I can only be bothered to come up with three. There are many many more problems with this abysmal piece by George Will today. While it does make sense to adjust gas prices for inflation, the rest of his conclusions show a manifest ignorance about the nature of the energy problem and a reprehensible tendency to ridicule anyone who takes it seriously.
Here’s the first part:
>The next wave of stories about “soaring” gas prices will predictably trigger some politicians’ indignation about oil companies’ profits. The day after Exxon Mobil’s announcement that it earned $39.5 billion in 2006, Hillary Clinton said: “I want to take those profits, and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence.”
Here’s the second:
>Clinton’s “take” reveals her confiscatory itch. Her clunky “toward the direction of” suggests that she actually knows that independence is as chimerical a goal as Soviet grain production goals were.
The third:
>America produces about one-quarter of the 20.6 million barrels of oil it uses a day. Unfortunately, just as liberals love employees but not employers, they want energy independence but do not want to drill in the “pristine” (read: desolate) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ( potential yield: 10.4 billion barrels) and are reluctant to countenance drilling offshore.
Read the rest. There’s more.
will is so afraid of being the boy who cried wolf that he pretends there are no wolves.