Forty years ago this fall, the world was caught up in an oil crisis that forever changed American energy policy. On October 16, 1973, Arab countries began an oil embargo that would last six months. The first impacts were felt on Alaska’s North Slope, where drilling companies had been battling for years to build a pipeline to transport crude oil from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field. On November 16, Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, removing regulatory barriers and subsidizing pipeline construction. It marked a dramatic defeat for the coalition of native Alaskans, environmentalists, fisherman and sportsmen who had banded together to oppose the project in the most vigorously fought conservation struggle since the damming of California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley.
The battle lines and trajectories drawn back then continue to shape contemporary disputes about petroleum extraction, conveyance, refinement and distribution, from offshore drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Keystone XL Pipeline Extension. Rarely has infrastructure been so central to American politics and yet so invisible in everyday life.
