Playing That ’70s Funk Again, but Not in a Good Way

The country is in a funk. Oil prices are at record highs, and the dollar is plummeting. Foreigners are buying out leading U.S. business assets. Environmentalists say the world is headed toward an ecological crackup of biblical proportions.

Today’s headlines? Well, yes. But for those of us old enough to remember, they could just as easily be bulletins from one of the grimmest decades in recent U.S. history: the ’70s.


…There has probably never been a better time for the environmental left. Like fundamentalists forced to keep pushing back the date of the Rapture, environmental activists remain convinced of the current crisis; they’re just not sure which will get us first, “peak oil” or global warming. Former oil analyst turned environmental zealot Jan Lundberg predicts the coming of a “final energy crisis” that rivals the most chilling denouements since the Book of Revelations. Once the price of oil reaches astronomic levels, he predicts, we’ll see “End time for USA” and “the swiftest empire collapse in history.”

Is there anything good to be drawn from this analogy? Sure. After all, the ’70s didn’t last forever. In the two decades that followed, minus a brief break in the early 1990s, the United States experienced pretty consistent economic growth. The scariest bogeymen of the 1970s — Japan, the European Union, the Soviet Union — all fared much worse.

Washington Post