What It Was Like to Live Through the 1970s Energy Crisis

The quintessential image of the energy crisis is of frustrated motorists queuing at gas stations in sometimes hours-long attempts to fill their tanks. Drivers dreaded seeing “Sorry! Last Car in This Line” signs placed in front of them. One nursing student told the New York Times in February 1974 that, after visiting her sick mother, she had spent most of the day trying to buy enough gasoline to get back to college but that they had already “closed down four lines” on her. To avoid such situations during the second energy crisis of 1979, a Virginia resident installed a 4,000-gallon gas tank in his yard.

Jay Hakes, author of Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s, says that gas station lines could get very long, in part because gas was pumped more slowly back then. He notes that prior to the energy crisis, gas station employees often washed customers’ windshields, checked their oil, gave them maps and otherwise pampered them while charging perhaps $0.29 per gallon. “By the end of the decade, of course, that had all changed completely,” Hakes says.

As with gasoline, the price and availability of heating oil took a hit during the energy crisis, a particular problem in colder states. On October 23, 1973, a full-page ad in a Maine newspaper asked, “Will there be enough oil to keep us warm this winter?” Homeowners responded by lowering their thermostats, installing additional insulation and, in many cases, turning to wood stoves, which surged in popularity.

Prior to the energy crisis, speed limits in parts of the United States were as high as 80 miles per hour. But in a national address on November 7, 1973, President Richard Nixon called on all governors to reduce highway speed limits to 50 mph, which he estimated could save more than 200,000 barrels of oil per day nationwide. Soon after, Nixon signed legislation setting a maximum national speed limit of 55 mph (which, besides saving fuel, corresponded with a reduction in automobile-related fatalities). The U.S. Congress repealed this law in 1995, thus allowing states to once again set their own speed limits.

In addition to lower speed limits, the energy crisis led to the establishment of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the Department of Energy and a variety of energy-saving innovations.

Frustrated by the new speed limits, high gas prices and fuel shortages, a 37-year-old trucker from Kansas announced on December 3, 1973, via citizens band radio, that he was going to block a portion of I-80. Before long, trucker demonstrations were popping up all over the country, with one trucker quipping that he expected Congress to act only when “those people run out of toilet paper.” Some of the demonstrations erupted in violence, with strikers harassing nonparticipating drivers by slashing their tires, dropping rocks on them from overpasses and even shooting up their rigs. “It got really nasty,” Hakes says.

After roughly 100,000 layoffs, several deaths and massive supply chain disruptions, most of the trucks were back on the road by February 1974, though trucker strikes returned in force in 1979.

First initiated as a fuel-saving wartime measure, daylight saving time became standardized in 1966, when Congress established that it would run from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. In December 1973, Nixon signed a bill extending daylight saving time to the entire year, claiming this would conserve roughly 150,000 barrels of oil per day in winter. “[It] will mean only a minimum of inconvenience and will involve equal participation by all,” Nixon said at the time.

Many Americans loathed this change, however, particularly kids and their parents who were now forced to get to school in the dark. Congress ended permanent daylight saving time just 10 months after it began, and it has not returned since. Today, daylight saving time lasts from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

American cars kept getting bigger in the 1960s, and by the eve of the energy crisis, they weighed significantly more than their European and Japanese counterparts. Once oil prices rose, however, a gas-guzzling muscle car with a V8 engine lost some of its appeal. Even before the energy crisis, ads for the Japanese-made Datsun 1200 and the German-made Volkswagen Beetle emphasized their high gas mileage.

Thanks largely to the energy crisis, Japanese cars in particular gained a strong foothold in the U.S. market. Imported automobiles rose from 15.3 percent of all U.S. auto sales in 1970 to 26.7 percent in 1980. By 1989, the Honda Accord had become the best-selling passenger car in the United States, and the Toyota Camry has been the king of passenger car sales since 2002.

During the energy crisis, Americans vented their frustration at big oil companies, Middle Eastern rulers and the U.S. government. Nonetheless, many considered it their patriotic duty to cut back on energy use when asked to do so by Nixon, who said “some sacrifice” would be required, even as it “need not mean genuine suffering for any American.”

A few years later, Carter famously donned a cardigan sweater and urged Americans to turn down their thermostats to ease a natural gas and fuel oil shortage, saying the problem could be solved “if we all cooperate and make modest sacrifices, if we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors.”

Hakes says that, because far greater sacrifices had been demanded of them during World War II, “you had a generation of people who believed in sacrifice for the national good.”