The U.S. is Running Out of Energy.

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The cost was put at $20 billion. As Congress is given to do after announcing grand projects, it slimmed down appropriations to less than $10 billion. U.S. researchers eventually teamed up with colleagues in several countries, but in 1998 Congress pulled the plug on the consortium, contending that it was too expensive. President Bush, however, reversed that decision. The White House announced last January that the U.S. "will join ... an ambitious international research project to harness the promise of fusion energy, the same form of energy that powers the sun. America will join negotiations with Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and China to create the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). This will be the largest and most technologically sophisticated fusion experiment in the world." Actually, it's the same consortium to which the U.S. had been party in the 1990s and from which it then bailed out.

So it is that the U.S. is likely to be faced with recurring oil and natural-gas crises for some years to come. Their duration and severity remain to be seen. But volatile prices--as with gasoline during the Iraqi war, natural gas last winter and electricity in 2000--are all but guaranteed. The result is a hidden tax of tens of billions of dollars on American consumers. Just how many billions depends on a catalog of variables ranging from the harshness of the weather to unfolding events in the Middle East. More important, it depends on whether Congress and the White House, Democrats and Republicans, come up with a thoughtful energy policy that imposes tough conservation and efficiency measures, promotes research to develop one or two realistic alternative energy forms in commercial quantities and encourages production from a mix of existing energy sources. But none of this will be worth the effort unless the U.S. sticks with a plan long enough for it to pay off. --With reporting by Laura Karmatz/New York and Eric Roston/Washington, with research by Joan Levinstein/New York