Carriages, energy-saving lamps, and "slow living": Every energy crisis in history has been a "forced upgrade" of human lifestyles.

When energy is cheap, humans love to do two things most: make things bigger and make them faster.

More powerful engines, larger houses, longer journeys, and even “instant response” digital services are all considered rights by default.

But once energy becomes expensive, society’s aesthetic standards first collapse, and the list of industry winners is immediately reshuffled—crisis acts like a hard ruler, forcing everyone to relearn the lesson of “efficiency.”

Since late February this year, the US-Iran conflict has rapidly escalated. Airstrikes, missile and drone defenses continue to expand, and Iran’s announcement of blocking the Strait of Hormuz directly hits the nerves of global energy supply. Oil prices soar, shipping insurance rises, and countries begin discussing releasing strategic petroleum reserves.

In traditional narratives, this is a typical geopolitical conflict.

But if we extend the timeline, human history offers another explanation—

What truly drives technological breakthroughs is often not abundant energy, but energy scarcity.

The Great Purge of Industrial Genes: From Horsepower Race to Energy Efficiency Hegemony

In autumn 1973, the US automotive industry was at its peak of power.

Detroit’s assembly lines operated day and night, setting a record of 9.7 million car sales that year. The most dazzling stars on the roads were “muscle cars” like the Ford Mustang or Pontiac Firebird. It was an era where engine displacement defined heroism: the bigger the engine, the cooler the car; fuel consumption? Just a negligible line on the gas station bill.

However, in October 1973, the Fourth Middle East War broke out. OPEC announced an oil embargo, and within a year, crude oil prices quadrupled.

In stark contrast was the Japanese auto industry. Toyota was then under enormous pressure from rising raw material costs, but its management keenly realized that the logic of car value had undergone a fundamental reversal.

In 1974, Toyota bet on the Corolla model. The core advantage of the Corolla was not how fast it could go, but how far it could squeeze every drop of gasoline.

1974 Corolla (Third Generation), Source: Toyota Official Website

This was not just a product competition but a blow to production methods. The Japanese automakers’ promotion of “lean manufacturing” perfectly aligned with energy efficiency, causing Japanese brands’ market share in the US to jump from negligible to 25% within a decade. This was a grassroots “industrial gene cleansing”: energy prices acted as natural selection scissors, trimming away false prosperity dependent on cheap resources, leaving behind more adaptable, efficient genes.

The rhythm of history often repeats in fifty-year cycles. Today, we are in the “muscle car era” of artificial intelligence.

Over the past three years, global tech giants have engaged in an unprecedented “computing arms race.” Nvidia’s GPUs have become the “large-displacement engines” of the digital age, with each data center consuming enough power to support a medium-sized city.

Just like Detroit in the 1970s, the current AI industry is built on the assumption of “unlimited computing resources.” But when electricity costs start accounting for over 30% of AI operational costs, even becoming the primary limiting factor for scaling, the industry’s aesthetic is undergoing a profound change. We see industry metrics shifting from sheer “parameter scale” to “inference energy efficiency.”

The power that destroyed muscle cars in 1973 is rewriting the AI industry: Companies that can achieve high efficiency through model compression, distillation techniques, and specialized small models will become the “Toyota” of the digital age.

Space Revolution: When Houses Turn into “Energy Machines”

If the 1973 oil crisis first rewrote the automotive industry’s genes, the second field to be forced into evolution is actually the most ordinary and unnoticed space—the house.

For most of the 20th century, architects rarely seriously considered one question: Will heat escape? The reason was simple: energy was too cheap.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, heating fuel costs in Western countries were so low they could almost be ignored. Walls only needed simple insulation with a few inches of fiberglass; if it felt cold in winter, people just turned up the thermostat. Building design focused on lighting, structure, and aesthetics, with little regard for “building energy consumption.”

The entire construction industry was based on an implicit premise: Energy is infinite.

The 1973 oil embargo suddenly shattered this premise.

When oil prices quadrupled within a year, people first realized: a house is not just a living space; it is a huge “energy funnel.” Heating continuously generates heat, but walls, windows, and roofs quietly send that heat back outside.

Architects faced a brand-new problem: How to keep the heat inside the house.

Thus, an almost forgotten technological revolution quietly began.

