Should Climate Activists Be Celebrating High Oil Prices?

Oil hit a walloping $135 a barrel. Sales of SUVs and other gas-guzzlers are plummeting. The number of miles driven by Americans is showing its largest decrease ever recorded, with 11 billion fewer miles driven in March 2008 than in March 2007. Public transportation use is the highest its been in half a century, and gas consumption in the start of 2008 is estimated to be down 0.6 percent from the same months in 2007. All of which should be great news for global warming activists, right? Not so, says The Wall Street Journal's Holman W. Jenkins, who argues that the current high prices will push investors and technology to find ways of producing "vast new resources" of fossil energy in order to capitalize on the public's willingness to shell out more money. This push, he argues, will only increase the amount of fuel consumed and crank the knob up ...