Just what will it take, exactly, for Americans to conserve fuel?

Crude oil is creeping toward $60 a barrel, pushing up the cost of heating oil, gasoline and kerosene.

At some point – and we’re just not there yet – the cost will force lowered consumption, but not before we get sick of shelling out precious dollars. The Senate had an opportunity Friday to help, but didn’t.

Senators rejected a proposal, as part of the much-fought-over energy bill, to raise fuel efficiency standards for SUVs and light trucks.

If the proposal of Sens. Olympia Snowe and Dianne Feinstein to match light trucks to passenger car fuel efficiency by 2011 had been adopted, we could have saved 800,000 barrels of oil per day by 2015. That’s about 4 percent of the current daily oil consumption.

Knowing SUVs continue to gain in the new car market, the Senate gave Americans permission, a blessing even, to continue guzzling gas.

It’s grossly wasteful.

The auto industry, in lobbying against government-mandated fuel efficiency standards, has once again donned its Chicken Little suit. The industry has worn the suit before, in Sen. Edmund Muskie’s day.

Muskie’s push to restrict pollution and clean our air was certain to bust the auto industry, or so the Chicken Little lobbyists cried. It was an empty alarm. Americans are driving more cars and driving them farther than ever before.

There is little danger that car-loving Americans will garage their vehicles. We’ve become too dependent on them.

What makes the Senate vote so disturbing is that the technology is already available to increase SUV fuel efficiency, so there is no viable argument not to act.

The energy bill is short on conservation and long on rhetoric.

In fact, senators acknowledge, according to the Associated Press, that the 1,000-page energy bill – when complete – “would do nothing in the short term to drive down high gasoline and other energy prices or significantly reduce America’s growing reliance on foreign oil.”

If that’s true, why bother passing the energy bill at all?