Through the nineteenth century, few Americans gave a second thought to the possibility of energy shortages. Vast deposits of coal powered the Industrial Revolution, and it was not until the early twentieth century that oil became a national concern. To assure a reliable supply of oil for the U.S. Navy, Congress set aside a number of petroleum reserves located on federal lands in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Concerns about securing a sufficient oil supply ended in the 1920s with the discovery of vast new western oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma. At that time it appeared that the United States had an unlimited supply of oil.
However, the outbreak of World War II placed a heavy demand on the U.S. domestic supply of oil; these supplies were even more heavily taxed when the war ended and American demand for automobiles skyrocketed. Changes in the transportation industry shifted much of the freight traffic from trains to trucks, and the postwar economic boom furthered the demand for oil. By the 1950s, the United States could no longer rely solely on domestic sources to meet its growing need for petroleum. Furthermore, incidents of accidental oil spills began to raise concerns about the environmental consequences of domestic oil extraction. A large spill—at the time the largest in American history—that occurred off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 was particularly alarming, contributing to suspicions revolving around the oil industry in general. By 1970, the United States produced only 69 percent of the oil it consumed, with the bulk of the imports coming from the Middle East. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 created upheaval in the world’s oil market. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) exploited American and European dependence on imported oil by dramatically limiting the supply as a means to drive up the price. During the 1970s, the price of gasoline and home heating fuel skyrocketed, and the limited supply led to long lines at gas stations throughout the United States. Several frigid winters in the late 1970s merely worsened the economic plight of American consumers, who were already facing high unemployment and rising prices.
The postwar demand for oil paralleled similar changes in the demand for electricity. As the economy boomed and the rural electrification projects of the New Deal expanded the use of electricity in American homes, the country continued to be heavily dependent on the coal industry to power homes, businesses, and factories. Yet coal extraction continued to be a dangerous and dirty industry, with miners risking illnesses such as black lung disease and injury due to cave-ins and collapses. Additionally, coal-fired power plants were a major source of air pollution for neighboring regions. The search for a cleaner-burning source of electricity that was less reliant on nonrenewable resources helped to facilitate the development of the nuclear power industry, although its appeal was short-lived. In 1978, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown in one of its two reactors, resulting in the release of radioactive gases into the environment around the facility. Although no immediate deaths were associated with the Three Mile Island accident and the effect on public health in the vicinity was less than initially feared, it was nevertheless a widely publicized event producing a high level of anxiety, and as a consequence the general public quickly cooled to the idea of nuclear power. No new nuclear power facility has been built in the United States since this accident.
During the Campaign of 1980, the Democratic and Republican parties adopted very different tactics for dealing with the energy crisis. Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter stressed the need for conservation of both fuel and electricity (including lowering the speed limit to 55 miles per hour) and advocated higher fuel economy rates for automobiles (such as the 1978 Energy Tax Act that levied a special tax on gas guzzlers), more energy-efficient mass transit, and the use of alternative energy sources. Republican nominee Ronald Reagan advocated the increased domestic production of oil, coal, natural gas, and other traditional sources of energy. While the energy crisis alone did not sink the Carter campaign, his inability to resolve these problems undoubtedly damaged his candidacy.
By the 1980s, other sources of oil were being developed, and energy prices fell as production gradually increased. However, the process was slow. The American automobile industry suffered in the early 1980s as its domestic customers turned to the less expensive, more fuel-efficient cars that were being imported from Japan. By the Campaign of 1984, the domestic economy (including the automobile industry) began to rebound, and Reagan was easily reelected. Opposition to extraction of oil, particularly in the Alaskan wilderness, did for a time increase in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, but for the most part, the petroleum industry weathered the disaster, and with continued low prices for gasoline and other petroleum products, incentives for the consumption of oil strengthened. Americans once again returned to their love of large automobiles, and Congress aided and abetted this trend by weakening CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations and permitting automakers to classify more vehicles as light trucks to further skirt fuel-efficiency requirements. While gasoline prices were mentioned briefly in the Campaign of 2000, when Republican nominee George W. Bush claimed that his relationship with the Saudis put him in a better position to bargain over gas prices, it was not until the Campaign of 2008 that oil imports became a serious topic of debate. During this election, rising oil prices forced both candidates to propose strategies to deal with the problem. Democratic nominee Barack Obama emphasized investing more resources in alternative sources of energy, as well as improving fuel efficiency of American vehicles. Republican nominee John McCain argued that greater domestic production of energy would lower prices. He advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, as well as in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay. McCain running mate Sarah Palin’s slogan became “Drill, baby, drill!”
