The Holy Land (An Oily Land)

... Those of us who crawled into the 21st century with five or more decades already under their belt may have a perspective on the energy situation in the USA not shared by the new generations. Into the early 70's gasoline was cheap, and service was big. Picture this. Attendants pumped your gas, checked your oil, washed your windshields. Road maps were free.
... On October 19,1973 -- a critical date -- the Oil Producing and Exporting (OPEC) nations in the Middle East declared an embargo on petroleum sales to the United States. Almost overnight everything changed. Our other suppliers (Iran, Venezuela and Mexico were actually our friends then) could never make up the shortfall. So supplies tightened, and prices soared for all oil products. A number of gas stations went out of business for lack of product to sell. Those remaining open had lines blocks long of customers waiting to fuel up. The dark side of this was that businesses learned people would wait in long lines, pay anomalously high prices and even pump the gas themselves with freebies no longer needed to promote sales. Real customer-oriented service never came back.

... For the first time car manufacturers shrank models. Parking lot operators even reserved spaces for the resurgence of "compact cars", happy to fit more paying customers into the same acreage. Among foreign imports Volkswagen "Beetles" were popular, and my very first car was a used 1963 model.

...Mopeds, already popular in Europe, first appeared in our country. Wind power and solar energy got a boost. This was over 40 years ago!

... Israel, then only a 25-year old state, was involved in its fourth war with its Arab neighbors. Though friendly to the USA it had no oil to sell and too small an economy then to buy much from us. Yet we suffered through an embargo directed at us for supporting that country in their wars. Of course there is more to this friendship than plain economics.

... What I'm getting at is that the present is not so different from the past after all. Sometimes the lessons of history are only learned the hard way. We had a chance then to learn real conservation. Instead we held our breath trusting that things would get better. And they did, for a while. Now we are back where we started with an even bigger appetite for petroleum.