Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s US Energy Crisis
Caleb Wellum
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of History
University of Toronto
2017
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.
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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

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/98798/1/Wellum_Caleb_201711_PhD_thesis.pdf