Beyond Neoliberalism: Oil Politics and the Turn to Climate Adaptation in the Late 1970s

This paper is about a group of elite, influential scientists and social scientists in the late 1970s United States and Western Europe who believed that human-induced climate change was inevitable. Convinced that the United States would prove incapable of abandoning fossil fuels in the name of protecting the climate, these experts concluded that adaptation to climate change, rather than proactive prevention, was the only realistic path forward. Historians typically attribute the turn to climate adaptation to the rise of neoliberalism. Adaptation, they point out, placed its faith in the potential of market—rather than state—based policy approaches to climate change and assumed that policies to address climate change would need to be compatible with economic growth in order to be politically viable. But as I argue in the paper, neoliberalism and growth ideology alone cannot account for the emergence of an adaptation-centered approach to climate politics. Instead, this paper situates the scientific turn to adaptation in the context of the oil politics of the 1970s. I show that the political fortunes—and continual failures—of US efforts to facilitate a transition away from fossil fuels in the wake of the 1970s oil shocks served to radically temper scientists’ notions about the feasibility of proactively preventing climate change. If, in the wake of the oil crises and turbulent global energy geopolitics of the past decade, the political will to shift the US economy away from fossil fuels had failed to materialize, then even the direst of climate forecasts would not be enough to impel the world to abandon its existing carbon-intensive energy infrastructure. In this paper’s telling, the turn to adaptation was as much an effect of scientists’ perceptions about the limits of modern democracies vis-à-vis energy system overhauls as it was a symptom of neoliberal ideology.