President George W. Bush, responding to criticism that his energy policy, has ordered federal employees on the West Coast to conserve electricity.

What an innovative idea!

The directive includes such common-sense measures as raising thermostats, not heating and cooling unused spaces, switching off escalators and using the stairs, and — a really bold move — turning off excess lighting.

These are all good ideas, and they’re tricks that those of us who sign the checks for our own utility bills have long used. That same group of people knows that while they’ll whittle away a small portion of our energy usage, such conservation measures are not, on their own, sufficient to get California out of the mess it’s currently experiencing.

Furthermore, human nature being what it is, consumers of a commodity that’s in limited supply — such as electricity in California or water across the Southwest — tend to hold the fatalistic belief that conservation just shifts commodities to someone else, and we’re all understandably reluctant to terminate a record of historical usage of something we might need again some day.

What we need is a dramatic and permanent revision of that attitude, so that conservation measures are not seen as temporary annoyances but as improvements that have an ethical basis. The last time we had an "energy crisis," that one caused by Mideastern politics, we were able to implement very impressive policies that actually resulted in considerable efficiencies. Remember cars that went 45 miles on a gallon of gas? The government promoted research into fuel efficiency, and scientists and engineers responded.

Then the availability of oil improved, and research into those topics dwindled. It’s now possible to visit space recreationally; can it really be impossible to design a vehicle that combines acceptable gas mileage with room for four ordinary-size adults? Of course it cannot, nor can it be impossible to utilize other forms of energy economically. Yet research into solar and wind power has diminished as well, and we have let safety concerns sideline nuclear power, rather than trying to develop safeguards that make it useable.

We have a great deal of technology that we don’t utilize effectively. Inexpensive motion sensors — the kind many people have on the porch lights — mean that unlit rooms are no longer unsafe. In terms of science, we’ve made remarkable strides since the last energy crisis. In attitude, though, we’ve lapsed right back to where we were in the middle of the past century.

Current energy policy, with its emphasis on production of resources that are so obviously finite, feeds right into the folly that we should use our resources while we can, before someone else does or before some environmentalist manages to get their use outlawed. The utility of such a policy is obviously limited. Eventually we will run out of some commodities and the costs of using others — possibly including petroleum — will outweigh the associated benefits.