Through Rose Garden Glasses

Americans are short on memory and long on greed. It's a dangerous combination that makes us ill-prepared to deal with a looming energy crisis caused by a rapidly growing global demand for oil.

We are pocketbook activists when it comes to energy conservation.

When gasoline prices are low, we guzzle the stuff. Fuel-efficient cars, which have been plentiful since the mid-1970s, go begging for customers, often accounting for less than 5 percent of annual U.S. vehicle sales.

We lust for horsepower, the more the merrier. There is no such thing as too much horsepower in times of cheap fuel. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Va-va-varroom!

No car or truck is too big. No house is too large. No exurb is too far from central work areas. Got a million bucks? We've got your mini-mansion, replete with an atrium that is good for nothing except heating and cooling. You can have a two-car, three-car or four-car garage. You'll need that many cars, because the builders who put up your housing development and the politicians who approved it were looking at more highways and streets instead of rails for efficient mass transportation.

What the heck? Gasoline here is cheap, about a third of what it costs in Europe, cheaper than it is in Japan. In fact, we have the cheapest gasoline in the developed world.

Go ahead. Live it up. Guzzle!

And we do so happily, as we are doing yet again, now that the illusory good times of cheap U.S. gasoline have returned -- just in time for national elections in November.

At $2.26 a gallon for regular unleaded in early October, overall gasoline prices in the United States are 58.7 cents lower now than they were a year ago, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

At $2.24 a gallon, the price for regular unleaded gasoline on the East Coast is 64.2 cents a gallon lower in early October than it was at the same time last year, according to the EIA.

Do you remember last year's agony? Do you remember the soaring gasoline prices of early summer, when many people were dumping the sport-utility vehicles that they bought of their own free wills, when they were erroneously blaming "Detroit" for making nothing except gas guzzlers, when they were screaming and yelling at our Do-Nothing Congress to do something?

Do you remember President Bush's State of the Union address last January, the one he gave after being briefed by key administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, on the problems presented by growing global demand for diminishing oil supplies?