (2013): 35–56; Safety Walkouts, Miners for Democracy Records, box 58, folders 23–31, box 59, f1–29, box 60, folders 1–5, 25–34, box 61, folders 1–5, 7–10. 26. Black Lung Benefits Act, 30 USC 922 (1972). 27. On the inevitability of miners continuing to contract black lung, see statement of Rep. Robert Mollohan (D-­W V) in US Congress, House of Representatives,

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NOTES TO PAGES 74–77

General Subcommittee on Labor, Black Lung Benefits, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 1971, 42–44; US Government Accountability Office, Achievements, Administrative Problems, and Costs in Paying Black Lung Benefits to Coal Miners and Their Widows, 17–18, 66–67; US Office of Management and Budget, The Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 317; Robert D. Lifset, “A New Understanding of the American Energy Crisis of the 1970s,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014): 22–42; US Office of Management and Budget, The Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 234. 28. Oral arguments, December 2, 1975, at 8:53, 33:32, 1:01:34, Usery, Secretary of Labor, et al. v. Turner Elkhorn Mining Co. et al. 428 U.S. 1 (No. 74–1302), https:/­/­ www.oyez.org/­cases/­1975/­74-­1302. 29. Usery v. Turner Elkhorn Mining Co. (1976). 30. On previous accidents, see Stewart, No. 9: The Farmington Mine Disaster, 15, 36; AP, “Flaming Pit Entombs 15; New Blasts Shatter Seal; All Hope Lost in Blast,” Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, November 15, 1954. The idea that the nation has incurred a debt to coal miners persists in legal scholars’ approach to the problem of mining regulation. For a recent example, see Anne Marie Lofaso, “What We Owe Our Coal Miners,” Harvard Law & Policy Review 5, no. 1 (2011): 87–113.

Chapter 4: Hard Hat Cowboys 1. Steve Gardiner, “Rumblings in Razor City: The Oral History of Gillette, Wyoming, An Energy Boom Town” (unpublished manuscript), 78–81. 2. During the Gilded Age, western coalfields powered front-­range homes and transcontinental railroads, but never amounted to much in terms of national production. There was almost no coal production in the West before 1870, and productive mines accounted for about 10 percent of US coal by 1910. For coal data, see US Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Coal Data: A References (Washington, DC: Energy Information Administration, 1989), 15; Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 256–57. On “energy capitals,” see Joseph A. Pratt, Martin V. Melosi, and Kathleen A. Brosnan, Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). On “labor management accord,” see Nelson Lichenstein, “Labor Management Accord?” in State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 98–140. 3. “The Coal Industry’s Controversial Move West,” Business Week, May 11, 1975, 35; US Energy Information Administration and the US Mine Safety and Health Administration, “Historic Coal Production Data: 2000.” On the energy crisis more

NOTES TO PAGES 77–78

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generally, see Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2016). 4. “Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx,” Highgate Cemetery, London, March 17, 1883. On journalist coverage of miners as Trump supporters, see, for example, Declan Walsh, “Alienated and Angry, Coal Miners See Donald Trump as Their Only Choice,” New York Times, August 19, 2016. 5. There is a large literature by scholars and journalists on strip mining (mostly focused on Appalachia) that pays attention to the environment, but largely ignores workers. See Erik Reese, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). For notable exceptions, see the work of anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014). Oil historians have made a similar critique in their studies; see Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani, eds., Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). On the energy crisis and consumption, see Jacobs, Panic at the Pump. 6. “100 Years with Coal Age—­1940s: Coal Provinces and the Fuel for World War II and the Cold War,” Coal Age, September 14, 2012. 7. John McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pres, 2016). For the relationship between the workplace and worker control, see David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For the concept of “workscapes” in coal mines, see Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). To understand how surface mines changed labor relations in mining, see Brian Leech, The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and it’s Expanding Berkeley Pit (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018), and Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 8. On capital flight, see Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Deindustrialization of America; Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Robert Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132–65. On rural American job loss and the reactions to it, see Keith Orejel, “Factories in the Fallows: The Political Economy of America’s Rural Heartland, 1945–1980” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015); Don A. Dillman and Daryl J. Hobbs, eds., Rural Society in the United States: Issues for the 1980s (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982); Janet M Fitchen, Poverty in Rural America: A Case Study (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

260

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1987); and Kathryn Porter, Poverty in Rural America: A National Overview (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1989). 9. Robert Reynolds, “Guide for the Supervision of Coal Exploration Drilling” (unpublished manuscript), box 12, folder 3, Robert Reynolds Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming; Daniel Philip Wiener, Joseph Mohbat, John DiStefano, and Ron Lanoue, eds., Reclaiming the West: The Coal Industry and Surface-­Mined Lands (New York: InForm Press, 1980), 33–34; “Wyoming Coal Project: Biweekly Progress Report, September 5, 1975 to September 19, 1975,” Morrison-­K nudson Company, Inc., box 839, folder 1043, Westmoreland Coal Company Records, 1765, series VI, Hagley Library and Museum, Wilmington, Delaware. 10. For coal data, see “Coal Production, 1949–2017,” Table ES1, US Energy Information Administration, Annual Coal Report 2017; “Coal Consumption by Sector, Selected Years, 1949–2011 (Million Short Tons),” Table 7.3, US Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review 2011. On “energy transitions” as a “changing composition (structure) of primary energy supply,” see Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and national Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017). For a work that treats the mechanization of mining as the end of the political significance of the coalfields, see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011). 11. On these early western mines, see Robert A. Chadwick, “Coal: Montana’s Prosaic Treasure,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1973): 18–31; William B. Evans and Robert L. Peterson, “Decision at Colstrip: The Northern Pacific Railway’s Open-­Pit Mining Operation,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 61, no. 3 (July 1970): 129–36; LeCain, Mass Destruction. 12. US Department of the Interior, “Surface Mining and our Environment: A Special Report to the Nation,” 1967, 39; Thomas Pew, “Spectre of an American Wasteland,” Horticulture, August 1977, 51; US President’s Council on Recreation and Natural Beauty, Beauty for America, Proceedings of White House Conference on Natural Beauty (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 315; Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 13. “Bucyrus-­Erie Advertisements,” series VI, box 790, folder 153.12, “Wyoming 5/­79-­7/­71,” Westmoreland Coal Company Papers, Hagley Library and Museum, Wilmington, Delaware. For John F. Kennedy quotes, see Leech, The City That Ate Itself, 116; Richard Rhodes, “A Plundered Province Revisited,” American Heritage 29, no. 5 (August/­September 1978), 4–13. 14. David Noble, Force of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 342; Andrews, Killing for Coal.

NOTES TO PAGES 80–82

261

15. LeCain, Mass Destruction; Alexander Mck Thompson, “Capital Accumulation in U.S. Coal: A Case Study of Labor, Technology and Competition” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1979) 11; Knife River Coal Mining Company, Digger (in-­house newsletter), June/­July 1981; Caroline Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets: Uneven Development in a Dakota County (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 117; Larry Stewart, “Articulated Trucks: Growing Into their Rough Rider Image?” Construction Equipment, January 1, 2003; Beverly Sauer, The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (New York: Routledge, 2003), 113. 16. Thompson, “Capital Accumulation in U.S. Coal,” 11; Noble, Forces of Production, 342. 17. Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, 101; Jessica Smith Rolston, “The Politics of Pits and the Materiality of Mine Labor: Making Natural Resources in the American West,” American Anthropologist 115, no. 4 (December 2013): 584; James Tate Jr., Pavel O. Steiger, and John Nick, “A Computer-­Assisted Topsoil Management System for Reclaiming Surface Mine Soil,” in Ecology and Coal Resource Development, ed. Mohan K. Wali (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979), 700–705; Douglass Scott, “Computerized Reclamation Planning System for Northern Great Plains Surface Coal Mines in Ecology and Coal Development,” in Ecology and Coal Resource Development, ed. Mohan K. Wali (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979), 412–20. 18. The miner is quoted in Rolston, Mining Coal, Undermining Gender, 105. On Butte copper mining, see Leech, The City That Ate Itself. 19. “Shell Oil Company Shareholder Report,” 4, box 141, folder “Coal Leasing,” Malcolm Wallop Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming; US Mine Safety and Health Administration, US Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981), 25–27. 20. Thomas Bass, “Moving Gary, Indiana to the Great Plains: The Oil Companies Head to the Prairies,” Mother Jones, July 1976, 36; Gardiner, “Rumblings in Razor City,” 79, 206; “College Students Seek Coal Field Jobs,” Gillette (WY) News Record, May 23, 1974, 1. 21. Warren Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines Try to Best Unions at Benefits Game,” Washington Post, July 1, 1981; Matthew Desmond, On the Fireline: Living Wildland Firefights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 43–46. 22. Michael Parfit, Last Stand at Rosebud Creek (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), 145, 196–201. 23. Christian Wright, Carbon County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020); Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines.”

262

NOTES TO PAGES 83–87

24. Rolston, Mining Coal, Undermining Gender, 57; Jerry Flint, “New Coal Fields in the West Lessen Effects of the Strike,” New York Times, December 20, 1977, 20. 25. James Herickhoff, “Open Letter to All TBSS Employees and the Powder River Basin Community,” Gillette (WY) News Tribune, clipping; Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines.” 26. Jefferson Cowie, Staying Alive: 1970s and Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), and Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to the Walmart Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 27. On hard hats, see Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, and Penny W. Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 28. On “hard hat cowboys,” see Larry Stewart, “Articulated Trucks: Growing Into their Rough Rider Image?” Construction Equipment, January 1, 2003. 29. Parfit, Last Stand at Rosebud Creek. 30. Jessica Smith, “Boom to Bust, Ashes to (Coal) Dust: The Contested Ethics of Energetic Exchanges in the US Coal Market Collapse,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. 1 (2019): 91–107. 31. As quoted in Smith, “Boom to Bust, Ashes to (Coal) Dust: The Contested Ethics of Energetic Exchanges in the US Coal Market Collapse.” 32. Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 67; Rolston, Mining Coal, Undermining Gender, 151. 33. Hamilton, “Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism”; Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 72, 114, 147. 34. Brown, “Powder River Basin Mines”; Rolston, Mining Coal, Undermining Gender, 151; Gardner and Flores, Forgotten Frontier, 213. 35. Claralee Dillinger, “Suggestion Made for Union,” Gillette (WY) News Record, September 8, 1975; Megan Knight Kerns, interview with author; Jessica Smith, “Putting Kinship to Work: Gender and Relatedness in a Wyoming Coal Mine” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 156, and Rolston, Mining Coal, Undermining Gender, 151. 36. Bethany Morton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 54. On corporate paternalism, see Karen Bescherer Metheny, From the Miners’ Doublehouse: Archaeology and Landscape in Pennsylvania (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). Tier Kin: Imagining and Contesting Familism 37. Peter Richardson, “Two-­ in UAW Local,” Journal of Anthropological Research 63, no. 1 (2007): 73–94; Don Kalb, Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 117; Stewart, “Articulated Trucks.”

NOTES TO PAGES 89–92

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Part II: Oil Transition in Crisis 1. Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2016), 3–4; Jens Hohensee, Der Erst Ölpreisschock, 1973/­74 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996), 109–12. 2. Niall Ferguson et al., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Konrad Jarausch, ed., Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). 3. Figures from Peter Odell, Oil and World Power (London: Penguin, 1986), 120; Joel Darmstadter and Hans H. Landsberg, “The Economic Background,” in The Oil Crisis, ed. Raymond Vernon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 15–39, 21; and from US Energy Information Administration, “US Imports of Crude Oil,” https:/­/­w ww .eia.gov/­dnav/­pet/­hist/­LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrimus1&f=m; David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 217; Rüdiger Graf, Oil and Sovereignty: Petro-­knowledge and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s, trans. Alex Skinner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 56–69. 4. Nuno Luis Madureira, “Waiting for the Energy Crisis: Europe and the United States on the Eve of the First Oil Shock,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4, special issue, “The Energy Crises of the 1970s” (2014): 70–93; Frank Bösch and Rüdiger Graf, “Reacting to Anticipations: Energy Policy in the 1970s,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014): 7–21; Fiona Venn, The Oil Crisis (London: Routledge, 2016). 5. Nye, Consuming Power, 202–15; Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero, eds., Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); figures from Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser, and Pablo Rosado, “CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Our World in Data, August 2020, https:/­/­ ourworldindata.org/­co2-­and-­other-­greenhouse-­gas-­emissions. 6. Christian Pfister, “The 1950s Syndrome and the Transition from a Slow-­Going to a Rapid Loss of Global Sustainability,” in The Turning Points of Environmental History, ed. Frank Uekotter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 114– 15; J. R. McNiell and Peter Engelke, “Into the Anthropocene: People and Their Planet,” in Global Interdependence: The World after 1945, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 365–534. 7. Donella Meadows, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome Project on the Predicament of Mankind (London: Earth Island, 1972), 23; Elke Seefried, “Towards ‘The Limits to Growth’? The Book and Its Reception in West Germany and Great Britain 1972/­73,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London 33, no. 1 (2011): 3–37; Robert M Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar

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America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132–44; Tyler Priest, “Hubbert’s Peak. The Great Debate over the End of Oil,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44, no. 1 (2014): 37–79. 8. Tyler Priest, “Shifting Sands: The 1973 Oil Shock and the Expansion of Non-­ OPEC Supply,” in Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy, ed. Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016). 9. See also Stephen G. Gross, “Reimagining Energy and Growth: Decoupling and the Rise of a New Energy Paradigm in West Germany, 1973–1986,” Central European History 50 (2017): 514–46. 10. Michael Graetz, The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); 79–97. 11. Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, 9; Graetz, End of Energy, 137–46; Horst Mendershausen, Coping with the Oil Crisis: French and German Experiences (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Chapter 5: American Politics and Energy Transitions in the 1970 s 1. John N. Nassikas to Philip A. Hart, April 2, 1970; Bureau of Power, Federal Power Commission, “A Review of Consolidated Edison Company 1969 Power Supply Problems and Ten-­Year Expansion Plans,” in Federal Power Commission Oversight: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment, 91st Cong. (1970), 46, 537; Federal Power Commission report, September 1969, quoted by Stanley Learned in Natural Gas Supply Study: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Minerals, Materials, and Fuels, 91st Cong. (1970), 205–6. Nassikas was later accused of using overly pessimistic supply forecasts from the oil and gas industry to justify higher prices; see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011), 177–81. 2. For a concise introduction to the developing energy crisis in the early 1970s, including the problems in the gas and electric industries, see Robert D. Lifset, “A New Understanding of the American Energy Crisis of the 1970s,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014): 22–42. 3. Nassikas testimony, January 30, 1970; Nassikas to Hart, April 2, 1970; Federal Power Commission Oversight, 12–42, 44–76. 4. Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Energy Resources,” June 4, 1971, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu /­documents/­special-­message-­t he-­congress-­energy-­resources. 5. Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Energy Resources.” The reference to “the health and safety of workers” evoked concerns about the dangers of coal mining; see Trish Kahle’s contribution to this volume. On the idea of taxing negative externalities to protect the environment during the 1970s, see William J.

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Baumol, The Theory of Environmental Policy: Externalities, Public Outlays, and the Quality of Life (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1975). 6. Richard Nixon, “Executive Order 11615—­Providing for Stabilization of Prices, Rents, Wages, and Salaries,” August 15, 1971, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­executive-­order-­11615-­providing-­for-­ stabilization-­prices-­rents-­wages-­and-­salaries. For the debate over oil price controls, see Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2016); Richard H. K. Vietor, Energy Policy in America Since 1945: A Study of Business-­Government Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 191–354. 7. John Noble Wilford’s three-­part series “Nation’s Energy Crisis” included “It Won’t Go Away Soon,” “Nuclear Future Looms,” and “Is Unbridled Growth Indispensable to the Good Life?” New York Times, July 6–8, 1971. 8. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972). 9. On US efforts to oversee the domestic and global oil markets during the mid-­ twentieth century, see David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). On the Texas Railroad Commission’s management of domestic prices, see William R. Childs, The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-­Twentieth Century (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Robert McNally, Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-­ Bust Oil Prices (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), chap. 4. On price management by the Seven Sisters, see Victor McFarland and Jeff D. Colgan, “Oil and Power: The Effectiveness of State Threats on Markets,” Review of International Political Economy, December 21, 2021, doi:10.1080/­09692290.2021.2014931; Theodore Moran, “Managing an Oligopoly of Would-­Be Sovereigns: The Dynamics of Joint Control and Self-­Control in the International Oil Industry Past, Present, and Future,” International Organization 41, no. 4 (Autumn 1987): 575–607. 10. Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation about Policies to Deal with the Energy Shortages,” November 7, 1973, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww .presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­address-­t he-­nation-­about-­policies-­deal-­w ith-­t he -­energy-­shortages. 11. Memorandum of Conversation, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969– 1976, vol. 36 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2011), doc. 362; Robert Hormats to Brent Scowcroft, July 26, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 37 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012), doc. 102. 12. Nixon, “Address to the Nation about Policies to Deal with the Energy Shortages.”

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13. On the framing of the energy crisis as a test of national sovereignty and governing capacity (a discourse that was not restricted to the United States), see Rüdiger Graf, Oil and Sovereignty: Petro-­knowledge and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018). On the cultural resonance of “energy independence,” see Sebastian Herbstreuth, Oil and American Identity: A Culture of Dependency and US Foreign Policy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chap. 3; Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), chap. 2. 14. Cabinet meeting, May 28, 1974, box 4, National Security Advisor Memoranda of Conversations, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 15. Energy Meeting with State and Local Elected Officials, November 7, 1973, box 93, President’s Office Files, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California. 16. Remarks by William A. Johnson, February 5, 1974, Action/­Briefing Memorandums, 1973–1975, box 1, February 1974, vol. I, RG 56: General Records of the Department of the Treasury, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; Sansom to Simon, n.d., but ca. March 1973, drawer 15, folder 31, William E. Simon Papers, Lafayette College Special Collections, Easton, Pennsylvania. 17. Tyler Priest, “Shifting Sands: The 1973 Oil Shock and the Expansion of Non-­ OPEC Supply,” in Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy, ed. Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 123. 18. Gerald R. Ford, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress Reporting on the State of the Union,” January 15, 1975, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­ www.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­address-­before-­joint-­session-­t he-­congress -­reporting-­t he-­state-­t he-­union-­1. 19. For Gerald Ford’s energy policies, see Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, chap. 4; Yanek Mieczkowski, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), chaps. 12–15. 20. US Energy Information Agency data shows American coal consumption in the electric utility sector rising more than 50 percent between 1973 to 1983, from 8.7 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) to 13.2 quads. See https:/­/­w ww.eia.gov /­totalenergy/­data/­browser. 21. Jan Lodal and Helmut Sonnenfeldt to Henry Kissinger, December 4, 1973, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. 36, doc. 261; Kissinger, “Energy: The Necessity of Decision,” February 3, 1975, Department of State Bulletin, February 24, 1975, 242. Kissinger’s statement about the development of alternative

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energy sources also referenced efforts by the International Energy Agency, the subject of Henning Türk’s chapter in this volume. 22. 119 Cong. Rec. H43584–43585, H43592, H43594, H43596 (1973). 23. John Hirten to William Simon, October 2, 1974, drawer 22, folder 60, William E. Simon Papers, Lafayette College Special Collections, Easton, Pennsylvania. 24. Frank Zarb to the Executive Committee of the Energy Resources Council, report on meeting of February 27, 1975, Records of the Assistant Secretary for International Affairs 1973–76, box 3, folder Energy Resources Council 1975, RG 56, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. 25. Brian Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 196–97; Nicholas Dagen Bloom, How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 107–9; Richard Nixon, “Statement on Signing a Highway and Mass Transit Bill,” August 13, 1973, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­statement-­signing-­ highway-­and-­mass-­transit-­bill; Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks on Signing the National Mass Transportation Assistance Act of 1974,” November 26, 1974, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­remarks-­signing-­ the-­national-­mass-­transportation-­assistance-­act-­1974. 26. Amory Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (1976): 65. 27. Paul Sabin, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021). 28. Lovins, “Energy Strategy.” 29. For more on the relationship between Carter and Lovins, see Duccio Basosi’s chapter in this volume. 30. Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy,” April 18, 1977, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­address-­t he -­nation-­energy. For more on this speech and Carter’s energy policies, see W. Carl Biven, Jimmy Carter’s Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), chaps. 7–8; Stuart E. Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), chaps. 6–9; Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, chaps. 5–7. 31. Jimmy Carter, “Solar Energy Remarks Announcing Administration Proposals,” June 20, 1979, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb .edu/­documents/­solar-­energy-­remarks-­announcing-­administration-­proposals. 32. Subcommittee on Energy Research, Development and Demonstration, US House of Representatives, Solar Energy Legislation Through the 94th Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), 3; fact sheet, “Energy R&D Program,” folder Energy—­1974, box 2, Records of the Assistant Secretary for Inter-

