Gasoline prices are up. Isn’t that thrilling?

We haven’t caught Western Europe yet, where they’re shelling out $7 a gallon. It’s going to take a lot more lousy policymaking to get there, but we can do it.

For today, though, let’s give ourselves a well-deserved pat on the back for some real progress. Sometimes, you’ve just got to stop and smell the ethanol.

We are oh-so-close to the day when abandoned monster pickups become roadside planters, 3-mile-per-gallon semis are museum pieces and we can pay a whole lot more not just for gas, but for everything.

You would think that the environmentalists we have to thank for so much of this – the ones who envision “walkable” cities bursting with eco-friendly tenements for car-free Americans, while the prairie reclaims the suburbs – would have hired a brass band by now.

They’re smart enough to keep a low profile, though, and some of their most dedicated political surrogates are feigning anger at the pain American drivers are feeling and putting the blame wherever it’s politically convenient.

Hillary Clinton, currently campaigning as Tough Hillary, has been telling her audiences, “We’re going to go right at OPEC…They can no longer be a cartel.”

That’s up to her? She’s got a better shot at using smart bombs to obliterate Iran than using smart lawyers to obliterate OPEC.

OPEC is only part of the problem, anyway, and it’s a part beyond our control. A great deal of the problem is green-addled, gullible us.

We, and our political representatives, have let ourselves get talked out of drilling for our own oil because doing so might scare the fish and inconvenience the caribou. Sitting under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 10 billion barrels of oil. That’s about 15 years worth of imports from Saudi Arabia. And it will continue to sit until we begin to prize our freedom of movement more than the caribou’s.

We’ve let ourselves get talked out of a lot of oil refining capacity, because refineries are yucky.

We’ve let ourselves get talked into producing all kinds of exotic mixtures of gasoline, sold according to season, that drive up prices of both food and fuel. And while we feed corn to their gas tanks, food riots break out elsewhere.

(Caribou steaks, anyone?)

Now the eco-warriors and the big corporations (aren’t we supposed to hate them?) that stand to profit (aren’t we supposed to hate people who make money?) from getting picked by government as winners in the “renewable” energy sweepstakes want to talk us into raising consumer costs even more – a lot more.

They’ve finally got sweet-tempered, whale-saving, can-recycling, post-industrial Americans over a $120 barrel, and they want to sell us government subsidized gadgets not ready for market or not yet thought of.

Please.

If windmills were the answer, there would be forests of them, all over the place, run by private industry at a profit.

Meanwhile, Congress talks of making it even more expensive for the remaining U.S. refineries to do their work, making it even harder to produce electricity from coal, making it even more difficult for what remains of U.S. manufacturing to survive.

All of those wrong turns are found in the Lieberman-Warner anti-global-warming bill, now working its way through the Senate. In a way, it’s kind of cute: a do-nothing Congress out to solve a non-problem. But if it passes, it will be devastating.

And there’s talk about a windfall profits tax on oil companies. And who do you suppose would really pay that? Not the oil companies: $4.50 a gallon at the pump, here we come. Yippee!

The supply of oil is both finite and artificially limited, and it’s in greater demand than ever, so prices are up. But until someone comes up with a better way to power the world – a job government is both too stupid and too grasping to do properly – let’s ease the self-inflicted pain.

We need to drill a lot more, refine a lot more and take an ax to regulatory red tape.

Kevin O’Brien is deputy editorial page director of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. E-mail [email protected].