Fifty years ago, on this day, January 9, 1973, British Prime Minister Ted Heath sets up a Department of Energy.
On December 13th 1973, Prime Minister Edward Heath announced a 3-day working week to ration electricity use. Parliament was recalled on January 9th 1974 to hear that a new Department of Energy was being set up to co-ordinate the government’s response. However, the crisis brought down the government the following month. The incoming Labour government, under Harold Wilson, settled the miners dispute, and the new Energy Secretary, Eric Varley, ended the 3-day week on March 7th 1974. Mallaburn & Nick Eyre (2014)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 329.3ppm. As of 2023 it is 419. .
The context was that what was to be the first of two “oil shocks” had begun in late 1973, with oil prices basically quadrupling in a very short period of time, after Middle-East oil extractors (they’re not ‘producers’!) imposed an embargo thanks to Western support for Israel in the ‘Yom Kippur’ War.
The “environment” had been considered important enough to have its own Department in 1970, and now it was the turn of “energy”.
What I think we can learn from this
When governments set up new departments, it can be a serious and long-lasting move, or it can be, well, the appearance of action. Even if they set it up for appearance sake, sometimes it creates new opportunities for an inconvenient rash of sanity to break out
What happened next
The oil price hike saw the end of the so-called thirty glorious years of “unproblematic” (ha ha) economic growth, followed by stagflation, all sorts of difficulties, the collapse of the Keynesian consensus. And then, in the late 1970s, the coming of Thatcher and then 18 months later, of Reagan… as celebrated (? mourned?) in the REM song Ignoreland, of which more later.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References and See Also
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[…] crisis – that of the first “Oil Shocks” and coming of the three day week led to an announcement in January 1974. Energy efficiency only really received a boost following a Presidential visit by Jimmy Carter in […]