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national Affairs, RG 56, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; Terrence R. Fehner and Jack M. Hall, Department of Energy, 1977– 1994: A Summary History (Washington, DC: US Department of Energy, 1994), 25. 33. Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy.” 34. Jimmy Carter, “Solar Energy Message to the Congress,” June 20, 1979, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­solar -­energy-­message-­t he-­congress. 35. Lovins recognized this problem when he insisted that by applying the label soft to renewables, he did not mean to imply that they were “vague, mushy, speculative or ephemeral.” Lovins, “Energy Strategy,” 77. 36. The politically contentious, but durable, US federal subsidy for ethanol was one of the more concrete policy results of President Carter’s 1979–1980 energy policy reforms. 37. Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: ‘The Malaise Speech,’” July 15, 1979, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.pres idency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­address-­t he-­nation-­energy-­a nd-­national-­goals-­t he -­malaise-­speech. On this, the infamous so-­called malaise speech, see Kevin Mattson, ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 38. For the text of PL 96–294, the Energy Security Act of 1980, see https:/­/­w ww .govinfo.gov/­content/­pkg/­STATUTE-­94/­pdf/­STATUTE-­94-­Pg611.pdf. 39. Adam Howard and Alexander R. Wieland, “Building Security in the ‘Arc of Crisis’: The Carter Administration’s Approach to Southwest Asia and the Persian Gulf Region,” in United States Relations with China and Iran: Toward the Asian Century, ed. Osamah F. Khalil (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), chap. 10; Victor McFarland, Oil Powers: A History of the U.S.-­Saudi Alliance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), chaps. 7–8; Olav Njølstad, “Shifting Priorities: The Persian Gulf in US Strategic Planning in the Carter Years,” Cold War History 4, no. 3 (2004): 21–55; William E. Odom, “The Cold War Origins of the U.S. Central Command,” Journal of Cold War Studies 8, no. 2 (2006): 52–82. 40. Gregory F. Nemet, How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-­ Carbon Innovation (New York: Routledge, 2019), chap. 4; Harold Wallace, “Inventing in a Crisis: Lighting the United States after the 1973 Oil Embargo,” Technology and Culture 62, no. 4 (2021): 1143–71. 41. Jimmy Carter, “News Conference in Plains, Georgia,” August 17, 1976, The American Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­news -­conference-­plains-­georgia-­0. President Carter had just met with the physicist Alvin M. Weinberg, who was concerned about the climate implications of boosting coal

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production. See Ralph M. Rotty and Alvin M. Weinberg, “How Long Is Coal’s Future,” Climatic Change 1 (1977): 45–57. 42. Council on Environmental Quality, Global Energy Futures and the Carbon Dioxide Problem (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981). Quotation from James Gustave Speth’s preface, vi. 43. See, for example, Bill McKibben, “Joe Biden’s Solar Plan and the Prescience of Jimmy Carter,” New Yorker, September 8, 2021, https:/­/­w ww.newyorker.com/­news /­daily-­comment/­joe-­bidens-­solar-­plan-­and-­t he-­prescience-­of-­jimmy-­carter; James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The Federal Government’s Fifty-­Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 33. 44. Senator Bob Dole (supported by Barry Goldwater) echoed Carter’s notion that the United States was entering the third energy transition in its history, this time to solar and other “renewable energy resources.” 126 Cong. Rec. S24743 (1980). 45. On President Reagan’s cuts to renewable energy research, see Corrie E. Clark, “Renewable Energy R&D Funding History,” Congressional Research Service Report RS22858, June 18, 2018. On the dismantling of the White House solar water heating system, see David Biello, “Where Did the Carter White House’s Solar Panels Go?,” /­ w ww.scientificamerican.com/­ article Scientific American, August 6, 2010, https:/­ /­carter-­white-­house-­solar-­panel-­array. On President Reagan’s response to the oil crisis and his application of market-­oriented rhetoric to the energy crisis, see Victor McFarland, “The United States and the Oil Price Collapse of the 1980s,” in Counter-­ shock: The Oil Counter-­revolution of the 1980s, ed. Duccio Basosi, Giuliano Garavini, and Massimiliano Trentin (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2019). 46. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), chap. 6; Judith A. Layzer, Open for Business: Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 47. Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Alex Trembath, and Jesse Jenkins, “Where the Shale Gas Revolution Came From: Government’s Role in the Development of Hydraulic Fracturing in Shale,” The Breakthrough Institute, May 2012, https:/­/­t hebreakthrough.org/­issues/­energy/­where-­t he-­shale-­gas-­revolution-­came-­ from; Zhongmin Wang and Alan Krupnick, “A Retrospective Review of Shale Gas Development in the United States,” Resources for the Future, April 2013, http:/­/­ www.rff.org/­fi les/­sharepoint/­WorkImages/­Download/­R FF-­DP-­13-­12.pdf.

Chapter 6: The Decade of the “Energy Transition” 1. The bibliography on the oil shock is extremely rich. Classic accounts include Leonardo Maugeri, The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource (London: Praeger, 2006), chaps. 8 and 9; Francisco Parra, Oil Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); Fiona Venn, The Oil Crisis (London:

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Longman, 2002); Daniel Yergin, The Prize (New York: Touchstone, 1991), 588–673. The event is best analyzed in its complexity in Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), chap. 5. See also Elisabetta Bini, Federico Romero, and Giuliano Garavini, eds., Oil Shock: The 1973 Oil Crisis and Its Economic Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016). 2. Rüdiger Graf, “Making Use of the ‘Oil Weapon’: Western Industrialized Countries and Arab Petropolitics in 1973–1974,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (2012): 185–208; Victor McFarland, Oil Powers: A History of the U.S.-­Saudi Alliance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), chap. 5; Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), chap. 3. 3. A recent account of these developments, synthetic and thought-­provoking if not always convincing, is Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), chap. 7. On petrodollars, see David Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 4. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, “Into the Anthropocene: People and Their Planet,” in Global Interdependence, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 365–536; Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), chap. 6; Juan Martinez-­A lier, The Environmentalism of the Poor (Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2002). 5. Less studied than its 1973 precursor, the making of the second oil shock is chronicled in Morris Adelman, Genie Out of the Bottle: World Oil since 1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC, chap. 7. 6. See Duccio Basosi, Giuliano Garavini, and Massimiliano Trentin, eds., Counter-­shock: The Oil Counter-­revolution of the 1980s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). 7. Juan Carlos Boué, “Abandoning Enforced Autarky for Re-­insertion in the World Petroleum Market: Mexican Oil Policy, 1976–86”; Olga Skorokhodova, “The Double Shock: The Soviet Energy Crisis and the Oil Price Collapse of 1986”; Einar Lie and Dag Harald Claes, “The Counter-­shock in Norwegian Oil History”; and Martin Chick, “Counter-­shock or After-­shock? North Sea Oil and Economics as Politics in the UK, 1973–86,” in Counter-­shock: The Oil Counter-­revolution of the 1980s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 161–79, 180–98, 199–217, 218–40. 8. Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (London: Praeger, 2010), 65–73; Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2012), chap. 16. 9. Smil, Energy Transitions, chap. 3; Kathleen Araújo, Low Carbon Energy Transitions: Turning Points in National Policy and Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 5; Yergin, The Quest, chap. 18.

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10. In general, Jean-­Claude Debeir, Jean-­Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery, Une Histoire de l’énergie. Les servitudes de la puissance (Paris: Flammarion, 2013 [1986]), 319–445. 11. Araújo, Low Carbon Energy Transitions, 287–290, Kindle. 12. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us (London: Verso, 2016), 61. 13. Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, 61. 14. The apt wording is by Joseph Szarka: “Towards an Evolutionary or a Transformational Energy Transition? Transition Concepts and Roadmaps in European Union Policy Discourse,” Innovation 29, no. 3 (2016): 223. 15. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-­Mines (London: Macmillan, 1866), 30; emphasis added. 16. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, 1934), 222– 24. 17. Palmer Putnam, Energy in the Future (New York: Van Nostrand, 1953); Harrison Brown, The Challenge to Man’s Future (New York: Viking, 1954). 18. Organisation for European Economic Co-­operation, Europe’s Growing Needs of Energy: How Can They Be Met? (Paris: OEEC, 1956). 19. With all its limitations, a Google n-­gram view for “energy transition” easily proves the point. 20. Ford Foundation, Energy Policy Project, A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1974), 93. 21. Cesare Marchetti, “Primary Energy Substitution Models: On the Interaction between Energy and Society,” Chemical Economy and Engineering Review 7, no. 8 (1975): 9–14. See also Cesare Marchetti and Nebojsa Nakicenovic, The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the Logistic Substitution Model (Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA, 1979). IIASA had been founded as an international organization for scientific cooperation in 1972. 22. Incidentally, this makes it somewhat complicated to heed Bonneuil and Fressoz’s otherwise convincing suggestion to replace “transition” with “substitution” when replacement between sources is absolute and with “addition” when it is only relative. See Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, 61. 23. Data on pronuclear subsidies in Simon Pirani, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 31–32. 24. Among these, mention must be made of Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies (WAES), Energy: Global Prospects, 1985–2000 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1977); and the more cautiously pronuclear Wolf Häfele et al., Energy in a Finite World: Path to a Sustainable Future (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1981).

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25. Wolf Häfele and Alan Manne, “Strategies for a Transition from Fossil to Nuclear Fuels,” Energy Policy 3, no. 1 (1975): 3–23. Early criticism of this kind of forecasts came from Herman Daly, “Energy Demand Forecasting: Prediction or Planning?” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 42, no. 1 (1976): 4–15. 26. Häfele and Manne, “Strategies Transition from Fossil to Nuclear Fuels,” 7. 27. Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis (New York: Knopf, 1976). 28. Commoner, Poverty of Power, 53. 29. André Gorz, Ecologie et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1978); Giovan Battista Zorzoli, Il dilemma energetico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975); Federico Butera, Quale energia per quale società (Milan: Mazzotta, 1979); Enzo Tiezzi, Tempi Storici tempi biologici (Milan: Garzanti, 1984). On a more spiritual tone, the bestseller by physicist Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the New Culture (New York: Bantam Books, 1983). 30. On decoupling (and, in particular, Lovins’s influence on West Germany’s energy debates of the late 1970s), see Stephen Gross, “Reimagining Energy and Growth: Decoupling and the Rise of a New Energy Paradigm in West Germany, 1973–1986,” Central European History 50 (2017): 514–46. 31. Amory Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (1976): 65–96; Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 1979). On Lovins, also see Victor McFarland’s chapter in this volume. 32. On Barry Commoner, see Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). On Italian political ecology, see Catia Papa, “Alle origini dell’ecologia politica in Italia. Il diritto alla salute e all’ambiente nel movimento studentesco,” in L’Italia repubblicana nella crisi degli anni settanta, vol. 2, ed. Fiamma Lussana and Giacomo Marramao (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), 385–415. 33. Lovins, “Energy Strategy,” 76. Lovins’s ideas on the topic would be later systematized in Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, and Hunter L. Lovins, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution (London: Earthscan, 1999). See also Daniel Yergin and Roger Stobaugh, Energy Future: The Report of the Harvard Business School Energy Project (New York: Random House, 1979). 34. Denis Hayes, Rays of Hope: The Transition to a Post-­petroleum World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). 35. Hayes made the case for a 75 percent solar-­powered economy by 2025. Hayes, Rays of Hope, chap. 9. On steady-­state economics and energy, see Herman Daly, Steady-­ State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977), chap. 6. 36. Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy,” April 18, 1977, The Amer-

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ican Presidency Project, https:/­/­w ww.presidency.ucsb.edu/­documents/­address-­t he -­nation-­energy. 37. See Victor McFarland’s chapter in this volume on this point. On Jimmy Carter and energy, see Kevin Mattson, ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); W. Carl Biven, Jimmy Carter’s Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). A contemporary critique of Carter’s energy legislation, seeing in it too little of the original promises, was Barry Commoner, The Politics of Energy (New York: Knopf, 1979). After meeting the “young man called Amory Lovins,” on October 18, 1977, Carter wrote in his diary that he thought that “in the long run Lovins’s ideas are going to prove correct.” See Jimmy Carter, The White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 121. 38. “Les Dix-­Neuf hésitent à admettre la création d’un organisme de consultation sur l’énergie.” Le Monde, June 2, 1977. Le Monde’s archive also contains a rare apparition of the term from the year 1960: “La transition vers une économie énergétique nouvelle ne peut être supportée même partiellement, par les ouvriers des mines, déclare M. Marjolin,” Le Monde, July 1, 1960. 39. “Carter solicita apoio do Congreso,” Folha de S. Paulo, May 18, 1977; “Si può sfruttare l’energia atomica senza rischiare delle catastrofi?” Corriere della Sera, June 17, 1977. 40. Ali Ahmed Attiga, “Global Energy Transition and the Third World,” Third World Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1979): 39–56. 41. Yuri Kononov, Ènergetika i èkonomika: problemy perehoda k novym istočnikam ènergii (Moscow: Nauka, 1981) 42. “Address by Mr. José Lopéz Portillo,” September 27, 1979, United Nations General Assembly, Official Records, Thirty-­Fourth Session, 11th Plenary Meeting, 202. 43. “Plan mundial de energía propuesto por JLC,” El Informador, September 28, 1979. 44. Final declaration, 6th Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Non-­A ligned Movement, Havana, Cuba, September 3–9, 1979, 112, available at Non-­A ligned Movement (NAM) Disarmament Database, http:/­/­cns.miis.edu/­nam /­index.php/­meeting/­index?Meeting%5Bforum_id%5D=5&name=NAM+Summits. 45. Willy Brandt, North/­South: A Program for Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 171. 46. Florentin Krause, Hartmut Bossel, and Karl-­Friedrich Müller-­Reissmann, Energie-­Wende. Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1980).

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47. United Nations General Assembly, Res. 35/­56 of December 5, 1980, and Res. 35/­204 of December 16, 1980. 48. Roger Naill, Managing the Energy Transition (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977). 49. John Sawhill, Keichi Oshima, and Hanns Maull, Energy: Managing the Transition (New York: Trilateral Commission, 1978). 50. Sawhill, Oshima and Maull, Energy, xii–xiii. 51. See Duccio Basosi, “Lost in Transition: The World’s Energy Past, Present and Future at the 1981 United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy,” Journal of Energy History/­Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie 4 (2020): 1–16. 52. “Nacional’nyj doklad, predstavlennyj Sojuzom Sovetskih Socialisticheskih Respublik,” June 10, 1981, 3, United Nations Digital Library, https:/­/­digitallibrary. un.org/­record/­22577/­fi les/­A _CONF-­100_NR_51-­RU.pdf. 53. “The Sixth Five-­Year Plan (1981–85) for the National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China,” Chinese Economic Studies 17, no. 1 (1982): 25. 54. United Nations, Report of the United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy, Nairobi, 10 to 21 August 1981 (New York: United Nations, 1981), 2. 55. “Summary of the National Report Submitted by the United States of America,” July 2, 1981, United Nations Digital Library, https:/­/­digitallibrary.un.org/­record /­22567?ln=en. The speech by the head of the US delegation in Nairobi is reproduced in “Ambassador Stanton Anderson, 13 Aug. 1981,” Department of State Bulletin 82, no. 2058 (1982): 63–66. 56. On neoliberal rationality, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). More specifically on this aspect of present-­day energy transition debates, see Szarka, “Towards an Evolutionary.” 57. See, for example, Morris Adelman et al., No Time to Confuse (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1975); Fred Singer, ed., Free Market Energy: The Way to Benefit Consumers (New York: Universe, 1984). 58. A synthesis of such debates is in Tyler Priest, “Hubbert’s Peak: The Great Debate over the End of Oil,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44, no. 1 (2014): 37–79. 59. On the exhaustion scares in the United States, see Roger Stern, “Oil Scarcity Ideology in US Foreign Policy, 1908–97,” Security Studies 25, no. 2 (2016): 214–57; Vitalis, Oilcraft, chap. 2. 60. Priest, “Hubbert’s Peak.” 61. Donella Meadows et al., Limits to Growth (New York: Universe, 1972). An

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appraisal of the debates raised by the book is in Ugo Bardi, The Limits to Growth Revisited (New York: Springer, 2011). 62. Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, 58. 63. Garavini, Rise and Fall of OPEC, chap. 4. 64. Commoner, Poverty of Power, 46–51. 65. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Random House, 1971). A lively exchange on this subject is in Angelo Baracca and Enzo Tiezzi, eds., Entropia e potere (Milan: CLUP-­CLUED, 1981). 66. Ford Foundation, A Time to Choose, chaps. 7 and 11. 67. John Irwin II, “Getting Together over a Barrel of Oil,” Energy Policy 1, no. 2 (1973): 90. 68. Häfele and Manne, “Strategies for a Transition from Fossil to Nuclear Fuels,” 3. 69. Wolf Häfele et al., Energy in a Finite World, 2. 70. WAES, Energy, 17. 71. Sawhill, Oshima, and Maull, Energy, 13. 72. Krause, Bossel, and Müller-­Reissmann, Energie-­Wende, 13; Hayes, Rays of Hope, 35. See also Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy (New York: Viking, 1982), chap. 4. 73. Carter, “Address”; United Nations, Report, 67. 74. Smil, Energy Transitions, 130–31; Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts, chap. 6; Yergin, Quest, 523; John Deutch, The Crisis in Energy Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 13–14; Ian Bogdan Vasi, Winds of Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Leonardo Maugeri, Con tutta l’energia possibile (Milan: Sperling & Kupfner, 2011), 26; Hermann Scheer, Autonomia energetica. Ecologia, tecnologia e sociologia delle risorse rinnovabili (Rome: Ambiente, 2006), 18. A partially different view is in Kathleen Araújo, “The Emerging Field of Energy Transitions: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities,” Energy Research & Social Science (2014): 113. 75. International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2016 (Paris: IEA, 2016), 6; Pirani, Burning Up, chap. 4.

Chapter 7: Reversing the Transition from Coal to Oil? The research for this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the project “Die Internationale Organisation nationaler Energiepolitik: Großbritannien und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Internationalen Energie-­Agentur (IEA), 1974–1993” (Gz. TU496/­1-­1). I would like to thank Stephen Gross for his very helpful comments on the first drafts of the chapter. 1. On the data, see International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 1982 (Paris: OECD, 1982), 67. For a global perspective, see Vaclav Smil, “Energy in the

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Twentieth Century: Resources, Conversions, Costs, Uses, and Consequences,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25 (2000): 21–51. 2. Axel D. Neu, Die künftige Rolle der Steinkohle in der Energieversorgung (Kiel: Institut für Weltwirtschaft, 1980), 4. 3. On fresh research about the first energy crisis, see Rüdiger Graf, Oil and Sovereignty: Petro-­knowledge and Energy Policy in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018); Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero, eds., Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Rüdiger Graf and Frank Bösch, “The Energy Crises of the 1970s: Anticipations and Reactions in the Industrialized World,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014). 4. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 388. 5. That the 1973 oil crisis was the starting point for a “decade of energy policy” ending with the oil price decline in the 1980s was already the impression of the contemporaries. See Wolfgang Fischer and Erwin Häckel, Internationale Energieversorgung und politische Zukunftssicherung. Das europäische Energiesystem nach der Jahrtausendwende: Außenpolitik, Wirtschaft, Ökologie (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1987), 1; Robert J. Lieber, The Oil Decade: Conflict and Cooperation in the West (New York: Praeger, 1983); Martin Greenberger, Caught Unawares: The Energy Decade in Retrospect (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1983). 6. Duccio Basosi, Giuliano Garavini, and Massimiliano Trentin, eds., Counter-­ shock: The Oil Counter-­revolution of the 1980s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). 7. On the following, see Graf, Oil and Sovereignty, 52–62; Marloes Beers, “The OECD Oil Committee and the International Search for Reinforced Energy-­ Consumer Cooperation, 1972–3,” in Bini, Garavini, and Romero, Oil Shock, 146–47. 8. On OPEC’s history, see Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 9. Ethan B. Kapstein, The Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and Western Politics since 1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 141–49; Graf, Oil and Sovereignty, 56–57; Joseph Mann, “A Reassessment of the 1967 Arab Oil Embargo,” Israel Affairs 19, no. 4 (2013): 693–703. 10. Graf, Oil and Sovereignty, 57–58. 11. Richard Scott, The History of the International Energy Agency: The First Twenty Years, Vol. I: Origins and Structures of the IEA (Paris: OECD, 1994), 35–36; Ulf Lantzke, “The OECD and its International Energy Agency,” in The Oil Crisis, ed. Raymond Vernon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 218–19; OECD Oil Section, “Report on OECD-­Wide Apportionment of Oil Supplies in an Emergency,” Document DIE/­E/­PE/­73.135, Paris, November 28, 1973, OECD Archive, High Level Group Oil: DIE/­E/­PE, 4–5.

