The Twins, for those who do not devote as much attention to the sports pages as our president, have compiled the second-best record in baseball while spending considerably less on their payroll than any other team. The New York Yankees, for example, pay each of their 25 players an average of $2.6 million more per year than the Twins.

"Their cost per win is astounding," marveled Bush. "It serves as a good example of what frugality can do for the nation."

The audience laughed. As well they should. The energy speech Bush went on to deliver was about as frugal as George Steinbrenner on a megalomaniacal spending jag.

"America needs to generate more electricity," the president declared. "A high-tech economy is a high electricity-consumption economy."

Bush went on to call for more oil, coal, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear, biomass and geothermal power. In short, anything to keep the cell phones, laptops, microwaves, CD players, pagers, Walkmans, VCRs -- let alone automobiles and factories -- humming.

The concept of simply doing less is not a part of the thinking. Even the oil executives in the Bush White House praise "energy efficiency" (the new euphemism for conservation). But when Bush talked about efficiency in St. Paul,

he assured everybody that "conservation does not mean doing without."

Americans have no interest in doing without, as U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski, the Republican from Alaska who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, recently explained.

"I'm a big guy, and I don't like to get into a small car because I'm not comfortable," Murkowski said. "Do you want government to dictate to you the type of an automobile you have to have?"

Apparently not. And many Democrats agree. Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe, according to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, sped around Washington to denounce Bush's energy plan in a Cadillac Escalade, a 5, 800-pound SUV that gets about 12 miles to the gallon. (The DNC insisted the McAuliffe personally paid $5,000 to make sure the vehicle met California's tough emission standards, even though it was being driven on the East Coast.)

There is nothing partisan about America's refusal to cut back. Asked last week whether people should consider getting out of their SUVs, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., shook his head, volunteering that he doesn't see tougher automobile emission standards "as the panacea the way others do."

Even the environmental community, which has preached conservation for decades, seems to well understand, as one insider put it, that "pain is bad politics."

The day Bush's plan was released, leaders of more than a dozen environmental organizations gathered at a swank Washington hotel to denounce its call for new oil drilling and the weakened environmental regulations. But asked pointedly about whether Americans ought to get out their gas-guzzling SUVs, not a single one frowned on America's consumption habits.

Energy is part of what makes life worth living. It is a blessing to live in a country which can afford to consume a quarter of the globe's energy. From Disc-Mans to defibrillators, much of what separates people from monkeys is our ability to find the correct size batteries.

But it may be misleading to say we are experiencing an energy crisis. The first chart in Bush's energy plan shows that there would be no shortage if people stopped demanding more and more each year. We would not feel as if we were in a crisis if we controlled our ever-growing appetite.

Americans may marvel at frugality. But the truth is that more prefer rooting for the Yankees than the Twins. Especially the man with the Texas-size appetite in the White House.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

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