YOU DON’T NEED those TV Land “Retromercials” to get a remembrance of the ’70s energy crisis nowadays.
But it’d still be fun to exhume some of the old public-service ads from the era. Like the one where Fred Flintstone sings and dances about “Conservation Energy,” or the one with images of a decrepit old ’20s gas station and a solemn announcer proclaiming that “gas for less is gone–less gas is here to stay.”
Between the government-sanctioned extortion games of Calif. electric-generating companies (spun off from electric “retail” providers by a “deregulation” scheme designed to turn the power biz into a high-yield game for stock-market speculators), OPEC oil-supply manipulations, domestic oil-and-gas biz consolidations (such as the Exxon-Mobil merger and BP’s gobbling-up of Amoco and Arco), and climate changes that’ve (perhaps permanently) limited the capacity of Northwest hydro plants, we’re essentially in a mess folks.
And it gets worse when you ponder that this might not be a confluence of bad tidings, but the end of a confluence of good tidings.
That is, the cheap oil and abundant electricity North Americans enjoyed in the ’90s may have been just temporary blessings, not permanent trends of which today’s hassles are momentary interruptions.
In other words: The bad good-old-days of the Energy Crisis are back. And this time, they may stay a while longer.
Get out the CB radios to search for gasoline (OK, you’ll probably use cell phones with wireless e-mail instead, but the idea’s the same). Bring back the toilet bricks, the three extra layers of fiberglass attic insulation, the vanpools, and the notices in the windows of movie theaters and shopping centers apologizing for keeping their electric signs on.
Also, it won’t just be in the back pages of obscure magazines but in junk e-mails that you’ll find solicitations about “miracle” fuel-cell inventions (just needing that little extra bit of capital investment from you to become practical), or conspiracy stories about that secret gasoline pill the oil companies are supposed to have kept off the market.
Hey, maybe we’ll even get a revival of wind and solar power; so something good could come of this yet.
And if we’re really, REALLY lucky, perhaps those monster luxury SUVs will sooner or later become quaintly nostalgic but obsolete relics.
NEXT: Still more wacky new cable channels.
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