What is it about the price of oil that drives otherwise sensible pundits batty?(The Week ...)(Brief article)

What is it about the price of oil that drives otherwise sensible pundits batty? Fareed Zakaria, for example, notes in Newsweek that U.S. gas consumption has doubled over the last three decades, while it has stayed flat in Japan and Europe. But we have also had more economic growth than Japan and Europe, some of it fueled by that increased gas consumption. Our population is also more dispersed than theirs. But what's really odd about Zakaria's column, which is typical of a lot of writing on energy in this regard, is that there is no relation between the alleged problem and the proposed solutions. We are supposed to be upset about high gas prices. And the solution to this problem is--to increase prices ourselves, by raising gas ...