America is so lucky in its supplies of energy. Coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear -- we've got them all. Can't be fully enjoyed, though. The blessings come with a dark side, and we're not allowed to forget it.

It is environmental orthodoxy that our major uses of energy -- to run automobiles and power plants -- are warming the world catastrophically and even irreversibly. Oceans are rising, glaciers melting, storms and floods growing deadlier, and it's all our fuels' fault.

Thus may the most productive economic system in the world finally be brought down. Communism couldn't do it. The welfare state couldn't do it (but keeps trying). Environmental fears could do it.

It's almost incredible. "Fossil" fuels employ millions and keep everything running. "Green" energy, which might replace a sliver of the need, employ thousands and only while taxpayer subsidies keep coming.

A huge new supply of gas deep in the shales of Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York ought to be good news. It's bad news. It means we'll only have more to burn. No help with the habit.

Hundreds of years worth of coal lie beneath America, but burning it releases invisible poisons (now that the visible soot is practically gone). Mercury, arsenic and carbon dioxide, the "greenhouse gas" that makes the Earth a hot house, how so average minds choose among scientists debating all that?

Huge supplies of oil in Canada, just across the border, must be more bad news, never mind a prospective 20,000 U.S. jobs and an 1,800-mile pipeline (which would use lots of American steel).

Listen to the New Yorker magazine's Nov. 28 edition. "If the pipeline was built, it would hasten the extraction of exceptionally dirty crude oil, using huge amounts of water and heat from the tar sands of Alberta, which would then be piped across the United States (to Texas), where it would be refined and burned as fuel, releasing a vast new volume of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere."

"What would be the effect on the climate?" asked the mag's man on the scene.

"Hansen (a climate scientist) replied, 'Essentially, it's game over for the planet.'"

Game over• For the whole world• In the nick of time, we're told, environmental groups saddled up and a march of 12,000 "encircled the White House" on Nov. 6. President Obama got the message. He'll delay a decision on the pipeline permit until 2013 (after his supposed re-election). Sorry, 20,000 job seekers.

Wonderful, isn't it, how conjectural dooms are able to hold off solid economic advances• Exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is impeded by federal bureaucrats terrified of, or hand-in-glove with, environmental pressurists.

You wouldn't think oil and gas production had added 200,000 employees since 2003, up 80 percent, or "more than one in five of all net new private jobs," according to the Wall Street Journal. The techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") are paying off without a single "job creation" loan guarantee for our all-thumbs Energy Department. North Dakota has 200 rigs pumping and 16,000 job openings. Pennsylvania's slice of the Marcellus shale grew 18,000 jobs the first half of this year.

It's Americans' choice: Go with the boom or believe the doom?

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