Kevin Williamson of National Review Online explains why Hurricanes Harvey and Irma should prompt an important discussion about the future of the energy sector.

Fossil fuels are very much a part of the old economy. Oil producers and refiners do not enjoy the digital world’s capacity for rerouting their product instantaneously in response to changing conditions. Refineries are big and sprawling, and pipelines are right where they are and nowhere else. Sure, we can put fuel on boats, trucks, and trains, but many of the circumstances that would disrupt the pipelines would also threaten to disrupt highway traffic, the railroads, or the functioning of our ports. And there are only so many tanker trucks and oil barges: One of the reasons why Florida’s gasoline market is so tight is that the fleet serving its markets is not very large and enjoys relatively little surplus capacity. If not exactly fragile, these systems certainly are not what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call “antifragile,” and it surely has occurred to the generals in Pyongyang and the ayatollahs in Iran that there are ways to disrupt them well short of something so dramatic as a nuclear weapon. But there are nuclear weapons in the world, too.

There are complex questions involved in this, but where the energy infrastructure is concerned, there is one fairly obvious solution: more. More pipelines, more refineries, more generating capacity, more nuclear plants, more production. This is not a call for a gigantic federal infrastructure project or a five-year plan. It is a call to let markets work. The United States is blessed with enormous stores of oil, natural gas, coal, and other energy resources, but we do not make nearly as extensive or efficient use of them as we could. The Trump administration, especially EPA chief Scott Pruitt, deserves some credit for taking baby steps in the right direction, for example by approving the Keystone XL pipeline. But there is much more to be done, from building pipelines to splitting uranium atoms, and the regulatory apparatus remains a critical obstacle.