Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s US Energy Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking up Janet Roitman’s charge to think critically about the epistemology of crises, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the 1970s “energy crisis” in the United States. It asks how a crisis of energy came to be, how different experts and interests interpreted its meaning, and how it has shaped US political culture. My central claim is that the energy crisis fostered neoliberalism in the United States by cultivating speculative discourses about energy futures that ultimately supported free market trade and energy policies by the early 1980s. Indeed, the energy crisis itself was always largely speculative, concerned with the possibility of greater scarcity in the future, and it generated competing visions of the future that ultimately moved the country further to the economic right. But this story is not just about the market. It is also about the ecological critiques of carbon capitalism that the energy crisis inspired and the ways in which they both challenged and overlapped with neoliberal formations. I first explore the evolution of the energy crisis as a historically specific assemblage that was only possible in the 1970s. I then consider the political flexibility of the crisis by tracing competing interpretations of its meaning. This theme continues in a chapter on the conservation ethic – a widely proposed solution to the energy crisis that excoriated the waste inherent in the American “way of life,” but for competing ends. Neoliberalism enters the story in my final chapters, which consider how “car films” valorized the white neoliberal subject through unfettered auto-mobility, and the establishment of oil futures contracts as a free market solution to the energy crisis. My interdisciplinary approach broadens the historiography of the energy crisis to consider the concepts, meanings, affects, and practices that comprised it, providing deeper context for the policy and geopolitical concerns that other scholars explore. I conclude that the articulation of a “crisis” was an insufficient foundation upon which to build a large scale energy transition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".