The US becomes energy efficient from the 70s?

Could a US President in the 1970s have persuaded the American people that they needed to do something about energy ineficiency? You know smaller cars, and better insulation that kind of thing.

I have to say that what Jimmy Carter tried to tell America was right but he seems to have made very little impact.
 
He or she can; the U.S. Department of Energy may have been established earlier than in real-life, the Americans and even the rest of the world are more conscious to global warming and climate change as early as the '80s, and Al Gore could even become a U.S. President.
 
Josh Ellis' response to this blog post:

I think people would have figured out a way to make sustainability ridiculously profitable a lot earlier in the game. And then they would have spent the money on coke and ridiculously expensive krill-based nouvelle cuisine. Imagine a cross between "The Greening Of America" and "American Psycho" and you're getting the picture.

Seriously, though: I've always believed that environmentalism has been crippled by all the weird bullshit attached to it. Sustainability and Native American rights have fuck-all to do with one another, for example, but you would have gotten lynched if you'd suggested that to hippies in the 70s. (I'm not minimizing Native American rights, of course, but you take my point.) Environmentalism has traditionally been handcuffed to the most ridiculous aspects of post-60s Leftism.

We've been changing that in this new century, thanks in large part to people like you and Big Bruce Sterling (and, to a much lesser extent, um, me). But if Carter had been elected? Was the hyper-capitalism of the 80s connected entirely to Reaganism? I like to think my first statement would have been the case. There's a lot of money to be made in cleaning up the environment, and the best part -- if you'll forgive my cynicism -- is that much of it comes from fat government contracts.

I think you would have seen a weirder form of socialist-capitalism emerge. And I do think that we'd be a good deal less consumerist as a society.

And the fiction writer in me deeply digs on the image of an alternate Gordon Gecko, in an Armani suit woven from renewable bamboo fiber and Nia Peeples yuppie glasses made from recycled pressed sunflower seeds, moving billions of dollars between coal-pollution suppression firms and multinational reforesting conglomerates.

Green is good. Green is right. Green works.
 
Thomas Friedman said if Carter's strengthening of fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles had been kept by Reagan, the US would be independent from foreign oil by 2000.

Although government "social engineering" is anathema to Reaganism (in theory--he did support the Drug War, big time), one could justify it to conservatives on national security grounds. After all, dependence on foreign oil means dependence on the whims of a bunch of despotic Middle Eastern monarchies and/or the Soviet Union.

(Friedman said high oil prices made the Soviets confident enough to do things like invade Afghanistan--the fall of oil prices meant they could not afford to do these things anymore.)
 
Its not just fuel economy standards. It is also zoning laws or lack there of that encourage urban sprawl and the groth of bedroom communities with no mass transit connections to major urban areas. It is the way most urban areas in the US see most of their growth horizontally instead of vertically. Look at a New York versus an Atlanta
 
Well, if you look at the graphs of actual energy usage, the US's actual energy use grew far BELOW the projections of energy use. (This despite the increases in population and electrical appliances and vehicles.) In addition, energy being used for appliances has often DECREASED, in many cases independent of Government regulation.
Companies have been cutting energy use for a long time. It's only recently that it's come to the public's attention as much as it has.

Two more potential change points. If the Iran/Iraq War intensifies, oil consumption would be reduced greatly. Second, one of the first reports on Global Warming from outside the scientific community was from Swiss Re or Munich Re (an insurance company) in 1987, I believe.
 
Low energy usage housing is a big possibility; a southerly aspect with big windows letting in bulk sunlight in winter, but a verandah keeping the sun off these windows in summer and other handy design features so heating/cooling energy is is slashed. If that became fashionable during the 1973 energy crisis US demand for energy overall would be reduced dramatically as more and more of these houses are built and designs are reduced.
 
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