After Osama, Energy Sanity?

Donald Trump is right. We didn't invade Iraq to get its oil.

 Holman Jenkins .

With President Obama, the gift of the left, having gone to considerable lengths and invested his political capital to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden, maybe the time is ripe to clear away certain myths about hidden agendas behind America's antiterror policies.
The U.S. didn't invade Iraq for its oil, though perhaps some remain hopelessly beyond reason on this point. Their view of the world is deduced from the covers of news magazines they haven't opened and from Hollywood movie plots, in which oil is vaguely implied to be infinitely valuable, and oil companies therefore infinitely potent behind the scenes of American policy.
Oil is not infinitely valuable. Invading Iraq was a far more expensive way to get its two million barrels a day than by buying them. True, Iraq is believed to have huge, unmapped reserves—no less a figure than Donald Trump now complains of our refusal to get our hands on these reserves, a failure President Trump presumably would remedy.
Mr. Trump is right about one thing. If we were after Iraq's oil, we've yielded with remarkably little fuss. U.S. companies have had little interest in the profitless terms the Iraqi government is offering. Many of the contracts have gone instead to the likes of the state oil companies of India, China and Angola. The winners will spend billions to develop new fields in return for a meager $1.40 for every barrel lifted, and then only after meeting a minimum production hurdle.
Mr. Trump is participating in a great American political tradition since the 1970s, saying silly things about energy. Apropos of nothing except $4 gas and political ructions in the Middle East, back on the media's agenda is the Boone Pickens plan, the Texas billionaire's recurrent campaign for Congressional tax credits to encourage natural-gas vehicles.
There is no end, of course, to people promoting the use of the tax code to support nice-sounding things. That's why we have the tax code we do.
In his recent energy speech, President Obama said the world is running out of oil and higher gasoline prices are foreordained. If so, higher gas prices will provide a bigger incentive for natural-gas cars than any puny tax subsidy. And if Mr. Obama is wrong, the tax benefit will have done nothing but create stranded investments in natural-gas vehicles that will require endless subsidies to remain viable.
Lo, this is no accident but a product of the bounded logic of our political system, as Peter Z. Grossman of Butler University has aptly laid out in various papers:
Voters want cheap gas. They also want things that are antithetical to cheap gas, like "energy independence" and environmental purism. Rather than choosing between conflicting goals, politicians offer happy talk and boondoggles to reconcile these opposites. That's how we got Mr. Obama's electric-car subsidies, Jimmy Carter's "synfuel" disaster, and Bill Clinton's now-forgotten 80 mpg family-car project.
Nor do you have to look further than the New York Times editorial page to find some who think the answer to events in the Middle East is to throw even more money at magical thinking on energy.
Mr. Pickens is no more regrettable than the various big names in national security who've been willing to associate themselves with the ethanol scam. The proclivity of such former high-ranking officials to transition to energy rent-seeking ought to be alarming to Americans.
Here's another example of energy madness: We've lately received the imperfect blessing of the shale gas boom, which some oppose as environmentally hazardous to the towns and farms and watersheds of upstate Pennsylvania and New York. But why did our enterprising wildcatters go hunting hard-to-reach gas in exurban backyards across the Northeast in the first place?
One answer is to be found in a 2004 Argonne National Lab report, which described huge amounts of conventional gas in U.S. wilderness lands placed off-limits in unthinking fashion. To give one instance, a Forest Service bureaucrat in 2001, with the wave of a pen, foreclosed access to 11 trillion cubic feet of gas by decreeing an end to road building on federal lands.
Writ small here is the dynamic that now has greens—rightly—in despair. The price mechanism works to deliver the energy we want even despite our own worst efforts, and it continues to be fossil energy.
Now we are ready to appreciate an irony: With his Iraq invasion, President Bush was accused of setting off a grenade in a china shop—destabilizing a part of the world we depend on for precious oil. Mr. Obama, in contrast, looks like a reversion to form: the hapless wasting of taxpayer dollars on symbolic energy escapism like electric cars; meanwhile, in the face of revolution in the Mideast, a barely concealed priority of stability above all, to keep the oil flowing.