Holman Jenkins is asking for details of the T. Boone Pickens wind plan in today’s WSJ. An excerpt:
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.