Oil shock: Five years later [antikvár]

Manfred Tietzel Introduction On October 16, 1978, it will be five years since the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) drastically raised the export prices of this raw material, and at the same time cut extraction and export quantities to press political aims in connection with the Yom Kippur war then being fought. This anniversary provided the occasion for publication of this book, which attempts a differentiated view of the events of that time and their aftereffects; the motivation for it evolved from many years of study of energy problems in the research institute of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Five years ago the energy crisis was a shock to the world public of a dimension with few parallels in economic history. And since big occurrences—even if they are only subjectively experienced—tend to evoke big words to describe them, phrases like 'oil catastrophe' or 'second October Revolution'—the latter arousing an historical trauma of the Western world—were common. There soon appeared on the scene prophets 'who had always predicted this' and who drew the oil importing states a horrors scenario of a future marked by energy scarcity, stagnation of economic growth, deep economic crises and austerity all along the line. Where the expression 'crisis' is used one often encounters attitudes and reactions more easily explained psychologically than by yardsticks of rational behaviour. The 'energy crisis' is no exception: in many countries driving bans or speed limits for motorised traffic were introduced with the aim of saving fuel with almost no public protest, although a glance at consumption statistics would have shown that in terms of overall petroleum consumption these measures could achieve very little. The 'quantity crisis' also expected at the time to result from the oil embargo of the Arab OPEC states, too, is only understandable if one evaluates the actual extraction cut—only 10°/o between September and November 1973 on the previous months—multiplied by the psychological factor X. These expectations, the product of the changes of economic data and their evaluation, produced the panicky reactions of the consumer states, the 'ruinous competition' for the coveted raw material which briefly caused prices for freely sold oil to rise even above the OPEC export prices. International political reactions alo reflected helplessness, ranging from timid appeasement attempts, such as the summit meeting of European and Arab statesmen in Copenhagen in December 1973, to more or less veiled threats going as for as hinting at military intervention. While these political reactions were inappropriate, to say the least, the economic ad-hoc analyses made within a few weeks of the event were 7