OPINION/COMMENTARY

Energetic Ignorance

There's no public-policy topic more prone to intellectual abuse than energy. Take conservation. Refrigerators, automobiles, houses, factories? They're more than twice as efficient in using energy than they were 50 years ago. Fine. But, despite the conventional political wisdom, conservation has not cut our energy use. To the contrary. "The more efficient our technology, the more energy we consume," write Peter Huber and Mark Mills in their brilliant new book, "The Bottomless Well." Energy becomes more desirable if it works faster and better. "To curb energy consumption, you have to lower efficiency, not raise it." Anyway, why on earth would we want to curb energy consumption? Energy abounds, and the leverage is incredible. It's a tiny proportion of the economy, yet without it, we'd grind to a halt. Or consider the supply side. How many Americans know that the U.S. is the world's largest energy producer? We rank number 11 in oil reserves, sixth in natural gas and first in coal. In 1979, we were told that the U.S. had only 30 billion barrels of natural gas left in the ground and that we'd run out by the 1990s. Instead, over the past 25 years, we have pumped out 67 billion barrels, and strong reserves remain. the oil is there. The obstacles to putting it to use are strictly political: restrictions on drilling, on building refineries (the number has dropped by more than half since 1980), and on making the distribution system more efficient. Remove the barriers, and prices will fall....

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