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12. Henning Türk, “The Oil Crisis of 1973 as a Challenge to Multilateral Energy Cooperation among Western Industrialized Countries,” Historical Social Research, 39, no. 4 (2014): 214–16; Beers, “OECD Oil Committee,” 142–71. 13. On the founding negotiations, see Türk, Oil Crisis, 217–26; Graf, Oil and Sovereignty, 294–307. 14. “Agreement on an International Energy Program,” in Scott, History of the International Energy Agency, Vol. 1, 379–81. 15. “Memorandum from the Chairman of the International Energy Review Group Working Group (Enders), 16. September 1974.” In Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1969–1976, vol. XXXVII: Energy Crisis 1974–1980, ed. Office of the Historians (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012), 24. 16. On the following, see Henry Kissinger, “The Energy Crisis: Strategy for Cooperative Action,” Department of State Bulletin 71, no. 1849 (December 2, 1974): 749– 56, https:/­/­w ww.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/­library/­document/­dosb/­1849.pdf#page=3. 17. Kissinger, “The Energy Crisis,” 753. 18. “Long Term Co-­operation Program,” in The History of the IEA: The First 20 Years, Vol. 3: Principle Documents, by Richard Scott (Paris: OECD, 1994), 177. See also Walter Kittel: “Das Programm für langfristige Zusammenarbeit,” Wirtschaftsdienst 56, no. 3 (1976): 123–28. 19. On the discussions about energy conservation in the 1970s, see also Thomas Turnbull’s chapter in this volume. 20. “Ministerial Decision on Group Objectives and Principles for Energy Policy 5–6 October 1977,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 79–90. 21. In the first years of its existence, the IEA resorted very often to the forecasting of energy gaps. These expected gaps were used as a sort of trigger to activate certain policies of the IEA member governments. For the use of “energy gaps” as a political argument, see Martin H. Geyer, “Die neue Wirklichkeit von Sicherheit und Risiken: Wie wir mit dystopischen, utopischen und technokratischen Diagnosen von Sicherheit zu leben gelernt haben,” in Die neue Wirklichkeit. Semantische Neuvermessungen und Politik seit den 1970er Jahren, ed. Ariane Leendertz and Wencke Meteling (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2016), 284–88. 22. “Ministerial Decision on Group Objectives and Principles for Energy Policy 5–6 October 1977,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 85. 23. “Ministerial Decision on Group Objectives,” 86. 24. “Ministerial Decision on Group Objectives,” 86. 25. International Energy Agency, Steam Coal: Prospects to 2000 (Paris: OECD, 1978). The countries with high cost coal, like West Germany and the United Kingdom, tried to soften the wording of the study. From their point of view, the study favored the position of low-­cost coal countries like the United States too much. See “Introductory Speaking Note for the Informal Meeting of the IEA Governing Board

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on 21 September 1978,” and “Deputy Secretary D Le B Jones to Minister of State and Secretary of State, 25 September 1978, concerning IEA Governing Board meeting on 21./­22. September 1978,” both in FCO 96/­1612, the National Archives (TNA), London; “Telex No. 523, 12. September 1978 von der OECD-­Gesandtschaft an das Auswärtige Amt betr. Sitzung Governing Board am 21./­22.9.1978,” Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (PAAA), Zwischenarchiv, vol. 121291. 26. International Energy Agency, Steam Coal, 5. 27. International Energy Agency, Steam Coal, 5. 28. See Lantzke’s non-­paper for the preparation of the G7 meeting in Bonn, Germany, in 1978, and the various negative evaluations by the West German economics ministry, BaK, B102, vols. 201587 and 201592. 29. “Note by D. R. MacLennan about the International Energy Agency, 21 February 1979,” Department of Energy, EG 14/­30, TNA, London. 30. See, for example, Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and Jan-­Henrik Meyer, “Global Protest against Nuclear Power: Transfer and Transnational Exchange in the 1970s and 1980s,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 165–90; Michael L. Hughes, “Civil Disobedience in Transnational Perspective: American and West German Anti-­Nuclear-­Power Protesters, 1975–1982,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 1 (2014): 236–53. 31. Richard Scott, The History of the IEA: The First 20 Years, Vol. 2: Major Policies and Actions (Paris: OECD, 1994), 174. 32. The second oil crisis and its consequences are described in detail in Wilfried L. Kohl, ed., After the Second Oil Crisis: Energy Policies in Europe, America, and Japan (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982); Francisco Parra, Oil Politics: A Modern History of Petroleum (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 215–39; Daniel Yergin, Der Preis. Die Jagd nach Öl, Geld und Macht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991), 830–83. 33. Frank Bösch, “Taming Nuclear Power: The Accident near Harrisburg and the Change in West German and International Nuclear Policy in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” German History 35, no. 1 (2017): 71–95; J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Natasha Zaretsky, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 34. “Ministerial Principles for IEA Action on Coal and Decision on Procedures for Review of IEA Countries’ Coal Policies,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 222. 35. Australia became a member in May 1979. For Australia’s changing attitude toward the IEA between 1974 and 1979, see Aynsley Kellow, and Peter Carrol, “‘Perfidy Afoot!’ Connor, the IEA and the Loans Affair,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 67, no. 1 (2021): 88–105. 36. “Ministerial Principles for IEA Action on Coal and Decision on Procedures for Review of IEA Countries’ Coal Policies,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 222.

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37. “Ministerial Principles for IEA Action,” 223. 38. “Ministerial Principles for IEA Action,” 221. 39. “Decision of the Governing Board on the Establishment of an IEA Coal Industry Advisory Board (CIAB), 11. July 1979,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 55. 40. See, for example, International Energy Agency, Report of the IEA Coal Industry Advisory Board (Paris: OECD, 1980). 41. Martin Marcussen, “OECD Governance through Soft Law,” in Soft Law in Governance and Regulation: An Interdisciplinary Analysis, ed. Ulrika Mörth (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004), 103–26; Fabrizio Pagani: Peer Review: A Tool for Cooperation and Change. An Analysis of an OECD Working Method (Paris: OECD, 2002); William Glenn Gray: “Peer Pressure in Paris: Country Reviews at the OECD in the 1960s and 1970s,” in The OECD and the International Political Economy since 1948, ed. Matthieu Leimgruber and Matthias Schmelzer, (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 209–31. 42. Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development, Energy Conservation in the International Energy Agency: 1976 Review (Paris: OECD, 1976). 43. For the strengthening of the process, see, for example, the 1978 review procedure discussed in “Secretary of State to Embassies, 23. November 1977, Subject: Energy, IEA-­SLT meeting on 14–16 November 1977,” WikiLeaks, https:/­/­fi le.wikileaks .org/­oc/­oc/­2532/­277210.pdf; “Embassy Paris to Secretary of State, 23. May 1978, Subject: Energy; IEA/­SLT Meeting of May 18,” WikiLeaks, https:/­/­fi le.wikileaks.org/­oc /­oc/­2694/­131296.pdf. 44. “Ministerial Decision on Group Objectives and Principles for Energy Policy, 5–6 October 1977,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 79. 45. International Energy Agency, Energy Policies and Programmes of IEA Member Countries: 1978 Review (Paris: OECD, 1979). 46. “Decision of the Governing Board on Procedures for Review of IEA Countries’ Coal Policy,” in Scott, History of the IEA, Vol. 3, 229. 47. International Energy Agency, Coal Prospects and Policies in IEA Countries (Paris: OECD, 1981, 1983, 1987). 48. “Note by D.R. MacLennan about the International Energy Agency, 21 February 1979,” Department of Energy, EG 14/­30, TNA, London. 49. Basosi, Garavini, and Trentin, Counter-­shock. 50. Fischer and Häckel, Internationale Energieversorgung, 1. 51. “Oil’s Role in the Energy Market,” Petroleum Economist 52 (1985): 235.

Chapter 8: From State to Market 1. Nicholas Georgescu-­Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 276; Donald Cardwell, “Power

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Technologies and the Advance of Science, 1700–1825,” Technology and Culture 6, no. 2 (1965): 188. 2. Sadi Carnot, ed., Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire: A Critical Edition with the Surviving Manuscripts, trans. Robert Fox (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 40. 3. Edward Daub, “The Regenerator Principle in the Stirling and Ericsson Hot Air Engines,” British Journal for the History of Science 7, no. 3 (1974): 272. 4. Michael White, “Where Did Jevons’ Energy Come From?” History of Economics Review 15 (1991): 64; on The Coal Question, see Frederik Albritton-­Jonsson, “The Coal Question before Jevons,” The Historical Journal 62, no. 2 (2019): 108–9. 5. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (London: Macmillan, 1865), 123. 6. R. Price-­Williams, “The Coal Question,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 52, no. 1 (1889): 2. 7. Thomas Turnbull, “Toward Histories of Saving energy: Erich Walter Zimmermann and the Struggle against One-­Sided Materialistic Determinism,” Journal of Energy History/­Revue d’Histoire de l’Energie, 1, no. 4 (2020): 1–23. 8. Thomas Turnbull, “From Paradox to Policy: The Problem of Energy Resource Conservation in Britain and America, 1865–1981” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2017), chaps. 3 and 4. 9. Francisco Louçã, The Years of High Econometrics: A Short History of the Generation that Reinvented Economics (London: Routledge, 2007), 29. 10. Harold Hotelling, “The Economics of Exhaustible Resources,” Journal of Political Economy 39, no. 2 (1931): 137. Archival work has revealed Hotelling was aware his model required considerable refinement when applied to mineral resources such as coal or oil. See Roberto Ferreira da Cunha and Antoine Missemer, “The Hotelling Rule in Non-­renewable Resource Economics: A Reassessment,” Canadian Journal of Economics/­Revue Canadienne d’Économique, 53, no. 2 (2020): 2–3. 11. Robert Lifset, “A New Understanding of the American Energy Crisis of the 1970s,” Historische Sozialforschung/­Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014): 23. 12. Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), prompted great controversy. See Neil De Marchi, ed., Non-­natural Social Science: Reflecting on the Enterprise of ‘More Heat than Light’: History of Political Economy Annual Supplement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 13. A notable exception is Louis-­Gaëtan Giraudet and Antoine Missemer, “The Economics of Energy Efficiency, a Historical Perspective,” HAL SHS, working paper, 2019, 1–28, https:/­/­halshs.archives-­ouvertes.fr/­halshs-­02301636/­.

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14. David I. Stern, “Economic Growth and Energy,” in Encyclopaedia of Energy, vol. 2, ed. Cutler J. Cleveland (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004), 37. 15. Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr, The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010). 16. Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 333–36. On the reception of such thinking in Germany, see Stephen G. Gross, “Reimagining Energy and Growth: Decoupling and the Rise of a New Energy Paradigm in West Germany, 1973–1986,” Central European History 50 (2017): 514–46. 17. John Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1 (London: George Routledge, 1932), 163. 18. Lewis B. Stillwell, “Electricity and the Conservation of Energy,” Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 18, no. 3 (2017): 334–61. 19. Eugen Diesel, Gustav Goldbeck, and Friedrich Schildberger, From Engines to Autos: Five Pioneers in Engine Development and Their Contributions to the Automotive Industry (Washington, DC: Henry Regnery Company, 1960), 204; Vaclav Smil, “The Two Prime Movers of Globalization: History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines,” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 376. 20. William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 3 (1993): 2–3. 21. On this distinction, see Ivan Illich, “The Social Construction of Energy,” in Landscapes of Energy, New Geographies 2, ed. Rania Ghosn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2009), 11. 22. Andrew Barry, “Thermodynamics, Matter, Politics,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 1 (2015): 110. 23. Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries: A Functional Appraisal of the Availability of Agricultural and Industrial Resources (New York: Harper Brothers, 1933), 53. 24. Christoph Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2017), 101. 25. Christopher McGlade and Paul Ekins, “The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2oC,” Nature 517 (2015): 189. 26. Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1959); David Stradling, Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 27. Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, 1910), 76.

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28. John Ise, “The Theory of Value as Applied to Natural Resources,” American Economic Review 15, no. 2 (1925): 286–87. 29. Gerald Alonzo Smith, “Natural Resource Economic Theory of the First Conservation Movement (1895–1927),” History of Political Economy 14, no. 4 (1982): 495. 30. Malcolm Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918–1947: Science and Social Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8. 31. Joseph Dorfman, “The Background of Institutional Economics,” in Institutional Economics: Veblen, Commons, and Mitchell Reconsidered, ed. Joseph Dorfman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 44. 32. On Texas, see Ronnie J. Phillips, Economic Mavericks: The Texas Institutionalists (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995). On Chicago, see Rutherford, Institutionalist Movement in American Economics. 33. Erich Zimmermann, Conservation in the Production of Petroleum: A Study in Industrial Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 118. 34. Richard Vietor, Energy Policy in America since 1945: A Study of Business-­ Government Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 22. 35. US Federal Oil Conservation Board, Federal Oil Conservation Board: Public Hearing, May 27, 1926, Offices of Board, Interior Building, Washington DC (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926), ix. 36. The Seminole Field was discovered in Oklahoma in 1927 and the East Texas Field in 1931. Of the two, East Texas was arguably most influential given the dominant role Texas held in the US industry. See Norman Nordhauser, “Origins of Federal Oil Regulation in the 1920s,” Business History Review 47, no. 1 (1973): 53–71; David Prindle, Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 38–39. 37. Prindle, Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission, 30–37; Norman Nordhauser, The Quest for Stability: Domestic Oil Regulation, 1917–1935 (New York: Garland, 1979), 118. 38. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 250. 39. Ernst Berndt, “From Technocracy to Net Energy Analysis: Engineers, Economists, and Recurring Energy Theories of Value,” in Progress in Natural Resource Economics, ed. S. Anthony, J. Heliewel, T. Lewis, and P. Neher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 337–66. 40. Matthew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 51. 41. Peter Shulman, “The Making of a Tax Break: The Oil Depletion Allowance, Scientific Taxation, and Natural Resources Policy in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 3 (2011): 281.

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42. Diana D. Olien and Roger Olien, “Running Out of Oil: Discourse and Public Policy, 1909–1929,” Business and Economic History 22, no. 2 (1993): 59. 43. Steve Hinchliffe, “Missing Culture: Energy Efficiency and Lost Causes,” Energy Policy 23 (1995): 93. 44. Donald Brand, “Corporatism, the NRA, and the Oil Industry,” Political Science Quarterly 98, no. 1 (1983): 99. 45. Matthew Huber, “Enforcing Scarcity: Oil, Violence, and the Making of the Market,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no. 4 (2011): 820–21. 46. On California’s path, see Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 143–50. 47. Alfred White, “The Bureau of Mines Forecasts of Demand for Motor Fuel and Crude Oil,” in National Resources Committee, Energy Resources and National Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), 403. 48. Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 79–80, 68. 49. Rutherford, 86; Walton Hamilton and Helen Wright, The Case of Bituminous Coal: Institute of Economics (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 189; Jeff Makholm, The Political Economy of Pipelines: A Century of Comparative Institutional Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94. 50. Makholm, Political Economy of Pipelines, 199n30. 51. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 27–28. 52. Steven Kobrin, “The Nationalisation of Oil Production, 1918–1980,” in Risk and the Political Economy of Resource Development, ed. David Pearce, Horst Siebert, and Ingo Walter (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), 137; Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 53–78. 53. Blakely Murphy, Conservation of Oil and Gas: A Legal History (New York: Arno, 1972), 686. 54. Zimmermann, Conservation in the Production of Petroleum, 130. 55. Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil: The Industry, the State System and the World Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 117. 56. Garavini, Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century, 216–26. 57. John Vafai, “Production Control in the Petroleum Industry: A Critical Analysis,” Santa Clara Lawyer 189 (1971): 189–288. 58. Chris Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 126. 59. Giuliano Garavini, “Completing Decolonization: The 1973 ‘Oil Shock’ and the Struggle for Economic Rights,” International History Review 33, no. 3 (2011): 437.

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60. Rogers Morton, “The Nixon Administration Energy Policy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 410 (November 1973): 65. 61. Rüdiger Graf, “Détente Science? Transformations of Knowledge and Expertise in the 1970s,” Centaurus 59, no. 102 (2017): 21–22. 62. There is, of course, an extensive literature on this supposed dichotomization. In practice, as David Edgerton notes, the division was fluid and was shifted in advantageous ways. See David Edgerton, “‘The Linear Model’ Did Not Exist: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Science and Research in Industry in the Twentieth Century,” in The Science Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implication, ed. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm (New York: Watson, 2004), 9. 63. Miriam Guthrie, Energy Research and Technology: Interim Bibliography of Reports, With Abstracts (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1974); Thomas Turnbull and Cyrus Mody, “Turn and Turn Again: How Big Science Both Helped and Hindered Alternative Energy in the 1970s,” in Debating the Societal Impact of Big Science in the 21st Century, ed. Theodore Arabatzis and Panagiotis Charitos (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2022). 64. Though on average support for economics constituted just 1 percent of the total National Science Foundation budget in this period. See Tiago Mata and Tom Scheiding, “National Science Foundation Patronage of Social Science, 1970s and 1980s: Congressional Scrutiny, Advocacy Network, and the Prestige of Economics,” Minerva 50, no. 4 (2012): 433n13. 65. Martin Greenberger, Caught Unawares: The Energy Decade in Retrospect (Cambridge: Ballinger, Harper Row, 1983), 7. 66. Greenberger, Caught Unawares, 8. 67. Sam Schurr, “Modelling Energy-­Economy Interactions,” Energy Policy 6, no. 2 (1978): 160–62. 68. Philip Cantelon, “The Regulatory Dilemma of the Federal Power Commission, 1920–1977,” Federal History 4 (2012): 66–67. 69. John Ikenberry, Reasons of State: Oil Politics and the Capacities of American Government (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 48. 70. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 57. 71. Bruce Netschert, “Electric Power and Economic Development,” in The Economic Impact of TVA, ed. John Moore (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967); Thomas Turnbull, “From Incommensurability to Ubiquity: An Energy History of Geographic Thought,” Journal of Historical Geography 73 (2021): 19. 72. US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom: A Report to the President, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), 1. 73. The Paley Report predicted the US economy, measured in GNP terms, would

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double from $273 billion in 1950 to $550 billion in 1975. See Richard Lane, “The American Anthropocene: Economic Scarcity and Growth During the Great Acceleration,” Geoforum 99 (2019): 4. 74. Arthur Maass, “Review: Resources for Freedom, a Report to the President by the President’s Materials Policy Commission, 1952: Vol. I,” American Political Science Review 47, no. 1 (1953): 206. 75. US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, vol. 3, 13; Robert Hardwicke, “Adequacy of Our Mineral Fuels,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 281 (1952): 63. 76. For a discussion of the disagreement that went on regarding solar, see Daniel Barber, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Social Energy in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162. 77. Reflecting an amalgam of price theory and institutionalism, the report also suggested that an improved highway system would be an effective approach to conserving fuel at the consumer end. See US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, vol. 3, 14. 78. US President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, vol. 1, 13. 79. For example, see Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 80. Medvetz, Think Tanks in America, 25. 81. Sam Schurr and Bruce Carlton Netschert, Energy in the American Economy, 1850–1975: An Economic Study of Its History and Prospects (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1960), 149. 82. Herman Daly, “Energy Demand Forecasting: Prediction or Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 42, no. 1 (1976): 10–11. 83. Zimmermann, Conservation in the Production of Petroleum, 137. 84. Timothy Mitchell, “The Resources of Economics,” Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 2 (2010): 200. 85. James Sweeney, “The Response of Energy Demand to Higher Prices: What Have We Learned?” American Economic Review 74, no. 2 (1984): 31. 86. Blaug notes, “The dominant role of the concept of ‘substitution at the margin’ was the major development of the nineteenth-­century ‘Marginal Revolution’ in economic thought.” See Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 311. 87. Ironically, given his refutation of interventionism, Solow’s talk was delivered at the AEA lecture series named in honour of Progressive Era conservationist economist Richard T. Ely. See Robert Solow, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics,” American Economic Review 64, no. 2 (1974): 1.

