I asked AI this question, which is partly political, partly technological, and it came up with an estimate of 75%. That is, three quarters of our dependence on fossil fuels could be solved by now if we’d gone all out in the mid-1970s, under late Nixon, or Ford, or early Carter, but one quarter would still escape us due to the slow development of efficient batteries and other developing technologies. But of course assuming efficiency in government is highly unrealistic–no doubt, each incoming administration would need to argue that the previous administration was totally wrong-headed and so would put the brakes on its energy policy, suggesting that progress would be much slower, more like 20% or 30% than 75%.
Depends, as so many factors.
A lot more Solar & Wind, earlier would have been a good start.
Could have added more hydro. Lots of issues here though.
Probably needed to add more Nuclear. Waste issues and tricky trusting Fission in the hands of corporations. I would have built more plants and have them be a part of the Navy instead. The US Navy has a really excellent record with Fission, especially back then. President Carter was a Navy Nuke Engineer in fact.
Often overlooked though.
Home Construction rules for better efficiency and insulation would help a lot. So much here.
Required efficiency and low power modes for electronics is another big one.
Transmission lines are a part of the problem and could have been improved even in the 70s.
Improved farming ends up helping not only greenhouse gases but reduces water waste. A win win.
Protecting and enlarging forests would have helped.
Transportation was and remains a big area of course, but that one everyone knows.
Improvements in manufacturing were possible.
Concrete production is actually still 8% of global emissions. This one is rarely addressed. Things could have been done. More should be done today.
The solar energy tax credit started in 1978. That helped at least. We didn’t need a tax break, as much as we needed a moon race. Only for solar. But if the demand is not there,well, tech sort of slogs along.
I got my system installed last year befor the credits got taken away by you know who.
The more people that buy in, the better the tech will be. The government needs to support this. Not Coal.
There is some cool stuff going on. I don’t need batteries, I sell the extra power that I don’t need (about 50%) back to the electric company, and buy it back at night. Xcel is esentially my battery.
My last electric bill was $0. We’ll see what happens when the AC kicks in.
My system is rated for two electric cars and a hot tub. Even at that, I asked for 3 more panels.
I have a friend that was an installer about 15 years ago. He’s rather stunned at how much power my system puts out. So things are getting better.
Speaking about gasoline specifically, I think that if a modest gas tax that of say five or ten cents per gallon that was earmarked for public transportation would have been a good idea. If such a tax would have started in 1973, there would be fifty plus years of continuous investment in public transportation. People are very sensitive to gas prices, because they don’t really have a good alternative to driving and are stuck when gas prices spike. A good system of buses, trains, trams, and subways as an alternative to driving could give people options to driving. But that didn’t happen, public transportation remains a poor alternative to driving in many places, and here we are.
That would have been great.
They didn’t even tie the Gas Taxes to inflation to keep paying for Highway & Bridge maintenance, so doubly neglectful.
Americans don’t really want public transportation. Everyone looks at Europe and thinks that America is lagging behind, but the reality is that America is HUGE compared to Europe and everything is much more spread out. It’s the old joke that Americans think 100 years is a long time and Europeans think that 100 miles is a long distance.
I have relatives in England and I have traveled around England using their public transportation. In some ways it’s great. You can go pretty much anywhere. In some ways it sucks. You have to walk to the nearest bus stop or underground station. Then you have to take the routes that the buses and trains take. If you are going across London you’ll probably have to switch trains at least once, maybe a couple of times. If you are going outside of London you are going to have to switch from the train to a bus. It’s SLOW compared to driving in a car. And you can’t carry a lot of stuff.
There’s a reason Europe has all of these tiny little stores everywhere instead of one big store like Walmart. I can go across town, load up my car with all sorts of stuff from Walmart, Home Depot, etc. and drive home. You can’t do that with public transportation.
If we had good public transportation, the commute to work would be much more pleasant. You could read, listen to music, etc. but on the down side, it would take you a LOT longer to get to work.
