ONLY TAXES CAN MAKE OIL MORE EXPENSIVE THAN WE'RE WILLING TO PAY:

40 Years of Energy Panic (HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR., 9/28/10, WSJ)

We seem to get all the oil we want at a price we're willing to pay. For three decades, our economy enjoyed one of its greatest boom periods ever—a boom that ended, ironically, not because of oil shortages, but because of overspending on giant houses far from town by people happily conditioned by the ubiquity and affordability of their energy supplies.

And look at countries even more dependent on oil imports than ours. China and India have inaugurated two of the greatest growth stories in history. Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, much of Western Europe—states notorious for a paucity of natural resources—have built among the highest sustained living standards on the globe.

Some confused persons still think we invaded Iraq to get its oil, which would have been like spending a dollar to get a penny. Saddam would have sold us all the oil we wanted (and Kuwait's too) if we had just left him alone.

Now whole careers in the public eye are being built on the idea of peak oil—a geological conceit that produces scenarios of global catastrophe only because it omits the price mechanism, which has worked well for a century to adapt the world economy to whatever amount of oil is geologically available at a given time.