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88. Tjalling Koopmans, “Activity Analysis and its Applications,” American Economic Review 43, no. 2 (1953): 407. 89. Tjalling Koopmans, “Efficient Allocation of Resources,” Econometrica 19, no. 4 (1951): 463. 90. Tjalling Koopmans, “Concepts of Optimality and Their Uses,” American Economic Review 67, no. 3 (1977): 264–65. 91. Shulman, “Making of a Tax Break,” 291. 92. Phillips, Economic Mavericks. 93. Siegfried Ciriacy-­Wantrup, “Conservation and Resource Programming,” Land Economics 37, no. 2 (1961): 105. 94. Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability. Resources for the Future. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 96. 95. Barnett and Morse, Scarcity and Growth, 74. 96. Till Düppe, “Koopmans in the Soviet Union: A Travel Report of the Summer of 1965,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 38, no. 1 (2016): 101. 97. John Gibbons and William Chandler, Energy: The Conservation Revolution (New York: Plenum Press, 1981), 31–32. 98. Tjalling Koopmans, “Economics among the Sciences,” American Economic Review 69, no. 1 (1979): 5. 99. Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, Energy Modeling for an Uncertain Future: The Report of the Modeling Resource Group, Synthesis Panel of the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, National Research Council (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1978). 100. Edward Hudson and Dale Jorgenson, “U.S. Energy Policy and Economic Growth, 1975–2000,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 5, no. 2 (1974): 472. 101. Koopmans, “Economics among the Sciences,” 1–13; J. Martin, “Energy Demand Control in Energy Policy,” in Energy Demand and Efficient Use. Proceedings of the Fourth International School on Energetics, ed. F. Amman (New York: Plenum Press, 1981), 7. 102. Laura Nader, The Energy Reader (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010), xvi. 103. Michael Schaller, Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-­Bush Era, 1980– 1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28. 104. Thomas Hughes and Agatha Hughes, Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Managing and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 2. 105. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 15.

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Part III: A Stalled Transition? 1. Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA, Praeger, 2017), 57–58, 120–21; Bruce Usher, Renewable Energy: A Primer for the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 12–15. 2. David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 201; Daniel Ford, The Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). 3. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Dolores Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018); Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-­Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 4. John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008), 5–44; Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World (New York: Viking, 2009); Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Atoms for Peace Speech,” December 8, 1953, International Atomic Energy Agency, https:/­ /­ w ww.iaea.org /­about/­history/­atoms-­for-­peace-­speech. 5. N. J. D. Lucas, Energy and the European Communities (London: Europa Publications, 1977), 13. 6. Vernon Ruttan, Is War Necessary For Economic Growth? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 69–89; Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power 1945–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 272–92; Francois Duchene, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 284–309; Krige, “Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon.” 7. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (New York: Public Affairs, 2015). 8. Joachim and Lothar Hahn, Aufstieg und Fall der deutsche Atomwirtschaft (Munich: Oekom, 2013); Christophe Wehner, Die Versicherung der Atomgefahr Risikopolitik, Sicherheitsproduktion und Expertise in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA 1945–1986 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017); Hecht, The Radiance of France.

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9. Natasha Zaretsky, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Nye, Consuming Power, 223–24; Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019); quotation from Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: SAGE Publications, 1992), 13. 10. Michael Graetz, The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 62–77; Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy: The Anti-­nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Andrew Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive!: Anti-­nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Chapter 9 : Nuclear Energy and the Dream of Independence 1. These attempts at reducing dependence on Russian gas continue, while Russia simultaneously develops new delivery routes; most notably, the controversial Nord Stream pipeline. See Balázs R. Sziklai, László Á. Kóczy, and Dávid Csercsik, “The Impact of Nord Stream 2 on the European Gas Market Bargaining Positions,” Energy Policy 144 (2020): 111692; Marco Siddi and Irina Kustova, “From a Liberal to a Strategic Actor: The Evolution of the EU’s Approach to International Energy Governance,” Journal of European Public Policy 28, no. 7 (2021): 1076–94. 2. Nikita Mitin and Tomáš Vlček, “Determinants and Considerations of Rosatom’s External Strategy,” Energy Strategy Review 17 (2017): 37–44. 3. Valerie Bunce, “The Empire Strikes Back: The Evolution of the Eastern Bloc from a Soviet Asset to a Soviet Liability,” International Organization 39, no. 1 (1985): 8. Eastern Europeans resented the assumption that they needed “civilizing,” as they often felt culturally superior to the Soviet Union. See Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, “Science and Imperialism,” Isis 84 (1993): 99–101. 4. Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic-­Powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR,” Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 297–324. At the Communist Party Congress in 1956, Soviet premier Nikolai A. Bulganin linked nuclear energy directly with the construction of communism and thus gave the program priority status. He declared that communists “must fully harness atomic energy—­t hat tremendous discovery of the twentieth century—­in the service of the cause . . . of building communism. . . . Our country leads other countries in the peaceful use of atomic energy. We must maintain this lead in the future.” See George A. Modelski, Atomic Energy in the Communist Bloc (London: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 114–15. 5. Scholars have debated who benefited more from this arrangement, the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. See Friedrich Levcik and Jiri Skolka, East-­West Technology Transfer: Study of Czechoslovakia. The Place of Technology Transfer in the Eco-

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nomic Relations between Czechoslovakia and the OECD Countries (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development, 1984); J. Wilczynski, Technology in Comecon: Acceleration of Technological Progress through Economic Planning and the Market (New York: Praeger, 1974), 74–75; Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-­Bloc Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5–6. 6. Audra Wolfe’s analysis suggests, furthermore, that Atoms for Peace was a spectacularly failed attempt at spreading American values: despite its tremendous popularity, the program backfired due to the long time lag between initial agreements and start of reactor operation, which caused frustration and resentment where it had been supposed to elicit enthusiasm and excitement for the American way of life. See Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 96–97. 7. It is noteworthy that Czechoslovakia initially requested Soviet assistance with a heavy-­water reactor. For one, they had experience with this type of reactor design, and second, it required no enriched fuel, so the critical dependence on Soviet enrichment services would have been avoided. The fact that the Soviets agreed to assist with this reactor is even more remarkable, as they typically didn’t export anything but their tried and proven pressurized water design (the VVER). The Czechoslovak heavy-­water reactor was completed after a lengthy construction process (sixteen years) and began operation at Bohunice in 1972, but suffered a major accident in 1977 and was subsequently shut down in 1979. Czechoslovakia subsequently abandoned the heavy water design in favor of the VVER. 8. Other countries joined, or attended sessions; China was involved in CMEA trade from 1950 until 1961. 9. The Warsaw Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance was signed in May 1955. That same year, Moscow committed to global deconolization at the Bandung Conference, and agreed to an allied peace treaty with Austria. See Giuseppe Schiavone, The Institutions of COMECON (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981); David Holloway and Jane M. O. Sharp, eds., The Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955– 1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005); Douglas Selvage, The Warsaw Pact and Nuclear Nonproliferation: 1936–1965 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2001.) 10. Stone, Satellites and Commissars, 50. 11. Levcik and Skolka, East-­West Technology Transfer, 23. According to the so-­ called Bucharest Formula, CMEA prices were based on average world market prices over a five-­year period. Initially, changes could only be made every five years, but this policy was modified in the 1970s to account for extreme oil price fluctuations.

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See Thomas W. Simons, Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 162–63. 12. William Mark Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc: Alliance Politics after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20; Simons, Eastern Europe in the Postwar World, 110. 13. Bunce, “Empire Strikes Back,” 5; Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization?: Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 125–54. 14. Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-­East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 221; Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc, 17; Bunce, “Empire Strikes Back,” 12, 21; J. F. Brown, The New Eastern Europe: The Khrushchev Era and After (New York: Praeger, 1966), 85–123. 15. Schiavone, The Institutions of COMECON, 27, 40; Stone, Satellites and Commissars, 9, 70, 240; Brown, New Eastern Europe, 169–70. 16. Brown, New Eastern Europe, 127–29, 169. 17. Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc, 84; Modelski, Atomic Energy in the Communist Bloc, 180; Raymond Pearson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 67–68. See Stone, Satellites and Commissars, for a contrary interpretation, as well as Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (2003): 178–256; Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (2004): 3–64; Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 3),” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (2005): 3–96. 18. Stone, Satellites and Commissars, 88; William V. Wallace and Roger A. Clarke, Comecon, Trade and the West (London: Frances Pinter, 1986), 74–75. 19. Stone, Satellites and Commissars. 20. Bunce, “Empire Strikes Back,” 30, 41–45; Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc, 21. 21. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall, 139, 94. 22. Soviet nuclear assistance wasn’t limited to technical artifacts. Teams of Soviet engineers spent years on site while nuclear reactors were built in CEE, and CEE engineers received training at Soviet institutions. 23. Dennis Deletant and Mihail E. Ionescu, eds., Romania and the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1989: Selected Documents (Bucharest: Politeia-­SNSPA, 2004); Eliza Gheorghe, “Atomic Maverick: Romania’s Negotiations for Nuclear Technology, 1964–1970,” Cold War History 13, no. 3 (2013): 373–92.

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24. It has been argued that the Atoms for Peace program did, in fact, contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation. See Leonard Weiss, “Atoms for Peace,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, no. 6 (2003): 34–44. In turn, some of the early negotiators of the nuclear nonproliferation regime reported that Soviet representatives were aware of, and concerned about, the possibility of illicit use of fissile material provided under the umbrella of peaceful technical assistance. See, for example, George Bunn, Arms Control by Committee: Managing Negotiations with the Russians (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 25. In this context, it is worth noting that the Soviets never exported the RBMK-­ type reactor to CEE: this design was derived directly from military plutonium production reactors, and even in its civilian version could be set up to produce weapons-­ grade plutonium. Only six of its kind were ever built outside the territory of Russia (four at Chernobyl in Ukraine, and two at Ignalina in Lithuania). For details, see Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-­Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). Even more notable is the fact that the Soviets helped Czechoslovakia build a heavy-­water reactor, and allowed Romania to go ahead with acquiring CANDU reactors: both designs pose explicit proliferation concerns, and have in fact been used to produce nuclear weapons by India and Israel. See George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 26. David R. Stone, “CMEA’s International Investment Bank and the Crisis of Developed Socialism,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 3 (2008): 48–77. 27. Wilczynski, Technology in Comecon, 588; Wendy Newman, The Politics of Energy in the Soviet Bloc (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978), 58. 28. In 1955 the Soviets signed such agreements with Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, and Hungary, and in 1956 with Yugoslavia. 29. For details, see Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization.” On the long construction times that caused friction among Atoms for Peace partners as well, see note 6. 30. Pearson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 91. 31. Modelski, Atomic Energy in the Communist Bloc, 169; Wilczynski, Technology in Comecon, 571. 32. At the time, the United States and Great Britain were expecting 70 percent of their electricity to be nuclear by the year 2000. See Wilczynski, Technology in Comecon, 577. 33. Schiavone, Institutions of COMECON, 32. 34. Wilczynski, Technology in Comecon, 71; Office of Technology Assessment, Technology and Soviet Energy Availability (Washington, DC: Congress of the US,

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Office of Technology Assessment, 1981), 295; Vladimir Sobell, The CMEA in Crisis: Toward a New European Order? (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1990), 155. 35. Sobell, CMEA in Crisis, 151; Ed A. Hewett et al., “1986 Panel on the Soviet Economic Outlook,” Soviet Economy 2, no. 1 (1986): 3–18. 36. Wilczynski, Technology in Comecon, 581–82. 37. Schiavone, Institutions of COMECON, 39. 38. Sobell, CMEA in Crisis, 153; on Czechoslovakia, see Levcik and Skolka, East-­ West Technology Transfer, 21. 39. Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc, 55–59; Stone, Satellites and Commissars, 153. 40. Stone, Satellites and Commissars, 165–166. 41. Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc, 66. Official cooperation between the CMEA and the European Community commenced in 1988. See Kazimierz Grzybowski, “The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the European Community,” American Journal of International Law 84, no. 1 (1990): 284–92. 42. On the German Democratic Republic’s trouble fulfilling its obligations under an integrated CMEA nuclear program, see Wolfgang D. Mueller, Geschichte der Kernenergie in der DDR: Kernforschung und Kerntechnik im Schatten des Sozialismus (Stuttgart: Schäffer-­Poeschel, 2001), 237–43. 43. Thomas Wellock, “The Children of Chernobyl: Engineers and the Campaign for Safety in Soviet-­Designed Reactors in Central and Eastern Europe,” History and Technology 29, no. 1 (2013): 3–32. 44. For details on the design, see International Nuclear Safety, “VVER-­440 Model 230,” https:/­/­insp.pnnl.gov/­-p ­ rofiles-­reactors-­v ver230.htm, and International Nuclear Safety, “VVER-­440 Model 213,” https:/­/i­ nsp.pnnl.gov/­-p ­ rofiles-­reactors-­ vver213.htm. For a discussion of how the joint safety analysis of “exotic Soviet reactors” revolutionized definitions of nuclear safety in Europe, see Wellock, “Children of Chernobyl.” 45. Apparently, this hybridization, which had never been attempted before, and which led to numerous technical challenges, was of less concern to the European Union than the lack of a containment on older reactor models. 46. World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Hungary,” December 2021, https:/­/w ­ ww.world-­nuclear.org/­information-­library/­country-­profiles/­countries-­g-­n /­hungary.aspx; World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Bulgaria,” January 2021, https:/­/­w ww.world-­nuclear.org/­information-­library/­country-­profiles/­countries -­a-­f/­bulgaria.aspx; World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Slovakia,” October 2021, https:/­/­w ww.world-­nuclear.org/­information-­library/­country-­profiles /­countries-­o-­s/­slovakia.aspx; World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in Czech

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Republic,” April 2022, https:/­/­w ww.world-­nuclear.org/­information-­library/­country -­profiles/­countries-­a-­f/­czech-­republic.aspx. 47. The nuclear subsidiary of the Czech Skoda Works is owned by a large Russian conglomerate, OMZ (United Heavy Machinery); Rosatom and its international organizations are involved in the construction of two new reactors in Slovakia, and they have a contract with Hungary to build two new reactor units at Paks. 48. Mitin and Vlček, “Determinants and Considerations of Rosatom’s External Strategy,” 42. It is worth noting that Russia’s 2022 military attack on Ukraine has started to affect negatively Rosatom’s international portfolio. 49. Nikita Mitin and Tomáš Vlček, “Post-­Fukushima Performance of the Major Global Nuclear Technology Providers,” Energy Strategy Review 21 (2018): 107. 50. For example, the European Union now requires fuel diversification to prevent a total Russian monopoly on nuclear fuel supply to Soviet-­designed nuclear reactors. Mitin and Vlček, “Post-­Fukushima Performance,” 107, emphasize Rosatom’s “recurrent neglect for competitive procedures.” Furthermore, Rosatom’s preference for bilateral deals that result from direct state-­to-­state negotiations has led to corruption charges and increased vigilance by European and international authorities.

Chapter 10: Contamination without Representation 1. K. K. Rebecca Lai and Jugal K. Patel, “For Millions of American Women, Abortion Is Out of Reach,” New York Times, May 31, 2019, https:/­/­w ww.nytimes .com/­interactive/­2019/­05/­31/­us/­abortion-­clinics-­map.html. 2. The literature on abortion and the antiabortion movement is extensive. A foundational work is Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). More recent work includes Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Karissa Haugeberg, Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); and Jennifer Holland, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-­abortion Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 3. Ginsburg, Contested Lives. 4. Dubow, Ourselves Unborn. 5. A notable and excellent exception is Cara Daggett, “Petro-­masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millenium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 1 (September 2018): 25–44. 6. Quoted in William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Twayne, 1991), 20. 7. On the Hibakusha, see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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8. On the history of atomics weapons testing, see Robert Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 9. Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 187. 10. US Congress, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint House and Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, “Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests,” 86th Cong., 1st sess., June 1959. 11. See, for other examples, “Atomic Fallout—­How Bad? The Facts and the Intrigue: A Special Report” Newsweek, April 6, 1959, 36–38; E.B. White, “These Precious Days,” New Yorker, May 16, 1959, 180; and Steven M. Spencer, “Fallout: The Silent Killer,” Saturday Evening Post, August 29, 1959, 25. 12. On children’s vulnerability to radiation exposure, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 274. 13. John W. Finney, “Nuclear Fallout Danger Stirs Widespread Fears,” New York Times, October 15, 1961. 14. Quoted in “Science Notes: Radiation,” New York Times, September 11, 1960. 15. Quoted in Anthony Liviero, “Scientists Term Radiation a Peril to Future of Man,” New York Times, June 13, 1956. 16. William L. Lawrence, “Science in Review: UN Report on Fall-­out Reveals Agreement on Radiation’s Deleterious Effects,” New York Times, August 17, 1958. 17. Genetics Committee, National Academy of Sciences, “Text of Genetics Committee Report Concerning Effects of Radioactivity on Heredity,” New York Times, June 13, 1956. 18. My discussion in this paragraph is wholly indebted to Dubow, Ourselves Unborn. 19. Dubow writes that “atomic sciences and the science of embryology became at least loosely linked in the public imagination,” Ourselves Unborn, 52. 20. On Women’s Strike for Peace and maternalism in the 1950s and 1960s, see Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1993); Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993); and Harriet Hyman Alonso, “Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists During the McCarthy Era,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 128–50. The definitive history of SANE is Milton Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, 1957–1985 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). 21. Quoted in Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 59.

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22. Albert Schweitzer, The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today: Statement with Reference to the Present Nuclear Crisis in the World (Berlin: Albert Schweitzer Education Foundation, 1958). 23. “Facts of Life in the Age of the Hydrogen Bomb: Q and A for Americans,” 10, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 058, series A, box 15, folder 1: advertisement, March 24, 1958, “No Contamination Without . . . ,” Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (hereafter referred to as SCPC). 24. “The World’s Peoples Have a Right to Demand No Contamination Without Representation: Questions and Answers for Americans About Hydrogen Bombs,” February 27, 1968, 58, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 058, series A, box 15, folder 1: advertisement, March 24, 1958, SCPC. 25. Quoted in Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 139. 26. Schweitzer, Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today. 27. SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, series A, box 14, folder 7: “Scientists for SANE,” SCPC. 28. Ernest Sternglass, “Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 25, no. 4 (April 1969): 18–20; Ernest Sternglass, “Can Infants Survive?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 25, no. 6 (June 1969): 26–7; Ernest Sternglass, “The Death of All Children: A Footnote in the ABM Controversy,” Esquire, September 1969, 1a–1d. For secondary discussions, see Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 265–85, Philip Boffey, “Ernest Sternglass: Controversial Prophet of Doom,” Science, October 10, 1969, 195–200; Christian Joppke, Mobilizing against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of the United States and Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 27–28; and J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 36–44. 29. Walker, Permissible Dose, 107. 30. Alan Richman, “Pennsylvania’s Governor Says Area Is Now Safe for Pregnant Women,” New York Times, April 10, 1979; on Three Mile Island Action Alert, see public hearing statement of Michael Klinger, May 24, 1979, RG 220, Central Files, box 307, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, National Archives II, University of Maryland, College Park (hereafter referred to as NA II). Also see “Interview with Physician #1, October 4, 1979, LMOHI, TMIC, DCASC; Three Mile Island Resource Center, http:/­/­tmi. dickinson.edu/­welcome-­to-­t he-­resource-­center/­. 31. “Interview with Obstetrician-­Gynecologist,” September 25, 1979, LMOHI, Three Mile Island Collection, Dickinson College Archive and Special Collections (hereafter referred to as TMIC, DCASC), Three Mile Island Resource Center, http:/­/­ tmi.dickinson.edu/­welcome-­to-­t he-­resource-­center/­.