In the US, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California developed a new type of glass coating in the 1970s—low-emissivity glass, now ubiquitous in the building industry as Low-E windows. This glass has a thin metallic oxide coating that reflects infrared radiation: in winter, it prevents heat from escaping indoors; in summer, it blocks outside heat.

At the time, this was purely a technology born to reduce heating bills.

But half a century later, it has become one of the most fundamental energy-saving technologies in modern buildings: today, over half of commercial building windows in the US use Low-E coatings, and in residential markets, the proportion exceeds 80%.

Meanwhile, a more radical building concept also emerged—“super-insulated homes.” In the 1970s, experimental buildings appeared in Europe and North America:

Denmark’s “Zero Energy Homes” in Copenhagen, Illinois’ Low-Cal House, and Saskatchewan’s Conservation House in Canada.

Conservation House in Saskatchewan, Source: Saskatchewan Research Council

These houses had astonishingly thick walls, extremely tight structures, almost like sealed containers. The architects’ goal was simple: Make a house work like a thermos.

By 1977, Sweden even incorporated strict insulation standards into building codes; Canada followed with the R-2000 program, providing training and subsidies for high-insulation homes.

Thus, modern architecture began to learn one thing—to negotiate with the physical world.

Buildings are no longer just art and structure; they have started to become energy machines: walls store heat, windows regulate radiation, and roofs insulate against temperature differences.

Many concepts we take for granted today—heat pumps, passive houses, solar rooftops—can all trace their origins back to the energy crisis of the 1970s.

In other words, today’s “green buildings” were not initially designed to save the planet.

They were just about saving money.

But history often works this way:

Economic pressure first changes technological paths, and technological paths then reshape civilization.

The Fracture of the Psychological Contract: From “Sense of Rights” to “Sense of Moderation”

The deepest impact of the energy crisis was the change it brought to human psychology.

Historian H. W. Brands wrote about this period:

For many Americans, “gasoline shortages themselves seemed un-American.” Queues, rationing, and quotas—these words seemed to belong only to wartime or developing countries, not the wealthiest nation in the world.

But in the fall of 1973, this psychological contract suddenly broke. When the ritual of “Sunday drives” disappeared because of gasoline shortages, Americans first realized: Prosperity is not a natural state.

Energy, supply chains, international politics—these grand structures can change ordinary people’s lives overnight.

As a result, consumer culture began to subtly shift. Cars became smaller and more fuel-efficient; households started to focus on heating efficiency; “energy independence” became a political slogan. In a deeper sense, people began to reevaluate the boundaries of “consumption.”

In a sense, what changed in the 1970s was not just the energy structure but also a psychological contract among Americans:

From entitlement to a sense of scarcity.

Half a century later, a similar psychological shift may be quietly occurring in another domain.

This time, the object is not gasoline but computing power.

In the past decade, the AI industry has almost built itself on a fantasy of “instantaneous computation”: as long as there are enough GPUs and electricity, any problem can be solved with larger models and more data.

But as AI data centers scale up rapidly, energy costs are re-emerging. Industry estimates suggest that by around 2027, AI data centers alone could add nearly 100 gigawatts of power demand—equivalent to the capacity of several medium-sized countries.

When electricity prices start to enter the cost structure, technological paths will also change.

In recent years, AI companies have competed over who has more GPUs; in the coming years, the competition may shift to another form: who can achieve the same results with less computation.

Thus, a familiar industry logic reappears.

In an era of expensive energy, efficiency often outweighs scale.

Today, algorithmic optimizations like model compression, quantization, and distillation are trying to reduce energy consumption per inference.

In the chip industry, a new metric is even emerging:

Performance per watt.

This means that the core of future AI competition may no longer be the number of model parameters but energy efficiency.

If advances in AI performance do not lead to improvements in watts per inference, then such progress is meaningless.

The True Legacy of the Energy Crisis: Civilizations Relearn Efficiency

Looking back, the 1973 oil crisis did not just change oil prices.

It taught civilization three lessons:

2. Reusing energy: shifting from waste to maximum efficiency.
3. Reorganizing production: from scale expansion to precise supply.
4. Redefining abundance: true progress is not unlimited consumption but creating more value with fewer resources.

When horsepower is no longer the only standard, when buildings learn to negotiate with the physical world, and when AI masters the dance between watts, human civilization truly matures.

Because when resources become scarce, society will relearn an ancient and powerful ability: living smarter.

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