Americans have never seen clearly when it came to gas prices.

For decades we became accustomed to an opulent supply and, accordingly, prices that on the global scale seemed uncommonly low. Over the years, market shifts, taxation, international relations and other factors have combined to drive the price upward. In more recent months, the rise has been drastic enough to ratchet the issue up several notches on the scale of political talking-points.

But how much of this talking is about conservation, about changing the way we think about fossil fuels? Not nearly enough.

This week President Bush put a temporary stopper in oil deposits flowing into the national strategic petroleum reserve to free more oil so prices might drop a bit. There's also been a lot of saber-rattling by the White House as well as Congress — on both sides of the aisle — about probing for price gouging and rescinding tax breaks for an industry making steep profits.

There's nothing wrong with these moves; it's a relief, in fact, to hear the administration address Big Oil in something other than reverential terms. But principally these steps serve only as political gestures aimed at calming the disquieted voters.

Gas prices will never roll back to the way they were — not on a permanent basis, anyway. Supplies of an unrenewable resource are diminishing while demand continues to rise. We can all do the math.

And yet we remain in a kind of national state of denial. Flip on the TV and click through the car commercials, and there's still a lot more noisemaking about how many horses are under the hood than about miles per gallon.

Even locally, the rhetoric is all about how the gas cap failed to keep prices low, when that was never the promise of the cap. The law was set up to link local wholesale prices to those in selected Mainland markets so that our prices would more or less track with theirs. At the moment, the problem of high prices is a national concern, so the gas cap can't be Hawai'i's escape hatch.

What's needed is leadership, in the private as well as public sectors, that will reward conservation and promote the development of alternative energy. And all of us need to consider carpooling and other conservation options.

And leaders had better start now. Turning the ship is a slow maneuver, and before too long, voters will start screaming for a permanent solution. Industry analysts expect that there won't be a sea change in public attitudes until per-gallon prices hit the $4 mark.

It won't be long now.