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32. Press Release from American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologist, April 13, 1979, RG 220, central files, box 7, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II. 33. Testimony of Jane Lee, Health Resources Planning and Development, Public Hearings: Personal Health Effects of the Three Mile Island Accident, Sheraton-­ Harrisburg Inn, New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, May 24, 1979, 7–15, RG 220, central files, box 307, unfiled, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II. Jane Lee is also interviewed in Robert Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980), 87–88. 34. J. Robert Heckman, PhD, Elizabethtown College, “Low Level Radiation and Genetic Mutations,” Prepared for House Select Committee on TMI, Public Hearing, Bainbridge, Pennsylvania, May 31, 1979, Beverly Hess Papers, box 5, folder 5, TMIC, DCASC. 35. Both testimonies come from Health Resource Planning and Development, Public Hearing, Middletown, PA, May 24, 1979, RG 220, central files, box 307, unfiled, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II. 36. Quoted in Edward J. Walsh, Democracy in the Shadows: Citizen Mobilization in the Wake of the Accident at Three Mile Island (New York, Greenwood: 1988), 39. 37. See, for examples, letters to commission from Nikki Naumann and Mary M. Wertman, RG 220, central files, box 307, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II. 38. Susan Bennett, “Psychological Fallout: TMI Plant’s Neighbors Show Ill Effects,” Philadelphia Daily News, August 25, 1982. 39. On Nilsson, see Eric Goldscheider, “Fetal Positions,” Boston Globe, August 10, 2003. See also Dubow, Ourselves Unborn; Luc Boltanski, The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion (London: Polity Press, 2013). 40. Julia Moskin, “The Weighty Responsibility of Drinking for Two,” New York Times, November 29, 2006. 41. Laury Oaks, “Smoke Filled Wombs and Fragile Fetuses: The Social Politics of Fetal Representation,” Signs 26, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 63–108. 42. Mary Segers and Timothy Byrnes, Abortion Politics in American States (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995). 43. See Planned Parenthood Association of Pennsylvania, Money, Power, and the Radical Right in Pennsylvania (Collingdale, PA.: Diane Publishing Company, 1996). 44. Quoted in Ginsburg, Contested Lives, 104. 45. PANE newsletter (undated), folder 2, PANE Newsletter Collection (unprocessed), TMIC, DCASC. See also Don Hopey, “TMI: Anxiety, Apathy Live Side by Side at Middletown,” Pittsburgh Press, March 25, 1984. 46. Ginsburg, Contested Lives, 9.

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47. Gary Rotstein, “No Evidence of Increases of Cancer near TMI Plant,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, September 6, 1985. 48. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 49. Georgia Dullen, “Helen Caldicott’s Many Lives: Pediatrician, Mother, Activist,” New York Times, May 25, 1979. 50. Lawrence Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the Worldwide Disarmament Movement, 1971–Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 51. Cathy Cevoli, “Will Gender Gap Become a Gulf?,” Nuclear Times, April 1984, SO 454, box 5, folder: Nuclear Times, Jan.–Apr. 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri at St. Louis (hereafter referred to as SHSM). 52. See SO 454, box 5, folder: Peace/­Disarmament, 1984–5, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM. 53. “Bishops Endorse Stand Opposed to Nuclear War,” New York Times, May 4, 1983. 54. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response (A Pastoral Letter on War and Peace) (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1984). 55. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Challenge of Peace. 56. See Patty Edmonds, “Anti-­bomb Equals Anti-­choice,” Nuclear Times, February 1984, box 20, folder 170, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign Records S0454, SHSMO-­St. Louis.

Chapter 11: The Rise of Counterexpertise and the Anti–Nuclear Power Movement in West Germany 1. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (Provincial Archives of Baden-­Württemberg, Main State Archive, Stuttgart, abbreviated as HstAS), EA 1/­924 Bü 1739, “Deutscher Bundestag—­7. Wahlperiode. Drucksache 7/­2802,” 148. 2. Deutsche Kinemathek (German Film Library, Berlin), Drei vor Mitternacht, WDR, June 24, 1986. Digitized recording. 3. Jürgen Habermas viewed the “public sphere” (similar to the concept of “civil society”) as initially serving the interests of the bourgeoisie, or middle classes. See Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962); English translation: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). A Google Ngram search shows the term to have come into widespread use in the 1960s.

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4. See Cathryn Carson, Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 103–13, 225–26; Dolores Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 1. 5. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, NARA USIA RG 306, 250/­67/­04/­02–04, box 7, report 208; NARA USIA RG 306, 250/­67/­04/­02–04, box 6, report 205. 6. See my analysis in Augustine, Taking on Technocracy, 29–31. 7. On the intertwining of politics, science, and the media and the resulting undermining of the standing of science as “objective,” see Peter Weingart, Die Stunde der Wahrheit? Zum Verhältnis der Wissenschaft zu Politik, Wirtschaft und Medien in der Wissensgesellschaft (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001), 133–39, 143; Peter Weingart, “Verwissenschaftlichung der Gesellschaft—­Politisierung der Wissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 12, no. 3 (1983): 225–41. 8. See Joachim Radkau and Lothar Hahn, Aufstieg und Fall der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (Munich: Oekom, 2013), 292–94, 298. 9. On Wyhl and its impact, see Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy: The Anti-­ nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Andrew Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-­nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Carol Hager, Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the German Energy Debate (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Augustine, Taking on Technocracy, chap. 4. On the impact of 1968 and the 1960s student movement, see Timothy Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-­authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 4–12, 81–84. On German environmentalism, see Frank Uekötter, Deutschland in Grün: Eine zwiespältige Erfolgsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). 10. Dieter Rucht, “Gegenöffentlichkeit und Gegenexperten: Zur Institutionalisierung des Widerspruchs in Politik und Recht,” Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 9, no. 2 (1988): 295, 298. 11. One example: “Arbeitsgruppe Kernkraftwerke an der Universität Hamburg-­ Physik, Kernkraftwerke gefährden unsere Umwelt,” Mao-­Projekt, Free University of Berlin, April 4, 1975, http:/­/­w ww.mao-­projekt.de/­BRD/­NOR/­HBG/­Hamburg_ AKW_Uni_Physik_1975.shtml. 12. Deutsche Kinemathek (German Film Museum, Berlin),“10. Internationales Forum des jungen Films” (brochure); Hans-­Jürgen Jagau, “Atomarer Wahnsinn. Ein Gespräch mit Susanne Beyeler,” Spot, October 4, 1980. On the Arsenal cinema, see Ulrich Gregor, “Das Berliner Arsenal,” in Theorie des Kinos. Ideologiekritik der Traumfabrik, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 256–64.

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13. Matthias Jung, Öffentlichkeit und Sprachwandel: Zur Geschichte des Diskurses um die Atomenergie (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 1994), 175. 14. See Robert Jungk, Der Atom-­Staat: Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (Munich: Kindler, 1977). English translation: Robert Jungk, The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us, trans. Christopher Trump (New York: F. Jordan Books/­ Grosset & Dunlap, 1979). 15. Reprinted in Robert Jungk, Und Wasser bricht den Stein: Streitbare Beiträge zu drängenden Fragen der Zeit, ed. Marianne Oesterreicher-­Mollwo (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1988), 165. 16. State efforts in the case of Wyhl are well documented: HstAS, EA 1/­924 Bü 1740, Abteilung VI, “Vermerk: Betr.: Kernkraftwerk Wyhl. Hier: Weiter Massnahmen der Öffentlichkeitsarbeit”; HStAS, EA 1/­924 Bü 1744, KWS, “Übersicht Öffentlichkeitsarbeit,” October 8, 1975, and Abteilung VI, “Vermerk. Betr.: Öffentlichkeitsmaßnahmen zum Thema Kernenergie und Wyhl,” October 13, 1975. 17. FU Berlin (Free University Berlin, Archives), UA, APO-­Archiv: S, Sig.039–040, Aktionsgemeinschaft für Umweltschutz Darmstadt, Was nicht im ‘Informations’-­ Zentrum in Biblis zu erfahren ist (Darmstadt: Aktionsgemeinschaft für Umweltschutz Darmstadt, 1977), 27–30. 18. See, for example, “Warum werden Kernkraftwerke gebaut?” Arbeiterkampf, November 1, 1976. For an example from the nonviolent Left, see “Schnelle Brüter: Die Kernkraftreaktoren die Päng können,” Graswurzelrevolution 25, no. 26 (December 1976): 12. 19. See Holger Strohm, Friedlich in die Katastrophe: Eine Dokumentation über Kernkraftwerke (Hamburg: Verlag Association, 1973). By the 15th edition, the book had sold 132,000 copies: Holger Strohm, Friedlich in die Katastrophe: Eine Dokumentation über Kernkraftwerke, 15th rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1988). 20. See Ulrich Stock, “Jens Scheer: Der gefragte Gegner. Der Bremer Physiker und die Macht des Atoms,” Die Zeit, May 23, 1986; Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 2011), 364–65. 21. See Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 166–67. 22. Paul Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke: Die Entwicklung im politischen und technischen Umfeld der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2013), 107–8. 23. Joachim Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975: Verdrängte Alternativen in der Kerntechnik und der Ursprung der nuklearen Kontroverse (Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbücher, 1983), 439; Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 107–113; “Wyhl: Geballte Ladung,” Der Spiegel, February14, 1977; WDR Historisches Archiv (West German Broadcasting Network Archives), Archivnr. 0103355, Series: “Vor Ort”; Episode: “Wyhl-­Prozess,” March 31, 1977.

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24. Jens Ivo Engels, “‘Inkorporierung’ und ‘Normalisierung’ einer Protestbewegungam Beispiel der westdeutschen Umweltproteste in den 1980er Jahren,” Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 40 (2008): 81–100. See also Rucht, “Gegenöffentlichkeit und Gegenexperten,” 299; Christian Joppke, Mobilizing against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of Germany and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 126–28, 165–66, 239. 25. See Amory Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken,” Foreign Affairs, October 1976, 65–96. This may have served as an inspiration to Jungk. 26. See Thomas Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 27. This term is used by Thomas Wellock, “A Figure of Merit: Quantifying the Probability of a Nuclear Reactor Accident,” Technology and Culture 58, no. 3 (2017): 705. 28. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “Liane B. Russell Remembered for Her Research, Advocacy,” July 23, 2019, https:/­/­w ww.ornl.gov/­news/­liane-­b-­russell-­ remembered-­her-­research-­advocacy. 29. See Ernest Sternglass, “Cancer: Relation of Prenatal Radiation to Development of the Disease in Childhood,” Science 140, no. 3571 (June 7, 1963): 1102–4. doi:10.1126/­science.140.3571.1102. 30. John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power: The Case against Nuclear Power Plants (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1971); for Gofman’s career as a critic of nuclear power, see Ioanna Semendeferi, “Legitimating a Nuclear Critic: John Gofman, Radiation Safety, and Cancer Risks,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 259–301. 31. See “Arthur B. Tamplin, 1926–20074” (obituary), Bakersfield Californian, January  24,  2007, https:/­/­w ww.legacy.com/­obituaries/­bakersfield/­obituary. aspx?n=arthur-­r-­tamplin&pid=86128374. 32. See Alexander von Schwerin, Strahlenforschung: Bio-­und Risikopolitik der DFG, 1920–1970 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015), 336–40. 33. WDR Historisches Archiv, Archivnr. 0103355, Series: “Vor Ort”; Episode: “Wyhl-­Prozess,” March 31, 1977. 34. See Friedrich Strohm and Ralph Graeub, Die sanften Mörder (Rüschlikon-­ Zurich, Switzerland: Albert Müller Verlag, 1972); “Friedhof mit goldenen Särgen,” Der Spiegel, November 14, 1976. 35. Ralph Lapp, “Nuclear Salvation or Nuclear Folly?” New York Times, February 10, 1974. 36. My translation. “Ein furchterregendes Unterfangen,” Der Spiegel, July 20, 1975. 37. WASH-­1400 calculated the risk of a reactor core meltdown in any given light-­

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water reactor to be one in twenty thousand per reactor per year. It also concluded that nuclear power plant accidents posed a distinctly smaller risk in terms of injury, death, or financial loss than everyday risks (such as from fires or automobile accidents) and risks posed by natural events (such as hurricanes). On technical aspects of the report, see Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 662–69. For a broader, contextualized analysis of both the technical and political aspects of the debate in the United States, see Wellock, “A Figure of Merit,” 681, 704–7. 38. Henry Kendall, Richard Hubbard, and Gregory Minor, The Risks of Nuclear Power Reactors: A Review of the NRC Reactor Safety Study, WASH-­1400 (NUREG-­ 75/­014) (Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists, 1977). The German translation: Ökö-­Institut Freiburg, Die Risiken der Atomkraftwerke: Der Anti-­Rasmussen-­ Report der Union of Concerned Scientists, trans. Richard Donderer (Fellbach: Adolf Bonz, 1980). 39. See Jung, Öffentlichkeit und Sprachwandel, 74–75. 40. See Laufs, Reaktorsicherheit für Leistungskernkraftwerke, 116–18. 41. Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986). First English edition: Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1992). The democratization theme comes out more clearly in Ulrich Beck, Gegengifte: Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 277, 288. 42. See Walter Patterson, “Harrisburg ist überall,” and “Gorleben Hearings,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1979, 10–11; Luther Carter, Nuclear Imperatives and Public Trust: Dealing with Radioactive Waste (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1988), 273–74. 43. See “Deutscher Bundestag—­8,” Wahlperiode, Drucksache 8/­4341, “Bericht der Enquete-­Kommission ‘Zukünftige Kernenergie-­Politik’ über den Stand der Arbeit und die Ergebnisse gemäß Beschluß des Deutschen Bundestages,” June 27, 1980, https:/­/­dip21.bundestag.de/­dip21/­btd/­08/­043/­0804341.pdf. 44. See Rucht, “Gegenöffentlichkeit und Gegenexperten,” 295. 45. See Melanie Arndt, Tschernobyl: Auswirkungen des Reaktorunfalls auf die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die DDR (Erfurt: Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Thüringen, 2011), Kindle edition, section 4.4. 46. Paul Hockenos, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 199–209, 211–13. 47. Deutsche Kinemathek, Drei vor Mitternacht, WDR, June 24, 1986. Digitized recording. 48. Deutsche Kinemathek, Drei vor Mitternacht. 49. Florentin Krause, Hartmut Bossel, and Karl-­Friedrich Müller-­Reißmann,

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Energiewende—­Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1980). 50. Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis (Green Memory Archive, Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin), A. Petra Kelly Archive 271, Öko-­Institut and Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung, “Qualitative und soweit möglich quantitative Abschätzung der Kurz-­und Langfristigen Wirkungen eines Ausstiegs aus der Kernenergie. Gutachten im Auftrage des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft,” August 1986. 51. See Katrin Jordan, Ausgestrahlt. Die mediale Debatte um ‘Tschernobyl’ in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich 1986/­87 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018), 299–305. 52. Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis A. Frank Schwalba-­Hoth, 16 2/­2, “Fischer: Energieversorgung ohne Atomkraft  .  .  . Umweltminister legt detailliertes Ausstiegskonzept vor.” 53. See Klaus-­Dieter Maubach, Energiewende. Wege zu einer Bezahlbaren Energieversorgung, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2014), 43. 54. See Carol Hager, “The Grassroots Origins of the German Energy Transition,” in Germany’s Energy Transition: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Carol Hager and Christoph Stefes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–26. 55. See Elke Bruns, Dörte Ohlhorst, Bernd Wenzel, and Johann Köppel, Renewable Energies in Germany’s Electricity Market: A Biography of the Innovation Process (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 110–11, 193–97, 201, 204, 209. 56. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Energiebilanzen e.V., “Auswertungstabellen zur Energiebilanz Deutschland. Daten für die Jahre von 1990 bis 2020,” table 4.1, https:/­/­ www.ag-­energiebilanzen.de/­10-­0-­auswertungstabellen.html.

Part IV: The Transition off Fossil Fuels: Challenges and Possibilities 1. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-­Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), 1–20; David Wallace-­Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); On neoliberalism, see, among many others, Philip Mirowksi and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gary Gerstle, Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). 2. Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-­Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene Shock, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2017).

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3. Robert W. Righter, Windfall: Wind Energy in America Today (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); Frank Laird, Solar Energy, Technology Policy and Institutional Values (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Carol Hager and Christophe Stefes, eds., Germany’s Energy Transition: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). 4. Amory B. Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (1976): 65–96; Stephen J. Macekura, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 137–71. 5. Tyler Priest, “Shifting Sands: The 1973 Oil Shock and the Expansion of Non-­ OPEC Supply,” in Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy, ed. Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 117–41. 6. Giuliano Garavini, “Thatcher’s North Sea Oil: The Struggle against OPEC and Labour Standards and the ‘Liberalization’ of European Energy,” Contemporary European History, forthcoming. 7. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (New York: Public Affairs, 2015); Righter, Windfall; Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann, Energy Democracy: Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables (Cham, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 8. Weart, Discovery of Global Warming, 138–59. 9. Anreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (London: Verso, 2021), 13, 18–22, 35; Michael Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back the Planet (New York: Public Affairs, 2021), 33; Kate Aronoff, Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet–and How We Fight Back (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021). 10. Jonas Meckling, Carbon Coalitions: Business, Climate Politics, and the Rise of Emissions Trading (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 11. Paul Nolte, “A Different Sort of Neoliberalism? Making Sense of German History since the 1970s,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 64 (2019): 9–26; Andrei S. Markovitz and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Bess, The Light-­Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003); Andrew S. Tompkins, Better Active than Radioactive!: Anti-­ nuclear Protests in France and West Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 12. Klein, This Changes Everything; Alasdair Roberts, The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Chapter 12: A Future Foreseen and Transition Delayed 1. NASA Earth Observatory, “World of Change: Global Temperatures,” January 13, 2022, https:/­/e­ arthobservatory.nasa.gov/­world-­of-­change/­DecadalTemp. 2. World Bank, “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” 2012, https:/­/o ­ penknowledge.worldbank.org/­handle/­10986/­11860. 3. World Bank, “Turn Down the Heat,” 54. 4. World Bank, 54. 5. Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (New York: Ecco, 2017); see also David Wallace-­Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition,” New York Intelligencer, July 9, 2017, http:/­/­nymag.com/­intelligencer/­2017/­07/­climate -­change-­earth-­too-­hot-­for-­humans-­annotated.html. 6. As reported by Wallace-­Wells, “Uninhabitable Earth.” 7. Paul Griffin et al., “The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017,” Carbon Disclosure Project, July 2017, https:/­ /­ climateattribution.org /­resources/­carbon-­majors-­report-­2017/­. Cumulative emissions since the Industrial Revolution from oil and gas are substantially similar to those from coal. See Griffin et al., “Carbon Majors Database,” 7. 8. Christophe Bonneuil, Pierre-­Louis Choquet, and Benjamin Franta, “Early Warnings and Emerging Accountability: Total’s Responses to Global Warming, 1971–2021,” Global Environmental Change 71 (2021): 102386. 9. Allan Nevins and Robert G. Dunlop, Energy and Man: A Symposium (New York: Appleton-­Century-­Crofts, 1960). 10. Allan Nevins et al., Energy and Man: A Symposium (New York: Appleton-­ Century-­Crofts, 1960), 55–58. 11. Nevins et al., Energy and Man, 70. 12. NASA, “Global Mean CO2 Mixing Ratios (ppm): Observations,” https:/­/­data. giss.nasa.gov/­modelforce/­ghgases/­Fig1A.ext.txt. 13. Charles D. Keeling, “The Concentration and Isotopic Abundances of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere,” Tellus 12, no. 2 (1960): 200–203 14. Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment (Washington, DC: White House, 1965); Roger Revelle et al., Appendix Y4: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. 15. F. N. Ikard, “Meeting the Challenges of 1966,” in Annual Meeting of the American Petroleum Institute (Washington, DC: American Petroleum Institute, 1965), 12–15. See also Benjamin Franta, “Early Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 and Global Warming,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 1024–25. 16. Franta, “Early Oil Industry Knowledge of CO2 and Global Warming,” 1024. 17. E. Robinson and R. C. Robbins, Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous

