By Bob King

A huge column of smoke seen from Gaza city billows from an oil facility in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon on May 11, 2021, after rockets were fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip towards Israel. | Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

STILL HAUNTED — This week marks a half-century since Arab countries, angered by Richard Nixon’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, cut off oil exports to the U.S. — an event that sent energy prices soaring and stranded motorists in long gasoline lines. It has shadowed American politics ever since.

By the end of the bad-vibe ’70s, as the months-long embargo gave way to rising prices and insecurity, Congress had capped speed limits at 55 mph and Jimmy Carter was wearing a cardigan on TV, two bows to austerity that didn’t do much to lift the national mood. In 1979, nearly 2,000 people rioted outside gas stations in my old home of Bucks County, Pa., setting vehicles ablaze.

To many who remember those days of petroleum pauperdom, worries about their return never entirely lifted. Some found historical echoes this month after another Mideast war — between Israel and Hamas — had oil prices blipping upward.

But much has changed in five decades, making some of these echoes as dated as “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

The 1973 oil shock “has disturbing parallels today,” a Wall Street Journal op-ed warned, lamenting that environmentalists had delayed the Alaska oil pipeline and blocked offshore drilling in California before the embargo.

“The parallels between Octobers 2023 and 1973 are easy to draw,” a Bloomberg Opinion column chimed in, focusing on the shrunken state of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Republican lawmakers sounded a similar theme while slamming President Joe Biden for selling nearly half of that Gerald-Ford-era oil stockpile to quell rising fuel prices. The reserve “is down to nothing,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters, though my colleague Ben Lefebvre noted that it actually holds 351 million barrels, equivalent to nearly 56 days of U.S. oil imports.

Looming scarcity is a big theme for the GOP presidential contenders, who claim that Biden “has shut down energy production in America,” as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) put it not quite accurately this summer. The embargo’s legacy lingers in Donald Trump’s boasts (also false) that his administration achieved the 1970s goal of “energy independence” — which Biden promptly squandered.

Even Iran grabbed a piece of 50th anniversary nostalgia this week by calling for an oil boycott of Israel. The New York Times observed that “such an embargo would probably have little immediate impact” — Israel doesn’t buy Iranian oil.

We can never be complacent about energy supply: Gasoline lines returned to the East Coast two years ago after hackers shut down a pipeline. No matter how much oil we produce, we’re yoked to the same global market that spiked gasoline prices to record highs last year. A war that takes Iranian and Saudi oil off the market would impose tons of economic pain.

Still, it’s important to remember that it’s not yesterday anymore.

The U.S. is now the world’s top oil producer, on track to set a new record this year, and the top natural gas producer. (This is largely because of fracking — not any president’s doing.) It’s a net petroleum exporter, with enough gas to prop up European allies in wartime.

Instead, the U.S. faces crucial debates about navigating its role as an energy superpower: As two of my co-workers previewed 11 years ago, energy abundance brings its own hard choices.

For example, do we let oil companies keep exporting crude — something the U.S. banned for decades until 2015 ― or keep it at home to push the domestic price lower?

And climate change has scientists and international bodies like the U.N. calling for countries to leave much of their oil and gas in the ground — to make the decision to turn off the tap. Biden has yet to do that, even if he’s proposing far less drilling than the industry wants.

The realities of energy have come a ways from the Frampton Comes Alive! age. The politics haven’t caught up.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected] or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @BKingDC.

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— House GOP abandons plan to empower temp speaker: House Republicans are abandoning a push to empower a temporary speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry, after it faced fierce pushback within the party today. As they left a nearly four-hour internal meeting about the idea, multiple Republicans said there was no virtually no path forward. The proposal, which may still come back for a vote at some point, would have allowed McHenry and the GOP to reopen the House after 16 days without a speaker. Many Republicans view that task as critical, given pending deadlines on government spending and an imminent White House aid request for Israel and other nations in crises.

— Biden to select Kurt Campbell as deputy secretary of State: Joe Biden is preparing to nominate Kurt Campbell as the next deputy secretary of State, three people familiar with the decision said, elevating the architect of the president’s China and Indo-Pacific strategy to the nation’s second-highest diplomatic post. Campbell’s frontrunner status has been known for weeks, after Biden asked the State Department’s top choice for the role, principal deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, to remain in his current position. Wendy Sherman, the administration’s first deputy secretary, retired in the summer.

— DOJ coordinates with state officials as threats to Jews, Muslims rise: U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed U.S. attorneys across the country to keep in close contact with state and local officials as threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities rise amid the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas. Reports of domestic threats have spiked since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Saturday. “As the FBI has noted, we are seeing an increase in reported threats against faith communities, particularly Jewish, Muslim, and Arab communities and institutions,” Garland said today during a speech.

