Boone Doggle

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Boone Pickens may be a fine man, and has played a colorful and useful role on the American stage for decades. But his "energy plan," which he's spending a fortune to promote on cable TV, is not a plan.

Asserting that something would be good to do is not "a plan." Saying how to do it is "a plan." By this standard, what the legendary oil man is devoting $58 million to pitch hardly amounts to a decent slogan.

He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to mention any practical theory of how to get there -- that would really be "a plan." Instead, he relies on the deus ex machina of Congress, waving a legislative wand to make people do things they would choose not to do, given the extravagant and unjustified costs involved.

Having reasons is not "a plan" either, but Mr. Pickens has his reasons. He says we spend $700 billion a year on foreign oil, which he calls a "transfer of wealth." But exchanging money for oil at the market price is an exchange of things of equal value. If we didn't value their oil more than our dollars, we wouldn't participate in such a bargain.

He laments that the U.S. consumes "25% of the world's oil." The phraseology is common, and misleading. Oil is produced to meet demand. He might as well complain that, with 25% of the world's GDP, we consume 25% of the world's advertising.

In fact, Mr. Pickens's "plan" bears a family resemblance to John Kerry's 2004 "energy independence plan," which on closer inspection was merely a scheme to reduce oil consumption by a couple million barrels a day, an amount equal to our imports from the Persian Gulf. Whatever its utility as an upraised middle digit to the Middle East, it's a strategy that does not even succeed on its own silly terms. Were the Kerry-Pickens approach to have any effect at all, the U.S. would only become more dependent on imported oil as high-cost U.S. oil were squeezed out; and more dependent on Mideast oil as oil from high-cost foreign sources were squeezed out.

Besides, if Mr. Pickens's geopolitical goals were really worth pursuing, why not pursue them directly without the Rube Goldberg complexity? If there's something to be gained by not sending our money to Saudi Arabia, let's ban oil imports from Saudi Arabia. If there's something to be gained by preventing anyone from buying Saudi oil, let's have the U.S. Navy blockade its oil ports.

If there are real net advantages to doing so, let's hear them.

We pick on Boone (and exploit a pun) but his "plan" is emblematic of the brainstorms that always find a market when gasoline hits a cyclical peak. Talk is cheap. Talk favors radical solutions to get rid of problems that we are all sick and tired of hearing about. Calls for Manhattan Projects and moon shots invariably decorate the op-ed pages at such times. In a form of social peacockery, the greater the misallocation of resources proposed, the more lavish the ovation -- though here Mr. Pickens has already been outdone by Al Gore.

But these plans are fulfillments of ritual, not practical proposals -- and their authors indicate as much by the economy of thought they put into them. Mr. Pickens is rightly contemptuous of those who accuse him of merely trying to make money off his natural-gas holdings -- if money-making were the goal, he certainly would have invested a more diligent and realistic application of his noggin first. To imply otherwise is to insult the man.

Take the universal recrimination over our failure to impose tougher fuel-mileage mandates, in which Mr. Pickens also indulges. These complaints are lofted without the slightest attention to what we've actually learned in 30 years of such mandates -- that car buyers simply amortize their forced investment in fuel-saving technology by driving more miles. They buy more affordable homes farther from town; they commute longer distances to work; they trek across two counties to buy groceries at Wal-Mart rather than the pricey supermarket down the street.

No: As Mr. Pickens says, we can't drill our way out of the dilemmas of living in the world. But drilling is one of many things we can do that are worth doing. Over time, the price mechanism and technology will tell us how to harness the energy that is infinite around us. There's the sun, the tides, geothermal and nuclear -- energy is not in short supply; only know-how is. And a shortage of know-how is a problem that our society, as long as its basic incentives remain intact, is constantly solving every single day.