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Atmospheric Pollutants: Final Report (Washington, DC: American Petroleum Institute, 1968). 18. Robinson and Robbins, Sources, Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Pollutants, 109–110. 19. Robinson and Robbins, 112. 20. Robinson and Robbins, 112. 21. Half a dozen major federal air quality statutes had been passed between 1955 and 1969, including the Air Quality Act of 1967. 22. Victor Erickson, “Potential Effects of Air Pollution Regulation on Manufacturing,” in Proceedings of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (Laramie: University of Wyoming, Geology Library, 1969). 23. David M. Evans, “A Proposed Industry Inventory of Our Fuel Resources,” in Proceedings of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (Laramie: University of Wyoming, Geology Library, 1969). 24. Warren E. Morrison, “Application of Contingency Forecasting for the Determination of Prospective Long Run Energy Conditions in the United States,” in Proceedings of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (Laramie: University of Wyoming, Geology Library, 1970). 25. John A. Carver Jr., “Energy Economics and the Errant Winds of Public Policy,” in Proceedings of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (Laramie: University of Wyoming, Geology Library, 1971). 26. William A. Vogely, “The Future of Mineral Supplies,” in Proceedings of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (Laramie: University of Wyoming, Geology Library, 1971). 27. Edward J. Mitchell, ed., Dialogue on World Oil: Proceedings of a Conference on World Oil (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974), 32. 28. Robert G. Dunlop, “Tomorrow’s Car: Electric or Gasoline Powered?” American Petroleum Institute, March 17, 1967. 29. American Petroleum Institute, Facts about Oil, June 1968, Charles Rothfus Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 30. American Petroleum Institute Board of Directors minutes, November 14, 1966, Bernard Majewski Papers, box 58, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 31. American Petroleum Institute, Planning Committee of the Committee on Public Affairs, Public Affairs in the 1970’s (pamphlet), Charles Rothfus Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie. 32. American Petroleum Institute, Public Affairs in the 1970’s. 33. American Petroleum Institute, Public Affairs in the 1970’s. 34. Peter Gammelgard on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute, March

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19, 1970, congressional hearing on bills to amend the Clean Air Act. Cited in Brad Johnson, “A Timeline of Climate Science and Policy,” Medium, September 27, 2016, https:/­/­medium.com/­@climatebrad/­climate-­hearings-­af27a3886a43. 35. Johnson, “A Timeline of Climate Science and Policy.” 36. Johnson, “A Timeline of Climate Science and Policy.” 37. Johnson, “A Timeline of Climate Science and Policy.” 38. Knisely’s assessment in 1979 was prescient in being essentially identical to the modern understanding that 80 percent of fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground to prevent two degrees Celsius of warming. 39. Steve Knisely, Controlling the CO2 Concentration in the Atmosphere, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, October 16, 1979. 40. NASA, “Graphic: The Relentless Rise of Carbon Dioxide,” https:/­/­climate .nasa.gov/­climate_resources/­24/­graphic-­t he-­relentless-­rise-­of-­carbon-­dioxide/­. 41. H. Shaw to H. N. Weinberg, carbon copy to N. R. Werthamer, November 19, 1979, Research in Atmospheric Science, Reference 79CR 184, Inter-­office Correspondence, Exxon Research and Engineering, https:/­/­w ww.industrydocuments .ucsf.edu/­fossilfuel/­docs/­#id=yqwl0228. 42. See “For Decades, Exxon Mingled with the Climate Science Elite,” Inside Climate News, September 22, 2015, https:/­/­insideclimatenews.org/­content/­decades -­exxon-­mingled-­climate-­science-­elite. 43. Ed K. Wiley, “CO2/­Greenhouse Effect Communications Plan,” Exxon Corporation, June 24, 1980. Cited in Brad Johnson, “A Timeline of Climate Science and Policy,” Medium, September 27, 2016, https:/­/­medium.com/­@climatebrad/­climate -­hearings-­af27a3886a43. 44. Henry Shaw (attended), Workshop of the National Commission on Air Quality, October 1980, Findings of the workshop edited by Henry Shaw from December 1980. Cited in Brad Johnson, “A Timeline of Climate Science and Policy,” Medium, September 27, 2016, https:/­/m ­ edium.com/­@climatebrad/­climate-­hearings-­ af27a3886a43. 45. Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman, Jr., David Hasemyer, and Lisa Song, Exxon: The Road Not Taken (n.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), chap. 9. 46. R. J. Campion to W. W. Madden, July 9, 1979, API CO2 and Climate Task Force memo. 47. R. J. Campion to J. T. Burgess, September 6, 1979, API CO2 and Climate Task Force memo. 48. J. A. Laurmann, “The CO2 Problem; Addressing Research Agenda Development,” API CO2 and Climate Task Force (AQ-­9) minutes, February 29, 1980, https:/­/­ www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/­fossilfuel/­docs/­#id=gffl0228.

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49. W. Glass to J. F. Black, R. W. Cohen, S. A. Diamond, and H. Shaw, August 14, 1981, Draft: EED to MEJO’L, Exxon Inter-­office Correspondence. 50. R. W. Cohen to W. Glass, August 18, 1981, Exxon Inter-­office Correspondence. 51. R. W. Cohen to W. Glass, August 18, 1981, Exxon Inter-­office Correspondence. 52. J. Hansen et al., “Climate Response Times: Dependence on Climate Sensitivity and Ocean Mixing,” Science 229 (1985): 857–59. 53. Roger W. Cohen to A. M. Natkin, September 2, 1982, CO2 Climate Modeling Research: Timetable for Presentations and Publications and accompanying note, Exxon internal communication. 54. Roger W. Cohen to A. M. Natkin, September 2, 1982, CO2 Climate Modeling Research: Timetable for Presentations and Publications and accompanying note, Exxon internal communication. 55. M. B. Glaser, CO2 “Greenhouse Effect,” Exxon Research and Engineering Company, November 12, 1982. 56. Glaser, CO2 “Greenhouse Effect,” 17. 57. Glaser, 27, table 6. 58. Glaser, 29. 59. Bonneuil, Choquet, and Franta, “Early Warnings and Emerging Accountability.” 60. Shell Internationale Petroleum Maatschappij B.V., The Greenhouse Effect, ­ ww.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/­fossilfuel/­docs/­#id=khfl0228. May 1988, https:/­/w 61. Shell Internationale Petroleum, The Greenhouse Effect, 21, 23, 24. 62. Shell Internationale Petroleum, 26. 63. Shell Internationale Petroleum, 25. 64. Shell Internationale Petroleum. 65. Shell Internationale Petroleum. 66. Shell Internationale Petroleum, 27. 67. Shell Internationale Petroleum, 6, 25. 68. Shell Internationale Petroleum, 29. 69. Shell Internationale Petroleum. 70. Shell Internationale Petroleum, 28. 71. Shell Internationale Petroleum. 72. Shell Internationale Petroleum. 73. Daniel Bodansky, “The History of the Global Climate Change Regime,” International Relations and Global Climate Change 23 (2001): 25, 27. 74. “API Girds for Clinton Greenhouse Tax Battle,” Oil & Gas Journal, November 18, 1996. 75. William F. O’Keefe, “A Climate Policy,” Washington Post, July 5, 1997.

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76. Gerald Karey, “BP Charts Its Own Course on Warming,” Platt’s Oilgram News, May 27, 1997.

Chapter 13: Renewable Energies in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1970s–1990s 1. In 2014 the percentage change in absolute CO2 emissions in Germany was 24 percent below 1990 levels, and the United Kingdom was down nearly 30 percent. See https:/­/d ­ ata.worldbank.org/­indicator/­EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=DE-­GB; https:/­/­w ww.carbonbrief.org/­climate-­showdown-­has-­t he-­us-­u k-­or-­germany-­done -­more-­to-­cut-­emissions. 2. The analysis concentrates on policymakers from national governments, political parties present in Parliament, and national ministries. 3. The last three German nuclear power plants are supposed to be taken from the grid until the end of 2022. Presumably, however, even afterward, Germany will occasionally have to import nuclear electricity from other European countries. The German coal phase out shall take place until 2038 at the latest. In 2020 the part of coal in the electricity generated in Germany was still at 23.7 percent. See https:/­/­w ww .destatis.de/­DE/­T hemen/­Branchen-­Unternehmen/­E nergie/­E rzeugung/­Tabellen / ­bruttostromerzeugung.html;jsessionid=935A8199B4E31530165D6EA146D6A958. live732. 4. I shall thus not assume the language of the 1970s and 1980s, when the fast breeder technology and nuclear fusion could be considered to constitute renewable energy sources, too. 5. The aspects of energy efficiency and economics are not discussed. 6. See Stephen G. Gross, “Reimagining Energy and Growth: Decoupling and the Rise of a New Energy Paradigm in West Germany, 1973–1986,” Central European History 50 (2017): 524–28. 7. John Campbell Wilson, “A History of the UK Renewable Energy Programme, 1974–88: Some Social, Political, and Economic Aspects” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2012), 127, http:/­/­t heses.gla.ac.uk/­3121/­. 8. See, for example, “Die Energiepolitik der Bundesregierung,” 3.10.1973, Bundestags-­Drucksache (BT-­Drs.) 7/­1057, 6; Bevan (Department of Energy), “Energy Policy Statements,” 27.10.1975, British National Archives (BNA) EG 16/­73. 9. See, for example, “Die Energiepolitik der Bundesregierung,” and the modified evaluation of energy policy goals after 1973 in “Erste Fortschreibung des Energieprogramms der Bundesregierung,” 30.10.1974, BT-­Drs. 7/­2713, 5–6. 10. See corresponding appraisals in Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Party manifestos from the 1970s. 11. See British Department of Energy, Energy Technologies for the United King-

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dom: An Appraisal for R, D&D Planning, energy paper 39, vol. 2 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979), 58–62. 12. See note by Colls, Atomic Energy Research Establishment, “R, D&D Expenditure,” 23.5.1979, BNA AB 57/­234. 13. See, for example, British Department of Energy, Energy: The Key Resource, energy paper 4 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975), 3; Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft, “Vortrag Dr. Geberths,” 22.6.1978, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch) B 102/­319558. 14. British Department of Energy, Energy Technologies for the United Kingdom, vol. 2 (1979), 103. 15. See, for example, British Department of Energy, Energy: The Key Resource, 3; Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien 1977–1980 (Bonn: Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie/­Referat Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, 1977), 87. 16. A whole range of studies came to analogical conclusions. See, for example, M. J. Norgett, Atomic Energy Research Establishment, “Renewable Energy Resources,” July 1979, BNA AB 57/­234; Dieter Oesterwind et al., Sanfte Energieversorgung. Möglichkeiten—­Probleme—­Grenzen (Jülich: Zentralbibliothek der Kernforschungsanalge, 1980). 17. See, for example, British Department of Energy, Energy Technologies for the United Kingdom: An Appraisal for R, D&D Planning, energy paper 39, vol. 1 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979), 58–62. See also Wilson, “History of the UK Renewable Energy Programme,” 100, 172. 18. British Department of Energy, Energy Technologies for the United Kingdom, vol. 2 (1979), 103. 19. See note by Energy Technology Support Unit, “Overseas R, D&D,” 30.5.1979, BNA, AB 57/­234; and “Dritte Fortschreibung des Energieprogramms der Bundesregierung,” 5.11.1981, BT-­Drs. 9/­983, 26. 20. For all quotes in this paragraph, see British Department of Energy, Energy Technologies for the United Kingdom: 1986 Appraisal of Research, Development and Demonstration, energy paper 54 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1987), 1. 21. See British Department of Energy, Energy Technologies for the United Kingdom, vol. 2 (1979), 12, 14–15, 17. 22. Climate Change: The UK Programme. United Kingdom’s Report under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Cm 2427 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1994), 15–30. 23. Sustainable Development: The UK Strategy, Cm 2426 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1994), 13; This Common Inheritance: Britain’s Environmental Strategy, Cm 1200 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1990), 72. 24. British Secretary of State for Energy and Chief Secretary to the Treasury, The

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Government’s Expenditure Plans within the Energy Sector: 1991–92 to 1993–94, Cm 1505 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1991), 11. 25. This Common Inheritance: UK Annual Report 1996. Reporting on the UK’s Sustainable Strategy of 1994, Cm 3188 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1996), 20. 26. This Common Inheritance: UK Annual Report 1996. Reporting on the UK’s Sustainable Strategy of 1994, Cm 3188 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1996), 20. 27. See Sustainable Development, 13, 131. 28. British Secretaries of State for the Environment, for Northern Ireland, Health, Scotland and Wales, United Kingdom National Environmental Health Action Plan, Cm 3323 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1996), 91. 29. This Common Inheritance (1996), 18. In detail on this argument, see Department of Trade and Industry, The Energy Report: Competition, Competitiveness, and Sustainability (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1995). 30. The idea of soft energy paths was propagated by the American activist Amory B. Lovins in Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977). With regard to West Germany, the concept was influentially taken up by Florentin Krause et al., Energie-­Wende. Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran. Ein Alternativ-­Bericht (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1980). 31. See Falk Illing, Energiepolitik in Deutschland. Die energiepolitischen Maßnahmen der Bundesregierung 1949—­2013 (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 2012), 153–55, 173–76. For an analysis of debates on energy policy in Parliament, see Eva Oberloskamp, “Energy and the Environment in Parliamentary Debates in the Federal Republic of Germany, United Kingdom and France from the 1970s to the 1990s,” in The Environment and the European Public Sphere: Perceptions, Actors, Policies, ed. Christian Wenkel et al. (Cambridgeshire: White Horse Press, 2020), 205–19. 32. See, for example, “Abschätzung des Potentials erneuerbarer Energiequellen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” carried out by the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, and the Fraunhofer-­ Institut für Systemtechnik und Innovationsforschung on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics, October 1984, BArch, B 102/­362461; Jörg Bostel et al., Möglicher zukünftiger Beitrag regenerativer Energiequellen zur Energieversorgung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Wissensstand—­Probleme—­Erwartungen, 2nd ed. (Jülich: Zentralbibliothek der Kernforschungsanlage, 1985). 33. See in particular “Zweite Fortschreibung des Energieprogramms der Bundesregierung,” 19.12.1977, BT-­Drs. 8/­1357, 3, 7, 11, 19; “Dritte Fortschreibung des Energieprogramms der Bundesregierung,” 5.11.1981, BT-­Drs. 9/­983, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14–17, 21–22, 24, 26; “Energiebericht der Bundesregierung,” 26.9.1986, BT-­Drs. 10/­6073, 12–13,

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17–19; “Das energiepolitische Gesamtkonzept der Bundesregierung. Energiepolitik für das vereinte Deutschland,” 11.12.1991, BT-­Drs. 12/­1799, 21–27. 34. See, for example, Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., 3. Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien (Bonn: Bundesminister für Forschung u. Technologie/­Referat Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, 1990), 40. 35. See Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., Zweites Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien (Bonn: Bundesminister für Forschung u. Technologie/­Referat Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, 1981), 81–83; Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft, “Forschungsschwerpunkte,” 18.7.1979, BArch B 102/­319558. 36. See, for example, corresponding discussions in BArch B 102/­338382, B 102/­ 338383, and B 136/­37625. 37. On the measures adopted by the federal government for reducing CO2 emissions during the 1990s, see the consecutive reports from the interministerial working group “CO2 reduction”: BT-­Drs. 12/­2081; BT-­Drs. 12/­8557; BT-­Drs. 13/­8936. 38. See, for example, “Das energiepolitische Gesamtkonzept der Bundesregierung. Energiepolitik für das vereinte Deutschland,” 11.12.1991, BT-­Drs. 12/­1799, 3–6, 36–40; “Umwelt 1994. Politik für eine nachhaltige, umweltgerechte Entwicklung,” BT-­Drs. 12/­8451, 6.9.1994, 208–9. 39. See, for example, Deregulierungskommission—­Unabhängige Expertenkommission zum Abbau marktwidriger Regulierungen, Marktöffnung und Wettbewerb (Stuttgart: C. E. Poeschel Verlag, 1991), 66–90. 40. Position statement by Günter Altner and Dieter v. Ehrenstein,“Bericht der Enquete-­Kommission ‘Zukünftige Kernenergie-­Politik,’” 27.6.1980, BT-­Drs. 8/­4341, 75. 41. By way of example, see BT-­PlPr. 10/­171, 7.11.1985, 12778–9. 42. On the structures of the British energy system until the 1970s, see Dieter Helm, Energy, the State, and the Market: British Energy Policy since 1979 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14. 43. See Illing, Energiepolitik in Deutschland, 30–33. 44. For pointers on this, I am grateful to Jeffrey Manuel of Southern Illinois University. 45. For example, in 1980, in the United Kingdom, 73.2 percent of total electricity was produced from coal; in Germany, 62.9 percent. See https:/­/­data.worldbank.org/­ indicator/­EG.ELC.COAL.ZS?locations=DE-­GB. It must be noted, however, that the quoted data for Germany is apparently the aggregation of West and East German figures. The part of coal in West German electricity generation can be expected to be lower. 46. See Duccio Basosi et al., eds., Counter-­shock: The Oil Counter-­revolution of the 1980s (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). 47. In the United Kingdom, the expansion of nuclear power for electricity gener-

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ation had started much earlier than in West Germany, and its development stood in military contexts, while West Germany did not pursue a military nuclear program. Furthermore, there were different types of reactors in use. See Simon Taylor, The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain: A History (Cambridge: UIT Cambridge Ltd., 2016), 5–46; Joachim Radkau and Lothar Hahn, Aufstieg und Fall der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (Munich: oekom verlag, 2013). 48. See Annika Sohre, Strategien der Energie-­und Klimapolitik. Bedingungen strategischer Steuerung der Energiewende in Deutschland und Großbritannien (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 410. 49. For example, RWE in West Germany, South of Scotland Electricity Board and North of Scotland Hydro-­electric Board in the United Kingdom. See Matthias Heymann, “Der Riese und der Wind. Zum schwierigen Verhältnis des RWE zur Windenergie,” in Elektrizitätswirtschaft zwischen Umwelt, Technik und Politik. Aspekte aus 100 Jahren RWE-­Geschichte 1898–1998, ed. Helmut Maier (Freiberg: TU Bergakademie, 1999), 217–36; Wilson, “History of the UK Renewable Energy Programme,” 162–65. 50. The Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and the Kernforschungsanlage Jülich were both involved in research on renewable energies. 51. For example: AEG, MAN, MBB, ERNO, Dornier, Philips, Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Ltd., Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Co. Ltd., Taylor Woodrow Construction Ltd. See Gerhard Mener, Zwischen Labor und Markt. Geschichte der Sonnenenergienutzung in Deutschland und den USA 1860–1986 (Baldham: LK-­Verlag, 2001), 423–38; Wilson, “History of the UK Renewable Energy Programme,” 162; Letter by Gibb, Taylor Woodrow Construction Ltd., 21.6.1979, BNA AB 57/­234. 52. See Mario Neukirch, “Windenergienutzung in der Pionierphase (1975–1991). Technische und sozio-­ökonomische Innovation im Wechselspiel,” Berliner Debatte Initial 21, no. 4 (2010): 121; David Ross, Power from the Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 130–55. 53. Wesley D. Sine and Brandon H. Lee, “Tilting at Windmills? The Environmental Movement and the Emergence of the U.S. Wind Energy Sector,” Administrative Science Quarterly 54 (2009): 124. 54. For a comparative analysis of antinuclear movements in West Germany and the United Kingdom, see Eva Oberloskamp, “Ambiguities of Transnationalism: Social Opposition to the Civil Use of Nuclear Power in the United Kingdom and in West Germany during the 1970s,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 29 (2022): 417–51. On the particular vigilance against totalitarian threats among West German anti–nuclear power activists, see also Eva Oberloskamp, “Intellektuelle und die Janusköpfigkeit der technischen Moderne. Der Konflikt um die Atomenergie und der Wandel von Intellektuellenrollen in der Bundesrepublik

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Deutschland, in Warten auf Godot? Intellektuelle seit den 1960er Jahren, ed. Ingrid Gilcher-­Holtey and Eva Oberloskamp (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg), 106, 113–14. 55. See Eva Oberloskamp, “Towards the German ‘Energiewende’: Ecological Problems and Scientific Expertise in West German Energy Policies during the 1970s and 1980s,” in Work in Progress: Economy and Environment in the Hands of Experts, eds. Frank Trentmann et al. (Munich: oekom verlag, 2018), 233–61. 56. See Adrian Smith, “The Alternative Technology Movement: An Analysis of Its Framing and Negotiation of Technology Development,” Human Ecology Review 12, no. 2 (2005): 106–19. 57. For example, the Husumer Schiffswerft, or members of the Verband Solar-­ Industrie. See Mener, Zwischen Labor und Markt, 433–38; Johannes Kammer, Die Windenergieindustrie. Evolution von Akteuren und Unternehmensstrukturen in einer Wachstumsindustrie mit räumlicher Perspektive (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2011). 58. See Werner Abelshauser, “Der Traum von der umweltverträglichen Energie und seine schwierige Verwirklichung,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-­und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 101 (2014): 58. 59. On the Federal Republic of Germany, see Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann, Energy Democracy. Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 73–122; Bernward Janzing, Störfall mit Charme. Die Schönauer Stromrebellen im Widerstand gegen die Atomkraft (Vöhrenbach: Dold, 2008). In the United Kingdom, similar initiatives existed, but they were smaller and there was no tradition of municipal energy supply. The earliest British example was the Newport and Nevern Energy Group, founded in 1980. See BNA EG 16/­248. 60. For suggestions in this regard, I am grateful to Felix Lieb, who is about to publish his doctoral dissertation as a book: Felix Lieb, Arbeit und Umwelt? Die Umwelt-­und Energiepolitik der SPD zwischen Ökologie und Ökonomie 1969–1998 (forthcoming). 61. Frank Uekötter, Deutschland in Grün. Eine zwiespältige Erfolgsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 151–68. 62. See Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972); Patrick Kupper and Elke Seefried, “‘A Computer’s Vision of Doomsday’: On the History of the 1972 Study The Limits to Growth,” in Exploring Apocalyptica: Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism, ed. Frank Uekötter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 49–74. 63. See Iris Borowy, Defining Sustainable Development for Our Common Future: A History of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014). 64. Pascal Pawlitta is preparing a doctoral dissertation titled “Politisierung des Klimas. Die Entstehung der internationalen Klimapolitik (ca. 1979–1995),” https:/­/­

