Boone Doggle

Business World - WSJ.com

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.
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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.