Abstract
There are striking similarities between aspects of the West’s current predicaments around oil and the problems western governments faced in the 1970s. As world conventional oil production stagnated in the mid-2000s so American production began to decline in 1970. In both cases rising oil costs became part of a growth crisis and triggered the production of more expensive supply. Geo-politically, the energy crisis of the 1970s increased the significance of the Middle East, as did the fears of peak conventional oil production in the first half of the 2000s. In both cases the US proved unable to maintain or establish pro-western regimes in a number of Middle Eastern countries. However, in a number of ways the present version of these problems is worse than those that were manifest in the 1970s. Non-western demand for oil is now much higher than in the past and the fallout of oil prices on the international monetary order is significantly more destabilising than in the 1970s.
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Thompson, H. (2017). Revisiting the 1970s. In: Oil and the Western Economic Crisis. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52509-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52509-9_4
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