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www.ifz-­muenchen.de/­f orschung/­e a/­f orschung/­p olitisierung-­d es-­k limas-­d ie -­entstehung-­der-­internationalen-­k limapolitik-­ca-­1979-­1995/­. 65. See Peter Weingart et al., Von der Hypothese zur Katastrophe. Der anthropogene Klimawandel im Diskurs zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik und Massenmedien, 2nd slightly modified ed. (Opladen/­Farmington Hills: Leske + Budrich, 2008). 66. Helm, Energy, the State, and the Market, 57–63. 67. See Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, 5th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 68. See Deregulierungskommission, Marktöffnung, 66–90. 69. In 1978, for example, the British government spent a total amount of $791.7 million on energy R&D—­$578.3 million went to nuclear fission/­fusion, and $22.7 million to renewable energies (all figures according to 1995 prices and exchange rates). See International Energy Agency, IEA Energy Technology R&D Statistics, 1974–1995 (Paris: OECD/­IEA, 1997), 177. 70. Wilson, “History of the UK Renewable Energy Programme,” 158–59. On the history of wave power in the United Kingdom, see Ross, Power from the Waves. 71. See Helm, Energy, the State, and the Market, 349. 72. In the United Kingdom, the highest amount of R&D funding ($51.1 million) dedicated to renewable energies was spent in 1981. Subsequently, annual grants dropped to under $30 million per year. See International Energy Agency, IEA Energy Technology, 178–79. 73. In 1995 the UK government R&D funding for renewable energies had gone down to $14.3 million. See International Energy Agency, IEA Energy Technology, 179. 74. See Catherine Mitchell and Peter Connor, “Renewable Energy Policy in the UK, 1990–2003,” Energy Policy 32 (2004): 1936–37. 75. On the first program, see Illing, Energiepolitik in Deutschland, 153–54. 76. An average of about three times as much as the United Kingdom during the whole period under consideration. See International Energy Agency, IEA Energy Technology, 89–91, 177–79. 77. In 1978 the West German government spent a total amount of $1.87 billion on energy R&D—­$1.3 billion went to nuclear fission/­fusion, and $63.3 million to renewable energies (all figures according to 1995 prices and exchange rates). See International Energy Agency, IEA Energy Technology, 89. 78. Matthias Heymann, Die Geschichte der Windenergienutzung. 1890–1990 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1995), 455. 79. On Growian, see Heymann, Die Geschichte, 369–82; Morris and Jungjohann, Energy Democracy, 42–45. 80. Neukirch, “Windenergienutzung in der Pionierphase,” 120. 81. Neukirch, 119, 128; Heymann, Die Geschichte, 419–31; Bundesminister für

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Forschung und Technologie, ed., 3. Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien, 46–50. 82. See Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien 1977–1980, 82–87; Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., Zweites Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien, 83–90; Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., 3. Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien, 42–6; Bundesminister für Forschung und Technologie, ed., 4. Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien (Bonn: Bundesminister für Forschung u. Technologie/­Referat Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, 1997), 59–64, 74–75. 83. See Heymann, Die Geschichte, 420–28; Dörte Ohlhorst, Windenergie in Deutschland. Konstellationen, Dynamiken und Regulierungspotenziale im Innovationsprozess (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009), 130–33. 84. See J. T. McMullan and A. S. Strub, Achievements of the European Community First Energy R&D Programme (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981). 85. See Helm, Energy, the State, and the Market, 5. 86. “Renewable Energy Output: (% of Total Electricity Output), Germany, the Unit­ ata.worldbank.org/­indicator/­EG.ELC.RNEW ed Kingdom,” World Bank, https:/­/d .ZS?end=2015&locations=DE-­GB&start=1990&view=chart.

  C ontributors

Dolores L. Augustine was a professor of history at St. John’s University (Queens, New York) until her retirement in 2020. Among her publications are Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (2018), winner of the German Studies Association/­Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Book Prize for the best book in German history published in 2018–19; Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945–1990 (2007); and Patricians and Parvenus: Wealth and High Society in Wilhelmine Germany (1994). Duccio Basosi is an associate professor of history of international relations at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Between 2011 and 2016 he coordinated the research project titled “The Engines of Growth: For a Global History of the Conflict between Renewable, Fossil and Fissile Energies (1972–1992),” funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. He has co-­edited, with G. Garavini and M. Trentin, Counter-­Shock. The Oil Counter-­Revolution of the 1980s (2018). Joseph Bohling is an associate professor of history at Portland State University. He is writing a book about French energy policy, titled Power to the Republic: The Oil Crisis and France’s Pursuit of Energy Independence since the 1970s. He published The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France with Cornell University Press in 2018. Benjamin Franta is a PhD candidate in history of science at Stanford University, where he studies the history of climate change politics. He holds a separate PhD in applied physics from Harvard University, a JD from Stanford Law School, and is a licensed attorney in the state of California. He is a co-­founder of the Climate Social Science Network at Brown University.

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Stephen G. Gross is an associate professor in the Department of History and director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. His books include Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 18990–1945 (2015) and Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (forthcoming). His research has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Trish Kahle studies energy, work, and politics in the modern United States. As assistant professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, Kahle co-­leads the Energy Humanities Research Initiative at GU-­Q’s Center for International and Regional Studies.  Victor McFarl and is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri. He studies energy history and related topics, including environmental history and US relations with the Arab world. His first book, Oil Powers: A History of the U.S.-­Saudi Alliance, was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. Andrew Needham is an associate professor of history at New York University, where he studies environmental, Indigenous, and urban and suburban history, as well as the history of the American West. He is the author of Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (2014) and is currently writing a history of the Teapot Dome Scandal. Eva Oberloskamp holds a research fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. She studied history, economics and Russian in Bielefeld, Paris, Saint Petersburg, and Warsaw, and she holds a double doctorate in history from LMU Munich and Université Paris IV. Her research fields include the history of intellectuals, European integration, and counterterrorism. She is currently working on a book project that analyzes the influence of environmentalism on energy policy in West Germany and the United Kingdom since the 1970s. Sonja D. Schmid is an associate professor of science and technology studies at Virginia Tech. Her research is situated at the interface of energy policy, technological choices, and proliferation concerns. For her first book, Producing Power: The Pre-­Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (2015), she used Russian archival sources and interviews with industry veterans to reconstruct the history and organization of the civilian nuclear energy sector

c ont ribu tors

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in the Soviet Union. In her most recent project, which was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, she investigated the challenges of post-­Fukushima initiatives to globalize nuclear emergency response. Before joining Virginia Tech, she held postdoctoral appointments at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. She earned her PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University, and an MA in Slavic studies, philosophy, and linguistics from the University of Vienna. Ryan Driskell Tate is a climate and energy analyst at Global Energy Monitor. His research and commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, TIME, the Economist, the Progressive, among others. He earned his PhD in energy and environmental history from Rutgers University. Henning Türk , PhD, is a specialist in twentieth-­century international history at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. He is currently working on a project funded by the German Research Foundation titled “The International Organization of National Energy Policy: Great Britain and Western Germany in the International Energy Agency (IEA), 1974–1993.” His main publications in this field of research are: “The Oil Crisis of 1973 as a Challenge to Multilateral Energy Cooperation among Western Industrialized Countries,” Historical Social Research 39, no. 4 (2014): 209–30; “Talking about OPEC without Talking to OPEC? The (Non-­) Relationship between the International Energy Agency and OPEC 1974–1990,” in The Handbook of OPEC and the Global Energy Order: Past, Present, and Future Challenges, ed. Giuliano Garavini and Dag Harald Claes (New York: Routledge, 2020), 100–110; and Treibstoff der Systeme. Kohle, Erdöl und Atomkraft im geteilten Deutschland (Berlin: be.bra, 2021). Thomas Turnbull is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a member of the Anthropocene Formations group. Given growing attention to the applied use of energy history, he is interested in the formalisation of this distinct disciplinary field. He is currently working on a book about energy conservation. Natasha Zaretsky is a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (2007) and Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (2018).

  i ndex

abortion: access, 168; history, 174, 179–80; conflict over, 168–69, 176, 178–80; restrictions, 177; rights, 176–78 Africa, 19, 21, 90, 119, 121 agriculture, 8, 25, 33, 39, 41–45, 83, 86, 185, 215 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 213, 215 American Petroleum Institute, 137, 205–9, 212–13, 219 alcohol: and alcoholism, 45; anti–alcohol programs, 45; diesel, 37; and fetal alcohol syndrome, 176; and France, 34, 37, 39–41, 43–47; fuels, 34–43, 45–46, 244n4; and gasoline, 36–37, 40, 246n24; surpluses, 42; value of, 39 Allen, Robert, 12 American Enterprise Institute, 208 American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, 207 Anthropocene, 8, 11, 76, 152, 170, 173, 180–81 Asia, 19, 21, 101, 197 atomic age, 8, 169–70, 180 atomic bomb, 17, 22, 184, 189 atomic electricity, 150 atomic energy, 123–29, 154–55, 169–70, 172, 179, 182–84, 220 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 149, 171, 189, 190

Atomic Law, 187 atomic state, 186 atomic utopianism, 64, 150, 152 atomic weapons, 170–71, 181 automobile clubs, 40 automobile industry, 10, 25, 27–28, 34, 37, 42–44 automobile society, 52, 102 Bérenger, Henry, 33, 39 Bituminous Coal Conservation Act, 138 Bretton Woods, 89 black lung, 63–66, 68–75, 254n2 Black Lung Benefits Act (1972), 63–64 Bonneuil, Christophe, 14, 108–9, 271n22 British Petroleum (BP), 52, 55–56, 199–200, 212 Bureau of Oil Prospecting (BRP), 43 capitalism, 89; agrarian, 86; American, 86; carboniferous, 109; classic liberal, 9; coalfield, 77; and creative destruction, 61; and energy transition, 112; and environmentalism, 111; global, 16; history of, 10–11, 13–15; industrial, 79, 86; neoliberal, 9; western, 116 carbon dioxide, 106, 197–200, 204–11, 218 carbon emissions, 19, 30, 91, 96, 106, 199, 219 Carter, Jimmy, 4, 14, 80, 95, 103–6, 321

322

112–13, 117, 146, 188, 199, 268n36, 268n41, 269n44, 273n37 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). See Eastern Europe Centre for Alternative Technology, 228 Chad, 10 chemistry, 16, 20 China, 19, 114, 154, 289n8 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 49–50, 53–54, 57–60 climate analysts, 50, 181, 198, 268n41 climate change. See global warming climate movement, 87, 180 climate policy, 148, 157, 181, 217–18, 220, 223, 229 climate science, 106, 152, 181, 200, 202, 211–17, 219 climate skepticism, 106, 200, 202, 204 “Climate of History,” 8 coal: alternatives to, 123; consumption of, 16, 19, 49, 78, 94, 96, 110; crisis (1958), 53; critiques of, 103, 202, 206, 219; decline of, 48, 59, 233; energy system, 16; energy transition, 92, 118–21, 130, 132, 135, 222; and France, 42; hard, 30, 48–54, 56–57, 59; imports, 38, 52; industry, 26, 55, 57–59, 63–64, 67, 77–78, 80–87, 127, 138, 199–200, 223, 226; and mine control, 78–79; and natural gas, 108, 221; as “national energy,” 41; policy, 124, 126, 128; politics of, 18, 29; power plants, 17; prices of, 26, 53, 59, 115; production, 30, 50, 97, 106, 211; and rail transport, 28–29; regions, 17; renaissance, 93; rise of, 25, 110, 117; and rise of oil, 20–23, 26, 33; and solar energy, 112; trade, 125; and the United States, 49, 99–101, 104–5; and West Germany, 49, 51–52, 54, 57; and Wyoming, 31 Coal Industry Advisory Board, 127 Cohen, William, 102 Cold War, 3, 13, 65–66, 79, 89, 100, 140, 146, 150–51, 164, 166; Second, 169, 178, 180 colonialism. See imperialism Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 187

INDE X

Congress (US), 69, 73, 100–1, 171, 200, 207–9, 213, 219 conservation: and Amory Lovins, 103; coal, 134; emergence of, 92–93; energy, 107, 111, 124–25, 127, 129, 132–33, 194; energy resource, 131–34, 138–40, 145, 147–48; and energy transition, 96, 111; fuel, 140; and Gerald Ford, 101; and Henry Kissinger, 123; and Jimmy Carter, 104–5, 112; petroleum, 136–37; policy, 117; politics of, 145–46; and the Progressive Era, 135, 144; and renewable energy, 112; and Richard Nixon, 98, 102 corporations, 10, 53, 227; American, 55, 103; energy, 10, 194; financial, 10; international, 25; and mines, 59; petroleum, 20, 50, 52; West German, 57 Council for Mutual Assistance (CMEA), 160, 162 counterexpertise, 182–86, 188, 190, 192–96 Czechoslovakia, 151, 159–60, 163–65, 289n7, 291n25 democracy, 10, 13, 46, 64, 186, 197 dependency, 18, 30, 34–36, 39–40, 46, 102, 119–23, 128–29, 139, 151, 167 Dietz, David, 150 Dunlop, Robert, 208 Eastern Bloc, 3, 53, 151, 161. See also Eastern Europe Eastern Europe, 157–67 Eco-­Institute (Germany), 154, 188, 191, 194, 228 efficiency ratios, 6 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 55, 150, 170 electricity grid, 21–22, 150, 182, 199, 225–26, 231–32, 308n3 empire, 42–43, 160, 166 energy consumption, 5, 10, 15, 19, 48, 53, 71, 92, 94, 98, 110–11, 118–20, 125, 127, 129, 144, 154, 222, 224, 250n5 energy efficiency, 13, 53, 104, 106–7, 131–32, 134, 194, 223, 225 energy extraction, 9, 147

INDE X

energy infrastructure, 6, 34, 42–44, 60, 91, 125–26, 163, 169 energy markets, 3, 50, 78, 93; German, 225, 228; liberalized, 223, 226; world, 220 energy policy: and energy transitions, 108; and France, 93; and the IEA, 122, 124, 127–29; interventionist, 144; new approaches to, 122; and North America, 138, 140–41; political parties, 16, 35; post–oil shock, 276n5; renewable, 229, 231; and sovereignty, 46; and Soviet Union, 158; and West Germany, 58, 93, 202, 221, 225, 308n9; and United Kingdom, 223, 310n31; and United States, 93, 95–96, 99, 103, 105, 140, 268n36 Energy Policy, 12–13, 111 Energy Policy and Conservation Act (1975), 101–2 energy production, 10, 15, 17, 63–64, 71, 73, 75, 78, 95–97, 105, 194, 224 energy provision, 15 energy security, 16, 92, 105, 107–8, 122–23, 129, 157, 167, 233 energy services, 12, 15 energy systems, 3; decentralized, 224, 233; and energy transition, 14; fossil fuel, 8; history of, 6, 13, 17; hybrid, 242n52; impact of, 15–16; interaction between, 20; large scale, 103; new energy systems, 50; and oil shock of 1970s, 21; success of, 23; traditional, 167 Energy Technology Support Unit, 229 energy transitions, 3; aftershocks of, 6; and climate change, 106; and coal, 21, 29, 48, 66, 78, 120, 130; consequences of, 121; contestations over, 128, 274n56; definitions of, 14–18, 23, 94, 108–10, 113, 120–21, 130, 169; ecological, 220–21, 234; and energy policy, 13; and energy security, 167; and environmentalism, 96; in Europe, 18, 20, 25, 60, 93, 271n14; and fossil fuels, 8, 198; as a framework, 120–21, 130, 169, 260n10; and globalization, 113; and global warming, 204; and “green transition,” 201–2; history of, 8, 14, 19, 23, 50, 61, 64, 77, 87, 94, 108–9, 135,

323

201; impact of, 18; and the Industrial Revolution, 12; and Jimmy Carter, 112; in the Middle East, 48; and Nairobi Conference, 115; in North America, 18, 20; and nuclear power, 22, 111, 149–52, 154; and oil, 21, 120, 130, 199; and OPEC, 199; post–oil shock, 92, 98, 114, 118, 120; public discourse of, 111–13, 118; and renewables, 5, 22, 104, 221; and Ronald Reagan, 115; and solar, 6; and think tanks, 108, 110; in the United Kingdom, 234; in the United States, 25, 62–63, 66, 93, 95–96, 99, 103–5, 269n44; in West Germany, 55, 59–60, 196, 221, 234; and wind, 6 engineering, 114, 132, 134, 162–63, 165, 184, 189, 195, 227–28; companies, 164, 231 environmental activism, 188 environmental concerns, 104, 208–9, 220, 222–23 environmental costs, 97, 225 environmental degradation, 8, 180, 224 environmental groups, 16, 198, 211, 198, 211, 227 environmental history, 6, 22, 134–35, 236nn6–7 environmentalism, 91, 102, 107, 185, 188, 193 environmental movement, 23, 96, 100 environmental protection, 95, 97, 100, 103, 105, 187, 192 Environmental Protection Agency, 200 environmental transformation, 8 Europe: Central Europe, 30; and China, 154; and climate change, 200; and coal, 28–29, 50, 108, 110; and the Economic Miracle, 48; and European Commission, 230; and European Council, 52–53; and European Union (EU), 202, 225, 232; and energy history, 12; and energy prices, 26, 91–92; and energy scarcity, 51, 90, 115; and energy transitions, 6–8, 25–26, 30, 49, 60; and energy use, 19–20; and fossil fuel consumption, 23, 197; and France, 43; and Green Party, 228; and heat wave, 203; and the Marshall Plan, 28, 42; and Marxism, 146;

324

Europe (cont.): and modernization, 161; and natural gas, 14; and nuclear energy, 110, 149–53, 161–62, 164–65; and oil, 16, 21–22, 30, 55; and oil–car nexus, 28; and oil exhaustion scares, 115; and oil importation, 101, 108, 114; and oil exportation, 163; and oil prices, 91–92; and oil shock (1973), 89–93; and “oil weapon,” 14; and politicization of energy, 50; rivers, 52; and scientists, 22; and Soviet Union, 157–64; and the United States 42; and urban centers, 11; and workers, 27; Western Europe, 3, 48, 52, 55, 151, 184, 199; West Germany, 49, 53, 201, 221 European Atomic Energy Community, 126 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 49, 51, 151 European Economic Community (EEC), 14, 59, 160, 232 Evans, David 207 expertise, 18, 22, 42–43, 125, 153–57, 161–67, 182, 188, 193, 196 ExxonMobil, 10, 13, 52, 54–56, 81, 90, 200, 204, 210–19 Farmington Mine disaster, 62–64, 67–69, 72, 75, 254n2, 255n6 Federal Energy Office, 100 Federal Oil Conservation Board (FOCB), 38, 136 Federal Power Commission (FPC), 96, 138, 141, 208 Federal Radiation Council, 170 fertilizer, 19, 38 Field, John, 70 financial crisis, 9, 13 First International Conference on Atomic Energy, 150 Ford Foundation, 110, 16, 142, 147 Ford (corporation), 200 Ford, Gerald, 95, 101–4 Ford, Henry, 27, 86 Foreign Affairs, 103, 111, 188 Fossil Fuel Obligation (NFFO), 230 fossil fuels, 18; controls, 217; costs of, 31, 50, 155, 219; decline of, 6, 8; and ecological

