It’s hard not to be exasperated and even a little frightened by the Senate’s selfishly partisan approach to the nation’s energy challenge in the days leading up to its August recess. Given one last shot at taking modest but meaningful steps to deal with tightening oil supplies and climate change, the Senate instead settled for a schoolyard blame game whose main purpose was to exploit public dismay over rising gasoline prices for short-term political gain. Senate Republicans tried to leverage voters’ anguish by offering proposals that furthered their unexamined strategy to expand offshore drilling. The Democrats responded by pinning the blame for the surge in oil prices on financial speculators, and offering a bill to curb trading. The usual bogeymen appeared, with Republicans’ accusing environmentalists of locking up precious oil supplies and the Democrats’ blaming Wall Street.

These competing bills provided a dashing image of senators hard at work, but neither provided any hope of relief at the pump for beleaguered constituents. The oil industry already has access to fourth-fifths of the nation’s recoverable offshore resources, mostly off Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico, and drilling the forbidden areas — protected by a longstanding Congressional moratorium that President Bush is trying to lift — would make only a marginal difference in prices 15 years down the road.

As to the speculators so reviled by the Democrats, most economists believe that they have little or nothing to do with oil prices.

This political theater — for that is all it was — exacted a price. It diverted the nation from the intellectually rigorous debate over energy policy it needs to have (and should have) in an election year, while sparing the Senate from developing serious policies that could help set the country on a more energy-efficient and environmentally sound course.

Among the victims of this poisonous bickering were serious proposals from Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, that would have provided an estimated $18 billion for alternative and renewable energy sources. Much of this money would have extended tax credits, set to expire in December, that are vital to the further development of climate-friendly sources of energy like wind and solar power, while providing new credits for plug-in hybrid cars that over time could actually make a difference in fuel prices.

The most vivid symbol of the Senate’s ineptitude was the majority leader, Harry Reid, who tried to make the best of a terrible two weeks by asking his opposite number, Mitch McConnell, to join him in an “energy summit” in Las Vegas. From one perspective, given the farce we have just witnessed, it makes sense to move the debate over energy policy as far from Washington as possible, even to an environment as distant from reality as Las Vegas. But Mr. Reid has to know how silly this looks and what it really says about the Senate’s capacity for action.

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