MIDDLE MAN — Trevor Packer had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year — “the toughest year of my 20 year career,” he told the Deseret News. Most years, as College Board’s point person for Advanced Placement courses, he focuses on overseeing curriculum development, rolling out end-of-year tests and dealing with the occasional complaint from disgruntled students or administrators.

This year, however, the loudest complaint happened to come from one of America’s most prominent politicians: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Packer, a soft-spoken man from Provo, Utah, has been stuck in the middle.

BALLOT HURDLE — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid for president is facing a big hurdle just as it gets off the ground: a grueling, expensive fight to get on the ballot in 50 states and Washington, D.C., reports POLITICO.

Kennedy said he planned to “spoil” the election for both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — and if polls that show him pulling as much as 14 percent of the general electorate hold, he certainly could be. But it will depend on whether his campaign can successfully navigate the complex ballot access process.

Kennedy has some important advantages heading in, first and foremost money. He has raised millions since his launch. But it’s less clear how much preparation the campaign has done to qualify for ballots across the country. Kennedy is essentially in a race against the clock. North Carolina and Texas require independent candidates to file by mid-May, and a crash of deadlines across the country over the summer, with 29 state deadlines in August alone.

BIDEN’S BANE — Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips is trying to hire top Democratic operatives with presidential campaign experience for his longshot primary challenge against President Joe Biden, reports the Messenger.

The outreach is the latest sign that Phillips is not only serious about running for president but has begun to put the pieces together to mount a challenge against the president.

It is unclear whether Phillips is having much success hiring Democrats, given working for him would mean crossing almost all of the party’s infrastructure. One operative who was solicited by Phillips’ orbit said the conversation “didn’t go very far” but that the congressman was “reaching out to a lot of folks.”

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a meeting with President Joe Biden in Tel Aviv, Israel on Wednesday. | Pool photo by Miriam Alster via AP

FEELING ABANDONED — Tomer Eliaz, a 17-year-old boy in the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, was forced to go door-to-door by Hamas and tell neighbors to come out, saying he would be killed if they didn’t.

Several opened up and were murdered, while others were hauled off as hostages to Gaza — with several children cooped up in chicken pens. After using the teenage boy as bait, the Islamist militants shot him dead too.

Just 800 meters from the Gaza border, Nahal Oz was one of the first Hamas targets on October 7, and the events of that morning are now painfully seared into the minds of residents Elad Poterman and Addi Cherry, writes Antoaneta Roussi.

Now both in Belgium, they vented their frustration over what they saw as abandonment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive right-wing government, whose hostile policy toward Palestinians is accused of undermining Israel’s security.

“He [Netanyahu] needs to say: ‘I’m sorry, I failed you. It’s because of me and my pride, you were almost murdered,’” said Cherry, a 45-year-old Belgian-Israeli health economist.

Poterman and Cherry described how they shut themselves in safe rooms on the morning of the attack, and hunkered down for 12 hours, waiting for the Israel Defense Force to come to their rescue. Over those excruciating hours, rockets flew overhead and Hamas raided homes across the kibbutz shouting “Allahu Akbar” [God is greatest] and “Massacre the Jews.”

Poterman, who until last week worked as an after-school teacher, sent what he believed would be his last Facebook post from the safe room: “Half an hour, we are locked up with terrorists at home, no one comes.”

The reasons for such a spectacular security lapse in a nation that prides itself on its intelligence apparatus is still unclear and a huge embarrassment for Netanyahu’s administration.

“I have a personal account with this [Israeli] government,” Poterman said. “They abandoned my daughter to die. That doesn’t go away. I’ll never forget.”

“With the Netanyahu government, I will take them out of the Knesset [parliament] myself, with my own hands, I will do that. I already started organizing a whole lot of people from the area that have been abandoned and want to do just that very thing,” he added.

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GREEN SKIES — If you manage to catch an advertisement for an airline in print or on television, chances are it’s going to have something related to the company’s commitment to green energy or sustainability. After all, flying has historically burned a lot of fossil fuels, and so in an effort to remain sustainable as well as competitive in the marketplace, these companies have tried various tactics to remain environmentally conscious. There’s been a recent shift in that strategy, though. While airlines used to simply buy carbon credits in order to offset their pollution, now they’re looking at sustainable aviation fuel. But the long road to going green is just beginning. Umair Irfan reports for Vox.

On this date in 1987: Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange work frantically as the Dow Jones Industrial average plunged more than 500 points for a loss of 22.62 percent. It was the biggest one-day loss in history at the time. | Peter Morgan/AP Photo

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