COURSE: Greed, Energy, and Power: How Reaganomics, Think Tanks, and Big Oil Shaped Today’s Climate Crisis

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Greed, Energy, and Power: How Reaganomics, Think Tanks, and Big Oil Shaped Today’s Climate Crisis

AIA CES program ID: GMGG.005

Approved LUs: 1.0 LU|HSW

Prerequisites: None

Program level: Entry

Advance learner preparation: None

How did a Middle East alliance, an oil embargo, and a domestic energy panic turn into decades of environmental consequences, and what happens when the people who understand the risk best choose delay over responsibility?

This episode follows the tight braid of geopolitics, energy markets, and environmental policy from the mid twentieth century through the late nineteen eighties, showing how power, profit, and public messaging shaped the climate path as much as science did. You move from the conflict dynamics of the Levant and the emergence of the U.S.–Israel alliance into the OPEC oil embargo and the shock that forced Americans to face fossil dependence, then into the lived reality of the nineteen seventies crisis, where regulation, tax policy, corporate behavior, and consumption collided with global disruption. From there, the episode contrasts the era of conservation-minded policy and institution-building under Carter with the free-market turn of the Reagan years that weakened enforcement, politicized oversight, and invited deeper corporate influence, even as major environmental disasters and new scientific alarms made the stakes impossible to ignore. Along the way, it exposes the fossil fuel industry’s early internal climate research and the deliberate strategies used to stall regulation, then widens out to the global response, from ozone discovery and NASA’s research to the Brundtland Commission and the Montreal Protocol, revealing how scientific warning becomes policy only when the political will is stronger than the incentives to postpone.

Program Description:

This episode traces the intertwined history of geopolitics, energy, and environmental policy from the mid twentieth century through the late nineteen eighties, framed by the idea that unchecked greed shapes both climate risk and political choices. It opens with the long arc of conflict in the Levant, the creation of the modern state of Israel, and the strategic alliance that developed between the United States and Israel, which helped trigger the OPEC oil embargo and a global energy crisis that forced Americans to confront their dependence on fossil fuels. The narrative then follows the domestic energy crisis of the nineteen seventies, explaining how U S regulation, tax policy, oil company behavior, and surging consumption combined with international shocks to produce fuel shortages, long gas lines, and political backlash.

The episode explores President Jimmy Carter’s response, including comprehensive energy conservation efforts, the creation of the Department of Energy, tax incentives for efficiency and renewables, the strategic petroleum reserve, and major environmental legislation such as Superfund and large-scale land conservation in Alaska. Against this, it reveals the fossil fuel industry’s early and remarkably accurate internal climate science, dating back to the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and shows how oil companies privately understood the catastrophic potential of continued emissions while publicly questioning the science and investing in strategies to delay regulation.