And because the U.S. is so big and so spread out, getting good public transportation everywhere would be a HUGE expense, and its efficiency would be absolutely miserable compared to Europe. When everyone is traveling much shorter distances and everything is crammed together, that makes public transportation significantly more efficient.
Americans don’t want to be packed into crowded cities with tiny little houses and practically no yard. It’s not just a lack of investment that makes public transportation in the U.S. so poor. It’s the reality of our geography and our population density.
If the thread question is about the United States, that country has been a net energy exporter since 2019:
As noted in my link, the U.S. is not an net exporter of every specific form of fossil fuel, but I doubt it is practical for that to be true of any country. Because of that, some deny the U.S. is energy independent, but I think that’s quibbling.
Because of energy independence, the U.S. has no gasoline lines, as seen lately in some other countries.
Contrast with the U.S. situation in the 1970’s, when a world-wide shortage, not altogether different from what is seen today, resulted in real American shortages:
Isn’t (and wasn’t) most electrical generation already “independent”, i.e., from domestic sources? Coal used to be the biggest source of electricity, and the fossil fuel that replaced it is mostly natural gas, both of which we produce plenty of domestically.
Where energy independence is tougher is in transportation, and you couldn’t run cars on electricity until better batteries were developed. Without that, the best you can do is run cars more efficiently, and transfer some transportation from cars to (mostly electric) trains, and the like.
A few years after the 1970s energy crisis, there was a free program (at least in Connecticut) under which the state would send someone to your home and perform an energy audit, to show you where your house was losing heat, and what you could do to improve the energy efficiency (add more insulation in the attic or outside walls, add weather stripping to the doors or windows, etc). I think there were even grants that would pay for some of this. That sort of thing ought to have been encouraged, along with stricter building codes requiring better, more tightly insulate new construction.
I keep pointing this out. Public transportation works well in cities that are compact and not spread out. SF has decent Public Transportation.
Of course, US Cities shoot themselves in the foot- San Jose has Light Rail, which does not (unless i am out of date- there is only a shuttle) go to the SJ Airport- why? The airport is heavily funded by parking fees.
Bill Bryson and others have complained about how bad the British rail service now- unless you are in or to/from London.
Yeah, I was wondering what the OP meant- did the OP mean independent from fossil fuels or from importing oil, etc?
To summarize, starting in 1990 airports could charge a Passenger Facility Fee to allow the building of “people mover” systems in airports, but they could only allocate that money to projects that benefited only airport passengers. So to use that funding, there would have to be a special link connecting the local transit system to the airport, rather than have a regular stop servicing the airport fully integrated with the city’s transportation system. In 2021, thanks to political pressure for the Metro Silver Line expansion to Dulles Airport, the rule was redone so that it became possible to allocate money from the fee to mass transit connections with the airport, as long as it was prorated according to the passenger usage.
Okay, but it means SJ Light Rail is less useful- and less used.
Right - but since the rule changed in 2021, it is easier to get airport money to allocate to local mass transit connections.
Consider Phoenix, where the light rail system started operating in 2008, going from downtown Phoenix out to Tempe-Mesa-Gilbert in the east valley. When the system was designed and built, there was no way to get money to run light rail through the airport itself - so the light rail ran north of the airport. When PHX built its airport people mover system (Sky Train) to run between the terminals and the car rental area, they added a link up to the light rail line because that would be used solely by passengers transiting to and from the airport. But it would have been easier and better for passengers if they could just use a light-rail station in the airport, on a line running through the airport - but they couldn’t, because at the time the rules specifically disallowed that.
Which unfortunately means Phoenix is stuck with the Sky Train kludge. I assume San Jose is in the same boat, or worse. But at least the rules are changed for new connections.
? AFAICT a lot of utility companies still provide free or cheap home energy assessments, and in some cases connect the client with funding for energy-efficiency upgrades. I think it’s definitely a standard thing these days.
Not really. By the 1970s, pretty much all good places for hydro dams already had dams. Since most dams do not produce electricity, they could have retrofitted some existing dams for hydro power, but they wouldn’t have been big producers.
