Why This Gas Crisis Isn’t Hitting Like 1979

Everyone’s mad about high oil prices, but are they doing anything about it? With around 11 million barrels per day (about a tenth of global production) shut in, and thus missing from the global oil market, someone has to be using less of it. Maybe it’s petrochemical plants that run on tight margins slowing down. Maybe it’s European airlines cancelling flights.

At least so far, it’s probably not American drivers.

“In the U.S. we’re seeing an indifference, in terms of what we can see from consumption numbers,” David Doherty, head of natural resources research at BloombergNEF, told me on the sidelines of the research group’s annual summit last week. The Energy Information Administration’s proxy for gasoline consumption, “product supplied of finished motor gasoline,” shows no dramatic change following the beginning of the war or subsequent spike in oil prices.

Gas prices in the United States sit at $4.11 per gallon according to AAA, compared to $3.15 a year ago. But even in the context of the almost $5 per gallon in 2022 and the $4.11-ish gas hit in the summer of 2008, the impact on actual households is likely more mild.

“$4 now is very different to $4 five years ago. And it's definitely different to $4 in 2008, which is when the last price spikes came through,” Doherty said. “$4 doesn't get you a coffee now. $4 a decade ago got you coffee plus oat milk.”

For one, a dollar is hardly a dollar anymore. There’s been higher than typical inflation since 2022, and a substantial rise in overall prices since 2008. This means that a dollar of gasoline (or even $4) is taking up a smaller portion of American consumer spending than it has in the past.

Looking back even further, the American auto fleet has gotten more efficient, meaning that drivers are getting more miles per gallon — and thus miles per dollar — than they were in the past. And that’s not even taking into account the rise of electric vehicles, which allow drivers to opt out of gasoline price volatility altogether.

Ironically, a big chunk of the credit comes from the now essentially scrapped Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards — themselves a response to the 1973 oil shock and designed to ease the American auto fleet’s dependency on fuels with volatile prices set by the global market by ratcheting up fuel economy over time. Then in 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the first major tightening of CAFE standards in nearly 30 years.

“CAFE standards — which have just been neutered — ultimately have helped,” Doherty told me, referring to the Trump administration’s successful efforts to undo further fuel economy progress under the Obama and Biden administrations.

Overall, the U.S. economy has also gotten less “oil intensive” — we simply use less oil per dollar of economic activity than we used to. Since 1970, oil consumption has gone up by about 20%, while the size of the economy as measured in GDP has more than quadrupled.

When it comes to how the changing price of oil, and thereby gasoline, affects drivers, it’s a little trickier. I decided to calculate the “miles per dollar” on an annual basis, and then conservatively estimated how fleet efficiency would have increased by now.

To do this, I looked at the average miles per gallon of the U.S. car fleet and the “all grades” gasoline price for those same years. (“All grades” a little higher than the typical “regular” gas series, but the data goes back further.) The MPG data only goes back to 2024, so I conservatively projected it out to this year. While U.S. drivers are getting less out of their dollar than they did in 2024, they’re also going farther than they did in 2022 and 2008, the last time gas prices spiked dramatically.

I also wanted to get an idea of how much household spending is on gasoline. There’s no perfect way to do this with up-to-date data, but I was able to look at the relative importance of transportation fuel in the Consumer Price Index, which tells you the portion of spending on gasoline among the goods and services tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As expected, the relative importance rose dramatically in the 1970s and early 1980s, and hit a new high in 2007; in 2025, it fell close to its all time lows at just under 3%.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also looks at annual household spending on gasoline. The latest data from 2024 agreed that it had been falling, from $2,805 in 2022, to $2,449 in 2023, and then $2,411 in 2024, but the 2025 data isn’t available yet.

Looking at more frequently updated data, the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee estimated that spending in February on “gasoline and other energy goods” was just over 1.9% of all personal consumption, a more than 0.2 percentage point decline from a year ago. This was, of course, before gasoline prices soared in March and into April.

“If you were to put [gasoline] beside the cost of your rent, for example, it's becoming a much smaller slice of your outlays,” Doherty said. This is the now-abandoned fuel efficiency standards actually working, Doherty said. “It's a different share of your budget. It's a more efficient car, and that’s through design.”

This also helps explain why in the United States, we’re not seeing the “demand destruction” that should accompany a contraction in oil supply, where consumers cut back consumption in response to high prices.

But with lines of empty tankers queuing up at the United States’ Gulf Coast petroleum export complex, looking to bring American crude to markets that can’t get their hands on oil from the Persian Gulf, prices may still have a way to go. Drivers in the United States are now in a barrel-for-barrel competition with the rest of the world.