As illustrated, today, in the Wall Street Journal by Holmes W. Jenkins Jr., who rips into T. Boone Pickens’ energy plan.

Some of the points are valid: Pickens’ claim that we should power cars with natural gas, however great that might sound, fails to mention that we lack a “practical theory of how to get there” - meaning the Pickens’ initiative is less a “plan” than an idea.

But sprinkled throughout the piece are comments that indicate what I really do think is the prevailing conservative mindset.

[Pickens] laments that the U.S. consumes “25% of the world’s oil.” The phraseology is common, and misleading. Oil is produced to meet demand. He might as well complain that, with 25% of the world’s GDP, we consume 25% of the world’s advertising.

Thus, with 25 percent of the world’s GDP, it is natural that we should consume so much of it’s oil; and that’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

In fact, Mr. Pickens’s “plan” bears a family resemblance to John Kerry’s 2004 “energy independence plan,” which on closer inspection was merely a scheme to reduce oil consumption by a couple million barrels a day, an amount equal to our imports from the Persian Gulf. Whatever its utility as an upraised middle digit to the Middle East, it’s a strategy that does not even succeed on its own silly terms. Were the Kerry-Pickens approach to have any effect at all, the U.S. would only become more dependent on imported oil as high-cost U.S. oil were squeezed out; and more dependent on Mideast oil as oil from high-cost foreign sources were squeezed out.

Besides, if Mr. Pickens’s geopolitical goals were really worth pursuing, why not pursue them directly without the Rube Goldberg complexity? If there’s something to be gained by not sending our money to Saudi Arabia, let’s ban oil imports from Saudi Arabia. If there’s something to be gained by preventing anyone from buying Saudi oil, let’s have the U.S. Navy blockade its oil ports.

Translation: Those geopolitical goals are not worth pursuing. We should not worry that so much of our energy, and thus our economic security, is derived from the most politically instable region on the globe.

The line that we could just not buy oil from Saudi Arabia fundamentally misunderstands the way the global oil market works. I’m sure Jenkins realizes this; but his point is, hey - Saudi Arabia produces that which we need. So let’s not badmouth them too much - as our need trumps any other consideration.

No: As Mr. Pickens says, we can’t drill our way out of the dilemmas of living in the world. But drilling is one of many things we can do that are worth doing. Over time, the price mechanism and technology will tell us how to harness the energy that is infinite around us. There’s the sun, the tides, geothermal and nuclear — energy is not in short supply; only know-how is.

But so long as our attitude mirrors Jenkins, we will shortchange attempts to get to that “know-how,” because our focus will remain instead on the here and now: We need oil; we have structured our society around the notion of cheap oil. Thus oil, preferably cheap oil, is an imperative; and must be the imperative of our national policy, and our foreign policy. And whatever costs this entails, all of it is necessary. Because we need oil; see above.

This is the mentality in which conservation and alternative sources of energy are damned with faint praise - sure, we should look into it. But later. Maybe - only - if the “price mechanism” and technology demand/permit it.

Stay the course. Only the misguided - and the weak - would do otherwise.