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010, and the resulting leak of approximately five million gallons of oil into the Gulf over a three-month period, led to environmental damage in coastal areas and a somewhat lessened level of enthusiasm for offshore drilling in environmentally sensitive areas. It also refueled Democratic Party opposition to offshore energy exploration. Ironically, just prior to the Deepwater accident, Obama had reversed course and stated that he would permit new offshore-drilling permits to be issued. In the Campaign of 2012, Obama, under pressure from activists within his own party, again preached caution on offshore drilling, as well as on the construction of the proposed Keystone oil pipeline to transport tar sands oil from northwest Canada to the Gulf. The Republican Party made the exploitation of domestic sources of energy—including the Keystone pipeline, offshore oil exploration, fracking for natural gas, and “clean” coal technology—a cornerstone of its campaign.
Nuclear energy, as an alternative to coal and natural gas, has generally remained off the political agenda in the United States. The close call at Three Mile Island, followed a few years later by the disastrous core meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine (in the former Soviet Union) in 1986 merely served to increase Americans’ worries about the safety of nuclear power and the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel for decades thereafter. The storage of depleted fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada (a measure strongly opposed by the local population) remains controversial. The topic of nuclear power made a brief resurgence in the Campaign of 2004, when incumbent president George W. Bush campaigned on expanding the domestic nuclear power industry as a cleaner alternative to coal. This was not a focus of the Campaign of 2008, and after the core meltdown at the Fukashima Daiichi reactor in Japan on the heels of an earthquake (and subsequent tsunami) in March 2011, it is unlikely to be an issue in future campaigns. Rather, citizens in countries throughout Europe and Asia have pressured their governments to discontinue their reliance on the use of nuclear power altogether.
Unlike nuclear power, coal-fired power plants have remained a topic of controversy at election time. One area of controversy deals with the mining practices in the coal industry. While the Carter administration attempted to create federal regulations for the burgeoning surface mining (also known as strip mining) industry, President Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, preferred to streamline these regulations, leaving much of the oversight up to the states (although Congress thwarted many of his plans). It was also during the Reagan era that coal-fired power plants of the Midwest first came under criticism for contributing to the problem of acid rain in the Northeast and Canada, leading to renewed concerns about coal as an energy source. Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis unsuccessfully attempted to take the Reagan administration to task in the Campaign of 1988, although he was not able to make this a major campaign issue.
It was not until the Campaign of 2000 that attention was once again placed on the mining and burning of coal for electricity. Democratic nominee Al Gore, by then an avowed environmentalist, criticized the coal industry for air pollution and for contributing to the greenhouse gases that were causing global climate change. Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote, in part due to his loss of the traditionally Democratic state of West Virginia, a major coal producer. Four years later, the country was at war in two nations in the Middle East, and scant attention was paid to energy or the environment.
By the Campaign of 2008, the Iraq war had ceased to dominate the campaign, and Americans once again turned their attention to problems on the home front. In addition to alternative energy sources (solar, wind, wave), Obama advocated limiting greenhouse gases with a cap-and-trade system in which companies essentially bid on vouchers to pollute. The rationale of this system is that profit-seeking companies will economize to sell their vouchers (rather than use them), creating a market-based incentive to limit pollutants. McCain acknowledged during the campaign that global warming was a problem, but he argued that there were more effective means to address it. By the Campaign of 2012, the political climate had changed somewhat. The GOP still opposed cap-and-trade on the grounds that it was an unfair infringement on American businesses and would render them unprofitable. But most GOP hopefuls (with the exception of Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee, and Jon Huntsman) denied that global climate change was even occurring, or that humans had the ability to influence the temperature of the Earth. The science of climate change remains a topic of partisan debate, with Democrats more sympathetic to arguments about both the existence of climate change and the need for the federal government to act, and Republicans more skeptical on both counts.
Partisan differences over the extraction of domestic sources of energy persist. Republicans appear to favor nonrenewable sources such as oil, coal, and natural gas and thus the GOP is sensitive to environmental regulations that place limitations on energy-related industries and their methods, even when controversial (e.g., hydraulic fracturing, or fracking). Democrats tend to focus on renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative fuel sources, but they are not uniformly averse to the continued extraction and processing of petroleum resources. That said, Democrats remain more inclined to favor increased government investment in new energy technologies designed to wean the economy from fossil fuels, hoping to generate less expensive consumer versions of these energies for everyday use.
See also Environment Issue
Dao, James. “The 2000 Campaign: The Vice President: Gore to Unveil a Plan to Foster Change Energy.” New York Times, June 26, 2000.
Daynes, Byron W., and Glen Sussman. White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2010.
Jackson, David. “McCain Calls to Lift U.S. Oil Drilling Ban.” USA Today, June 17, 2008.
Rutledge, Ian. Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.
Uslaner, Eric. Shale Barrel Politics: Energy and Legislative Leadership. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.