INDE X

damage, 103, 116, 148; emissions from, 204, 209–10; and energy security, 92; energy systems, 8–9, 197; and energy transition, 115, 154, 197–99, 202; global use, 22, 118; and global warming, 20, 23, 135, 204–19, 221–22; impacts of, 107; imports, 154, 167; industry, 30, 50, 60, 200, 202–4; and liberalization, 199; and nuclear power, 96, 111, 159, 183, 194; production, 108; and renewable energies, 20, 22–23, 60, 111–12, 183, 192; shortage fears, 75, 91–92; and the United States, 101, 104–6; workers, 75, 77; and World War II, 105 The Foundations of National Prosperity, 135 France: and alcohol fuel, 33–34, 39–40; and alcohol producers, 43–45; and automobile industry, 45; and balance of payments, 36; and coal, 42; colonies, 34; and counterexpertise, 153–54; and energy consumption, 10, 41, 46, 55, 108; and engineers, 37; and foreign oil dependency, 34–35, 43, 46, 93; and gasoline, 30, 34–36, 43; and the Green Party, 201; and hard coal, 30; and the National Front, 201; and nuclear power, 93, 150–51, 153–54; and oil activism, 39; and oil consumption, 21, 33–35, 42–43, 122, 154; and oil imports, 42, 93, 122; and oil prices, 26; and oil production, 27; and the United Kingdom, 131 Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, 194 French Oil Company (CFP), 36 Fressoz, Jean–Baptiste, 14, 108 fuel efficiency, 102 Geneva, 150 geopolitical autonomy, 22; benefits, 26; challenges, 22, 93; goals, 166; landscape, 16; protection, 152; rivals, 154; security, 15 geopolitics, 13, 16, 27, 94 Germany, 10, 21; and coal, 38, 49, 57-­58; and Communist Party, 187; and energy production, 195, 232; and energy tran-

INDE X

sition, 221; and energy use, 56, 58; and environmentalism, 188, 201, 220, 220, 228; and Freiburg, 154; and mining, 30; and neoliberalism, 229; and nuclear power, 194; and oil consumption, 56, 113; and renewables, 61, 202, 220, 234; and technoscience, 184; and wind energy, 231-­32 global capitalism, 10, 16 Global Climate Coalition, 204 globalization, 10, 14, 113, 153 Global North, 3, 18–19, 242n52 Global South, 19, 242n52 global warming: and the Anthropocene, 11, 236n6; and awareness, 207; beginnings of, 20; consequences of, 203–4, 209–11, 213, 217–19; and energy policy, 5–6, 9, 108; and energy systems, 14; and energy transition, 118, 154; and environmentalism, 8; future of, 18; and historians, 8–9, 13; history of, 203–7; and Jimmy Carter, 106; and Kyoto Accords, 201; and the oil industry, 23, 208, 210–15, 217–19; science of, 198, 200, 202–7 Gofman, John, 189 Gore, Al, 6 governance, 9, 24, 62–63, 65, 67, 71, 93–94, 129, 169 Great Acceleration, 19, 48, 91, 198 Great Britain: and colonization, 139; and coal, 38; early modern, 11; and energy transition, 10, 12; and France, 131; and industrialization, 109; and the North Sea, 199; and nuclear power, 150–51, 154, 291n32; and oil shock (1973), 93; politics, 201. See also United Kingdom Great Divergence, 11 gross domestic product (GDP), 12, 19, 48 gross national product (GNP), 133, 146 Gutermuth, Heinz, 53 “hard hat cowboys,” 78–79, 83–84, 87 heavy–water model, 161, 164, 289n7, 291n25 Hesse, 193–94 “high energy society,” 19, 21, 29, 71, 75, 78 Hirten, John, 102

325

historicity of energy, 108, 134 Hormats, Robert, 99 Hughes, Thomas, 11 humanity, 3, 8, 17, 91, 94, 149–50, 154, 179, 197, 200, 211, 219 hydrocarbons, 14, 19, 23, 30, 90, 94, 110, 113, 117, 199, 208–9 hydroelectricity, 41–42, 141 identity, 10, 14, 29, 31, 49, 78, 84, 227, 249n4 imperialism, 11, 159 Independent Commission on International Development Issues, 113 industrialization, 13, 49, 56, 109 Industrial Revolution, 8–9, 11–12, 214, 304n7 industrial societies, 16, 89, 125 inequality, 9–10, 18 infrastructure, 10, 14–15, 22, 27, 55–58, 194, 196, 226, 233 Institute for Ecological Economic Research, 194 Institute of Economic Affairs, 229 Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (Germany), 188 International Atomic Energy Agency, 110, 126 International Energy Agency (IEA), 93, 120–29 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), 3, 110–11, 117, 235n1, 271n21 International Panel on Climate Change (IPOC), 197 International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conversation Association, 204, 218 International Renewable Energy Council, 13 Ise, John, 135 Jevons, William Stanley, 109, 132–33 Johnson, Lyndon B., 66, 100, 102 Johnson, William, 100 Jungk, Robert, 186 Katalyse Institute, 188 Kennedy, John F., 67, 79

326

knowledge systems, 14–15 Koch, David, 200 Koch, Charles, 200 labor relations, 19, 26, 89, 259n7 Laurmann, John, 213 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 189–90 Lovins, Amory, 103, 111–12, 116, 188, 192, 198, 310n30 light–water model, 150–51 Mali, 10 Malthus, Thomas, 115 Marchetti, Cesare, 3, 13, 18, 110 Marxism, 146 Marx, Karl, 9 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 116, 190 Middle East, 19, 21, 27, 30, 35–36, 42, 48–49, 55, 90–91, 96, 116, 119, 121–22 miners: in Appalachia, 30, 62, 68, 83–84; and coal production, 65–67, 75, 84–85, 87–88; and death, 68, 71–74, 255n6; and disabilities, 69, 71, 73, 75; and extractivism, 84–85; “freedoms,” 80; and increased work, 30; and labor organization, 54, 68–72, 78–79, 82–84, 199; and mechanization, 28; and moral economy, 64; and safety, 29, 60, 63, 66–68, 86; and solidarity, 78; and strip mining, 85, 87; workers’ rights, 26, 54, 60, 68–70, 77 modernization, 41–42, 63, 157–59, 161, 166 moral economy, 25, 29, 62–64, 71, 73–75 multinational oil companies, 10–11, 20, 35, 46, 120, 127, 130, 200 Mumford, Lewis, 9, 109 Nassikas, John, 96 National Academy of Sciences, 172, 200 National Bureau of Economic Research, 143 National Center for Atmospheric Research, 212 National Coal Association, 77 National Coal Week, 66

INDE X

National Commission on Air Quality, 212 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), 173 national culture, 16 national defense, 36, 142 national economy, 40 “national energy,” 41, 64, 76, 78, 124–25, 128, 133, 232 National Energy Plan (1977), 4, 198 National Front, 201 “national fuel,” 38 national fuel strategy, 36 “national gasoline,” 46 national identity, 165 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), 137 National Institute of Mental Health, 176 “national interest,” 35 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956), 28 National Mass Transportation Act, 102 National Office of Combustible Fuels, 36 national oil industry, 36 National Recovery Administration, 138 National Resources Policy, 141 National Right to Life Committee, 177 National Science Foundation, 140 national security, 41–42, 46, 96, 101, 104 National Security Council, 99, 101 national wealth, 58 nation–state, 10, 14–15, 26, 92–93, 152 natural gas, 3, 5, 14, 74, 78, 94, 96–97, 99, 106, 108, 110, 118, 138, 142, 152, 199, 206, 221, 223 natural sciences, 8 neoliberalism, 197–200 Nef, John, 11, 134 Niger, 10 Nixon, Richard, 72—­73, 95, 97–104, 140 North America, 3; and alternatives to oil, 140; and carbon emissions, 91; and conservation, 135–36, 139–42; and economists, 135; and energy consumption, 90, 146, 197; and energy policy, 138, 141; and energy prices, 26, 91; and energy transition, 6, 8, 16, 18, 21–22; and global

INDE X

warming, 18, 20; and nuclear power, 150, 153; and oil consumption, 21, 23, 149; and oil importation, 139; and oil production, 27; and oil shock, 89, 93; and “oil weapon,” 14; and pro–rationing, 136, 138; urban centers, 11 nuclear energy: accidents, 95, 120, 129, 191–92, 195, 301n37; antinuclear movement, 153–55, 175, 177–78, 182–90, 192, 195, 197, 201, 215, 227, 233, 312n54; arms race, 179; catastrophe, 197; and Chernobyl, 164, 183, 192–94, 225; contamination, 107; development, 151; and the Eastern Bloc, 151, 158–60, 162–66, 293n47; and Europe, 151, 153; explosives, 97; fear of, 64, 97; fission, 19, 97, 104, 111, 167, 314n69; and fossil fuels, 118, 183; and France, 93; fuels, 111, 221–22; and Fukushima, 183, 197; fusion, 97, 222, 314n69; and IIASA, 117; industry, 177; and OPEC, 114; physics, 3, 110, 190, 205; power, 3, 5, 13, 17–18, 20, 22, 65, 92–97, 99, 101, 103–5, 108, 110–13, 123–26, 130, 149–54, 157–59, 161–63, 169, 174, 182, 192, 220; proliferation, 180; reactors, 22, 100, 150–51, 165, 174, 191; and the Soviet Union, 154, 156, 159–67, 288n4, 290n22, 293n50; testing, 171, 173; threat, 179–80; and Three Mile Island, 192; transition, 153; and the United Kingdom, 226–27, 229–30; and the United States, 153, 171, 188, 191; utopianism, 6, 22, 149; weapons, 159, 170, 175, 190, 291nn24–25; and West Germany, 93, 113, 183–88, 190–92, 194–95, 201, 221–25, 227, 230, 233–34, 308n3, 311–12n47 Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems (CONAES), 146 Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 175 Nye, David, 19 oil: activists, 44–45; alternatives to, 36, 124, 224; “century of oil,” 46; and coal, 29, 49–50, 58, 65, 78, 92, 108, 112, 124–26, 130, 149, 280n10; conservation of, 143–44; crude, 21, 108, 123; diesel, 28; era

327

of, 3, 6, 16, 20, 22, 29, 40, 77–78, 109; embargo, 90, 119, 121–22, 144; Erdöl, 5; and Europe, 19, 21, 26–28, 49–50, 55, 60, 90, 149, 160; and foreign dependency, 34–35, 39–41, 43, 46, 95, 98, 101; and France, 34–46; fuel oil, 52–56, 58; and gasoline, 33; global network, 20, 27, 35, 55, 112, 265n9; and global warming, 202–6, 219, 255n8; growth of, 25, 29, 48, 117–20, 152; importation of, 38, 40, 42, 46, 49, 55, 90, 99, 107, 114, 122–24, 132, 140, 249n75; industry, 10–11, 20, 26–27, 34, 36, 36, 39, 44, 50, 52, 54, 56–57, 59, 61, 92, 96, 98, 100, 152, 198–201, 208–9, 212, 218; infrastructure, 34, 60; and the International Energy Agency (IEA), 122–24, 128–30; lamp oil, 20; lobbying, 37, 245n18; and Mexico, 21; and the Middle East, 30, 36, 48–49, 60, 90, 93, 109; and North America, 21; oil–car nexus, 28; and OPEC, 23; pipelines, 27, 50, 100; prices, 22–23, 26, 57, 60, 91–92, 100, 108, 110, 117, 120, 129, 141, 144, 199, 226, 276n5, 289n11; production, 21, 27, 38, 55, 97–98, 100, 136–38; properties, 27; prospecting, 43; refineries, 50; regimes, 26; and Saudi Arabia, 21; shale, 115, 210; shortages, 35, 90, 147; and Soviet Union, 158–63, 167; spills, 95; and supply chains, 55, 105; and taxation, 38, 40, 52, 54; and thermal cracking, 19; and United Kingdom, 233; and the United States, 21, 27, 33, 52, 55, 64–65, 74, 104–6, 118, 121–22, 137–42, 149, 208; transition, 30, 33–34, 36–37, 45–47, 49, 89, 130, 244n3–4; vegetable, 134; and war, 26, 33; wave, 60; “weapon,” 14, 107, 140; and West Germany, 50–61, 113, 182 oil crisis, 12, 98-­99, 102, 106, 119-­22, 126-­29, 144, 147, 159, 163 oil shock (1973), 3, 12, 14, 21–22, 30, 46, 89–90, 92–94, 98, 102, 105, 117, 119–22, 128–29, 144, 147, 153–54, 158, 163, 197, 221–22, 232, 269n45, 278n5; second oil shock (1978), 126, 154, 278n32 “oil majors,” 20, 54, 90, 200

328

Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD), 120–28 Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), 110, 121 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC): competition to, 108, 114; and energy costs, 116; and energy transition, 199; founding of, 121, 139–40; market power, 23, 92, 99, 107, 147; and oil shock (1973), 90, 93; and “oil weapon,” 14; and Project Independence, 101; and sustainable capacity, 117; and the United States, 208 Paley Commission, 142 Paris (France), 39, 112, 121–22, 127 petroleum: alternatives to, 182; Committee, 33; conservation, 136, 140, 143–44, 152; consumption, 21, 25, 102; corporations, 20, 43, 137, 200, 204, 207–10; and diesel, 134; and global warming, 204; and imports, 139; and the Middle East, 93; post–petroleum world, 22; prices, 91, 107; production, 143; rationing, 132, 138; and renewables, 111, 113, 118; and Soviet Union, 108; and the United States, 135–36, 139 Polanyi, Karl, 9 political autonomy, 161, 166; change, 6, 8; economy, 6, 13, 15, 18–19, 21, 50, 59–60, 77, 169; geography, 18; governance, 6, 93; identity, 78, 84; institutions, 22–23, 35, 63; leadership, 68, 182–84, 193 power, 11, 39, 46, 64, 79, 178; representation, 17, 22, 152, 173;science, 34; sphere, 153, 227; values, 15 political parties, 16; European, 200; West German, 50, 182, 224; United Kingdom, 228 pollution, 19, 30, 91, 95–97, 100, 102, 153, 180, 201, 206–9, 212 Project Independence, 99–101, 103 public transportation, 25, 28, 127 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), 199–201

INDE X

radiation: and abortion politics, 174–77, 189; damage from, 152–53, 170–72, 188; debate over, 174; diseases from, 171–72, 174–75, 190; exposure to, 153, 169–72, 189–90; infrared, 205; physics, 175; levels, 153; research, 189; scares, 169–71, 180; and West Germany, 188, 190, 195 renewable energy 6, 13, 20, 30; and Amory Lovins, 188, 192, 198; and Bob Dole, 269n44; debate over, 105, 198; and environmentalism, 96, 194; and farmers, 46; goals, 6–7; and the International Energy Agency (IEA), 124, 129; and Jimmy Carter, 104–6; and nuclear power, 154; origins of, 22; policy, 229; and Ronald Reagan, 269; and solar power, 112; and the United Kingdom, 229–30, 234; and the United Nations, 113–14; and West Germany, 196, 223, 228–29, 231, 234 Research Applied to National Needs (RANN), 140 Rocky Mountain Institute (Colorado), 154 Romania, 35, 160–61, 164, 291n25 Ruhr (Germany), 21, 30, 49, 51–60 Sansom, Robert, 100 science: activist, 188–89; atmospheric, 211; Cold War, 140; and counterexperts, 183– 84, 195; of conservation, 132; decentralized, 94; and environmentalism, 198; and Exxon, 214; fiction, 150; and fossil fuels, 6, 22; of global warming, 200, 202, 213; and modernization, 161; of nuclear power, 18, 158, 184; and pollution, 209; promotion of, 200, 202, 224; and the Soviet Union, 166; and technoscience, 184; transition to, 23, 30–31, 50, 60–61, 106, 183, 201, 229, 232–33; weaponizing of, 204; and West Germany, 185, 188–89, 192, 195 Science Advisory Committee, 206 Scientific American, 6 Scientific Committee of National Fuels, 37 scientific knowledge, 23, 130 Seiberling, John, 102

INDE X

Shell Oil Company, 35, 52, 55–56, 81, 200, 204, 214, 218–19 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 50, 58, 60–61, 224, 228 Solar Energy Institute, 112, 198 Soddy, Frederick, 9 solar power, 3, 6, 96, 103–6, 109, 111–12, 194 solar water heaters, 103–4, 106 Solow, Robert, 143–44 South America, 19, 21 South Sudan, 10 Soviet Union: allies, 160; and Atomic Energy Agency, 110; and Eastern Europe, 157–161, 164; economy, 160; and electricity, 29; empire, 166; and energy transition, 113; and exports, 160; and modernization, 161; and nuclear energy, 18, 150–51, 159, 162–63, 165–67; and oil, 161; and petroleum production, 108; and renewable energy, 114; and satellite states, 165; security, 166; and socialism, 112; and technical aid, 151, 154, 157 and the United States, 27; post–World War II, 158 Stanford Research Institute, 207, 209 Standard Oil, 10, 35, 212–13. See also ExxonMobil state sovereignty, 36, 46, 52, 139, 266n13 Steeg, Helga, 129 strip mining, 29, 78–80, 82, 100, 259n5 technology: and abortion, 169; and air pollution, 207; and coal, 112; coal–by–wire, 65; critiques of, 91, 184; deep sea–drilling, 114; demand for, 12; and Eastern Europe, 158, 161; and energy systems, 24, 226; and energy transitions, 50, 87; and engines, 36; and gasoline, 37, 44; history of, 6, 134; insurance, 223; monopolization of, 18; naval, 150; and nuclear power, 111, 150–52, 162–63, 166–67, 184; professionalization of, 195; and renewables, 198, 202, 222; and the Soviet Union, 166–67; and strip mining, 29; transfer, 112, 122, 124, 166–67; turbine, 200; and unemployment, 79; and

329

the United States, 101, 103, 169; and West Germany, 183; and wind energy, 230 technological efficiency, 15, 142 Texas (US), 27, 97, 136–39, 144; Railroad Commission, 98 transportation, 9, 16, 20–21, 25–26, 102, 127 Trilateral Commission, 14, 108 the unborn, 169–71, 173–81 unborn rights, 152, 154 United Kingdom: and carbon emissions, 221, 308n1; and climate politics, 229; and coal, 226, 233, 277n25, 311n45; and energy discourse, 227; and energy systems, 226; and energy transition, 220, 222, 227, 234; and industrialization, 221; and nuclear power, 227, 312n54; politics, 228, 233; and renewable energy, 222–23, 225, 228–30, 232, 314n72 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 201 water irrigation, 215 water pollution, 180, 209 water power, 110, 208 Water Power Act (1920), 138 water reactors, 163–64 water use, 8 Western Europe, 3, 110; and coal, 50; energy demand, 108; energy transition, 14, 25, 48, 60, 93; and nuclear development, 151, 153; and oil consumption, 90; and oil importing, 101; and oil scares, 115; and oil shock, 89; petroleum, 21; and pipelines, 28; and privatization, 199; and rivers, 52; and science criticism, 184; and supply chains, 55 and the United States, 42; and uranium, 151 West German Institute for Reactor Safety, 191 West Germany: and coal, 53, 250n5, 277n25; and counterexpertise, 154-­55, 184-­85, 188, 192-­93; and energy demand, 29, 124, 127, 226; and energy transition, 60, 222, 226-­28; and environmentalism, 185-­86,

330

West Germany: and environmentalism (cont.), 201, 228; and fuel oil, 52, 56; and miners, 54; and nuclear power, 151, 153-­54, 182, 184, 187, 191, 194, 225-­28, 312n47, 312n54; and oil consumption, 55-­56; and oil industry, 56, 60; and oil transition, 49; postwar, 26, 60; and radiation, 195; and renewables, 198-­99, 224, 229-­30, 233; and scientific expertise, 154, 188-­90 West Virginia, 62–64, 68–71, 77, 82 wind power, 5–7, 13, 22–23, 50, 96, 103, 105, 194, 198–99, 201–2, 208, 221, 230–32 wood, 3 11–12, 48, 112, 134, 148, 222 workplace death, 64, 67

INDE X

World War I, 26–28, 33, 35, 37–38, 41, 46, 79, 136 World War II: and abortion politics, 168; and the automobile industry, 43; and coal; consumption, 28, 79, 119; and consumerism, 16; and economic growth, 21, 97, 226; and France, 41, 44, 46; and gasoline consumption, 34; and global capitalism, 10; and the Great Depression, 35; and national planning, 226; and nuclear power, 22, 105, 151, 221; and oil consumption, 27, 38, 109, 119; and the Soviet Union, 158, 166; and the United States, 66, 79, 100