"A UN ceasefire ended hostilities on October 22, 1973, but the OPEC embargo against the United States remained in force while the organization further increased the price per barrel to the rest of the world. What followed was an interesting case study in network breakdown and cascading failure. In fact, the embargo never actually achieved a shutoff of OPEC oil imports to the United States. All but about 5 percent of the needed supply found its way to America by a circuitous route as allocations to other nations were surreptitiously redirected. But the base price of a barrel of oil did eventually more than quadruple by the time the embargo was called off in March 1974. And the price rise, alone staggered the West and Japan. Already at that time, public transit was a thing of the past and about 85 percent of Americans drove to work every day."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 2, p. 46.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Long Emergency
95 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Long Emergency →
Related Quotes
"Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that re…"
"What is... not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the o…"
"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was ro…"
"Malthus… has been the whipping boy of idealists and techno-optimists for two hundred years. His famous essay proposed…"
"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like coal,…"
"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the…"
"The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper…"
"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanis…"
"The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to …"
"It has been... hard... to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life…"