Surveying the Landscape: The Oil Industry and Alternative Energy in the 1970s

Abstract

AbstractThe multi-level perspective (MLP) is one of the most widely-used frameworks for understanding the conditions and choices underpinning energy transitions. Although this volume contains several cogent critiques of the concept of an energy transition, it is still important for historians to be able to address the transitions studies community on its terms—which means being able to convey our historical cases in the language of MLP. At the same, we can use the rich and ambiguous historical record to point out—and possibly correct—shortcomings in the MLP framework. In this chapter I show that MLP’s vocabulary offers useful heuristics for understanding the energy debates of the 1970s—the “landscape” changes that destabilized the fossil fuel “regime” and stimulated alternatives such as solar and nuclear to “break out” from their “niches.” However, I show that the oil industry’s role in the 1970s debates complicates the MLP framework, in that the era’s most important landscape shifts were not exogenous to the oil industry, while oil firms exerted substantial control over niche alternatives. By the mid-1980s, the fossil fuel regime re-stabilized and alternative energy technologies were forced into even smaller niches than before—a reversal that is in tension with the more optimistic and linear stories usually found in transitions studies.