Those Good Old Colonial Days

The “oil crisis” became a “crisis”—and it is a genuine crisis, not just one more of those media crises we are served up daily at breakfast—because it happened so suddenly. The embargo and the quantum jump in the price of petroleum arrived overnight; neither our economic system nor our minds were prepared. If there had been a past series of partial embargoes and if the price had been escalated gradually, both the system and our minds would probably have adapted pretty well as we went along.

Looking back from now, we can realize that we shouldn’t have been all that surprised. Something of the sort was in the cards. These ingredients were given: 1) the super-rapid economic growth of the Western nations; 2) the essential role in this process of an exponentially increasing application of energy; 3) the derivation of this energy more and more preponderantly from petroleum; 4) the expanding reliance on locations outside Western political jurisdiction as source of the petroleum; 5) the appearance of a non-Western, nuclear-armed superpower. The mixture of the five was going to produce, sooner or later, the kind of crisis that erupted in 1973.

JB

About the Author

James Burnham

The “oil crisis” became a “crisis”—and it is a genuine crisis, not just one more of those media crises we are served up daily at breakfast—because it happened so suddenly. The embargo and the quantum jump in the price of petroleum arrived overnight; neither our economic system nor our minds were prepared. If there had been a past series of partial embargoes and if the price had been escalated gradually, both the system and our minds would probably have adapted pretty well as we went along.

Looking back from now, we can realize that we shouldn’t have been all that surprised. Something of the sort was in the cards. These ingredients were given: 1) the super-rapid economic growth of the Western nations; 2) the essential role in this process of an exponentially increasing application of energy; 3) the derivation of this energy more and more preponderantly from petroleum; 4) the expanding reliance on locations outside Western political jurisdiction as source of the petroleum; 5) the appearance of a non-Western, nuclear-armed superpower. The mixture of the five was going to produce, sooner or later, the kind of crisis that erupted in 1973.