Save America, Burn Coal? Energy, Citizenship, and the Ambiguous Abundance of the 1970s

In 1980, coal miners picketed outside the Democratic National Convention with signs that read Save America, Burn Coal. An onlooker would have been right to ask questions. How could burning coal “save” the country? And what exactly was the country being saved from? These questions cut to the heart of the relationship between the country’s political and energy system, a relationship which had been stable for decades, but now teetered on a precipice. I show how U.S. energy politics during the 1970s was powerfully shaped not just by burning coal, but by the political relationships implicit in that statement. This paper examines coal miners’ efforts to renegotiate the terms of what I call energy citizenship during the 1970s: the rights Americans could claim on the basis of their position in the energy system, and the obligations the political character of that energy system then placed upon them. When coal miners promised national salvation through fossil fuel combustion, what they really meant was that they were ready to fulfill their obligations to the energy system. Miners had relied on this conception of energy citizenship for decades to navigate their working lives in a coal-fired country, but the 1970s presented them with new challenges, particularly as they also claimed the right to restitution for the harms the country’s coal-fired democracy had wrought on their bodies, land, and communities. In a decade of ambiguous abundance, limits to growth and stagflation the rights and obligations of energy citizenship would increasingly come into conflict: during the oil embargo, coal strikes, efforts to pass environmental regulation, and more. I examine these conflicts both to show how energy citizenship operated, shaping the decisions the country made about its energy system–the legacies of which Americans still live with today.