The Miracle of the Market and Political Silliness

With a couple billion Chinese, Indians and others joining the global marketplace, they will need energy, and lots of it. The price mechanism is our only hope.

Sure enough, it's working. Money is pouring into Canada's massive tar sands. A thousand substitutions are taking place on the demand side. Sales of SUVs are falling; sales of four-cylinder sedans are up. The number of miles driven by American motorists shrank in February for the first time in 26 years.

Yet there's one miracle of adaptation that even $135 oil apparently can't vouchsafe. It can't bring intellectual coherence to American rhetoric or policy on energy.

By one count, America sits on enough oil and gas to meet its own needs for half a century. We won't help ourselves although our environmental delicacy somehow doesn't stop us from screaming at other countries to tear up their own pristine wildernesses to supply us with cheap energy.

President Bush rushes to the Saudis, supplicating for more oil. Congress threatens OPEC with antitrust action. Go figure. That U.S. politicians can afford to indulge a persistent unreality about a basic input of industrial civilization only testifies to how responsive and resilient the global energy market has been despite the political silliness it meets at every turn.

From "The Coming Oil Investment Boom" in today's WSJ