Bill Gates at the Well
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The October 31 issue of Fortune magazine carries an interview with the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft chairman is asked to name the best book he’s read lately. “There’s one called The Bottomless Well, about energy, that I love,” Mr. Gates says. Amid all the scare talk on Wall Street, in Congress, and in the press about the supposedly devastating effects of high oil and gas prices on the economy, the book, by Peter Huber and Mark Mills, is the one that caught his attention, and ours.
The book says that the cost of energy actually has “less and less to do with the cost of fuel,” and that “the raw fuels are not running out.” With respect to automobile fuel efficiency, the book says, “The best thing U.S. policy makers can do it step out of the way and let the market find its own way to the extraordinary future that now beckons.” The book says, “It rarely makes any sense for regulators to try to promote ‘more efficient’ technologies, because given the fecundity of technology, there’s no reason to suppose that regulators will reliably choose the right technologies to promote, or the right time to promote them.”
What’s more, the authors write, “when radically more efficient technologies do emerge, they are quickly embraced by paying customers without any need for government mandates.” The book further violates the politically correct left wing orthodoxy by suggesting that environmentalists “reach some sensible political accommodation with the nuclear industry in case their global warming projections turn out to be right.”
In an April 22, 2003 editorial, “Welcome to The Fight,” we noted that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has backed a network of alternative Christian schools and been supportive of charter schools. Now Mr. Gates is yet again showing his free-market orientation by praising “The Bottomless Well.” The book’s acknowledgements note that it was produced in part under the auspices of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, an institution that The New York Times just the other day devoted an entire article on the front of its metro section to deriding as a “gadfly.” Tell it to Bill Gates.
