D‘endless lines of cars in front of American gas stations; Dutch motorists banned from driving on Sunday; petrol ration tickets distributed to the British. So many restrictions and calls for civility which forged the image of the oil shock of October 1973 as a brutal, unexpected and unpredictable event. Completely fascinated by a commodity that makes the world go round, industrialized societies would not have been aware of their dependence on hydrocarbons and, naive, would have come to believe that its immediate, massive and cheap availability was self-evident.
Unthinkable and unprecedented, the oil shock? The idea is largely erroneous: even in the West, the massive recourse to fossil fuels has never completely eliminated the specter of shortage which, constantly repressed, is no less consubstantial with the condition of Homo petroleum. There was of course the Second World War, its gas-powered cars and its increased use of hitchhiking; In 1956, the Suez Crisis disrupted supplies to the point that restrictive measures similar to those of 1973 were taken in many European countries.
Beyond the question of its availability, the unease around oil was already being raised in environmental and health terms at the turn of the 1970s. The sinking of the Torrey Canyon (1967) then the Santa Barbara oil spill (1969) made visible to all the pollution due to the extraction and transport of hydrocarbons, while the number of deaths on the road, in France as in the United States United, now react. Despite the efforts of oil companies, the idea that the combustion of hydrocarbons could, in a few decades, lead to global warming is gaining ground, including in mass culture.
In 1973, the film Green Sun, by Richard Fleischer, features Charlton Heston as a police officer in the New York of 2022 overwhelmed by a permanent heatwave, a sad foreshadowing of a future that seems to be constantly getting closer. That same year, Ivan Illich published Friendliness as well as’Energy and equity and, alongside other thinkers, lays the foundations of an ecological critique of carbon-based societies, which outlines other possible futures. Between radical denunciation and occasional emotion, the oil shock of 1973 is therefore part of a “petromelancholy”in the words of the American academic Stephanie LeMenager, which arises from the awareness of problematic dependencies, but so complex that it would be impossible to put an end to them.
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