But some cities built light rail to their airport despite that limitation. DC, for example, had a line to Reagan National Airport when I visited in the late 1990s. Portland built its Red Line to the airport starting in 1997 and completing in 2001.
To add to your examples, Atlanta’s MARTA has an airport station, which was built with the airport terminal in the late '70s but only connected to the system in 1988. It took a great deal of political capital to make that investment that wouldn’t pay off for several years, as well as getting Clayton county to agree to have a MARTA station within its boundaries - the suburban counties of Atlanta resisted MARTA like the plague.
But given that its the sort of thing that makes both the transit system and the airport better, it should be a no-brainer to use airport fees to contribute to making the linkup happen, particularly since the airport usually has a lot more money due to the fee than a typical mass transit system has for capital investments - but the regulation prevented this from happening for about three decades while some inferior workarounds were built instead.
OP here. I meant both or either. I meant relying on oil, foreign or domestic, to supply the U.S.'s energy needs.
Solar panels were $128/watt in 1975. It was down to $11/watt by 1988, but it kind of flatlined there. It was $5/watt in 2007, so the price only cut in half in almost 20 years from 1988 to 2007. But then prices declined again to $0.26 per watt in 2024.
The cost decline in solar is uneven. Prices declined by 90% in the late 70s and early 80s. Then were very slow to decline for 20 years, then declined rapidly from 2007 to 2013 (going from $5/watt to $0.83/watt in 6 years)
However I have no idea how much of that was due to other technologies that just happened to make solar easier, or direct investment in solar itself.
Having said that, the US has about 100 nuclear plants that produce 20% of our grid electricity. We could’ve added reactors to those sites and built new nuclear plants over the decades so that 80% of our grid was nuclear and the other 20% was renewables. That would’ve cost about a few trillion dollars or so (assuming regulations were loosened) which was doable and could’ve been done with existing technology in the 70s.
However I have no idea about transportation or heavy industry, which also require fossil fuels.
That looks to me like connecting airports to public transportation is no problem at all, and that there’s just one particular source of funding that can’t be used for that. But there are oodles of sources of funding that can’t be used for that purpose. You can still put a station for your transit system in the airport, using any other source of funding. Like, say, whatever your transit system is using for every other station in the system.
I’m not convinced that the problem with public transit in much of the US was one of political will or funding, but rather that public transit has a stigma associated with poverty and racism in large parts of the US. Combine that with the fact that it’s less flexible and less convenient, and it becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, when it’s inconvenient and inflexible and associated with the poor, black, and/or homeless, then that’s all you’re going to get riding it because they’re the ones who are the most price sensitive.
It’s only really consistently viable in built-up areas like the older US cities, where parking is a cast iron bitch, and traffic is atrocious. Otherwise driving one’s self quickly becomes more attractive.
As far as the OP’s question goes…
Considering the circumstances in the 1970s through the mid-2000s, I think that new sources of energy weren’t the answer, save going full-bore for nuclear back then, but that would have taken massive government subsidies and extended and consistent political will.
Back then, US production of oil with conventional technology peaked around 1970 and steadily declined until the mid-2000s, when hydraulic fracturing and other new technologies made old oil fields in places like West Texas viable again.
Natural gas production had plateaued at the same time that oil production had declined in the 1970s, and ramped up at the same time and for the same reasons as oil production. So it wasn’t really an option either.
So reducing consumption is where it would have had to have been.
I think that the government should have had much tighter CAFE regulations from the start, or at least consistently and regularly tightened them.
Also, some kind of cap and trade scheme for pollution would have been a good idea. That would have both reduced emissions and likely increased fuel economy as well (burning less gas automatically tends to lower emissions)
Huge subsidies for efficient air conditioning, insulation, etc… would have been a good idea. I know there were some, but from what I know, they were rather desultory; nobody wanted to pour money into insulating houses and installing more efficient ac/heat when the Soviets were considered a bigger threat.