Dear Yanks: Time to Snap Out of Oil Coma

Romancing the Saudis and railing against speculators won’t accomplish anything, Gerard Baker tells American pols in the Guardian: A second industrial revolution is driving oil prices up and there’s no turning back. Stop the populism— the "economically illiterate idea for a gas tax holiday," for instance—and the saber-rattling, and instead focus on areas, like energy efficiency, where progress is being made. 

Concludes Baker, “real, ingenious American leadership will be needed not to make pointless gestures towards the newly powerful energy producers"—distasteful they may be, in the Middle East and Russia particularly—"but to ensure we don't turn our dependence on a scarce resource into political capitulation.” (More crude oil stories.)