The devastation wrought by Katrina and Rita was a loud wake-up call for Americans. Now they know their South American coffee and bananas come in from and their Midwestern corn and wheat ship out of New Orleans. They now know the Gulf of Mexico supplies a great deal of the country's domestic crude oil and natural gas. And, they've learned that all of this precious energy comes ashore through pipelines into processing plants and refineries along the Louisiana and Texas coasts. They also now know that we pump crude oil, not gasoline, from the ground. And that all the oil tankers in the world at U.S. ports or the release of U.S. strategic oil reserves can't help our refining-capacity shortfall. Someone has hopefully told Donald Trump this by now; he told Jay Leno and a cheering southern Californian audience after Katrina that the U.S. should talk to Saudi Arabia about sending us more oil to relieve gasoline prices. Now Americans may get it. But what will they do about it? History tells us Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Was he callous, or so stumped he just didn't know what to do? America's citizens and politicians alike have been fiddling too, while the U.S. energy picture has grown untenable. I was going to write this month, with awe, that the resilient U.S. economy grew in first-half 2005 despite that oil prices have doubled since 2004 and natural gas prices have increased even more. The importance of the Gulf Coast is much more awesome. It takes a disaster such as Katrina to bring home the energy facts that many Americans have been denying and have had to own up to in the face of images of destruction of Gulf platforms, drilling rigs and refineries. Shell's Mars platform, one of the biggest in the Gulf and designed to take 71-foot waves and 140-mile-an-hour wind, withstood the power of Katrina while it reached Category 5 and a low pressure of 902 millibars. Helmerich & Payne's Rig 201 on this platform lost its entire derrick. A Diamond Offshore jack-up is buried on the beach of Dauphin Island, Alabama. A GlobalSantaFe semi-submersible was grounded in shallow water at the mouth of the Mississippi River. A Pemex semi-sub in drydock at Mobile, Alabama, got national attention as it was lodged by surge water under the Cochrane Bridge. "Is it leaking oil?" a national TV reporter asked. All the world that was listening learned that drilling rigs don't transport crude oil. Another lesson learned, many more to go. The platforms, refineries, rigs, roads and ports can be repaired. The heart-breaking tragedy is the long-term damage to the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, some of it irreparably. On the Louisiana toe, the transition zone is now truly offshore. Newly formed, river-delta land, if you use the term loosely, has been reclaimed by the Gulf south of Empire and Venice, important bases of offshore operations. This storm, and the approach of Rita at press time, will take a long-term toll on U.S. energy infrastructure. If high gasoline prices force consumers to reprioritize spending, so has Katrina focused federal, state and local governments. She will galvanize the private sector. A word of warning: the recently approved energy act is not the safe harbor American consumers need, but it is a beginning that should be taken far enough, fast enough, to increase U.S. energy resources (or wean us from wasting them). It has become tougher, more time-consuming and more expensive to find hydrocarbons that are economic to produce. Harold Korell, chief executive of Southwestern Energy, told me this past summer, "The whole industry has changed. We used to drill for darcies. Then we looked at millidarcies. "Now we are left drilling for nano-darcies. There's a lot of gas in those tight shales, but it will take a lot to get it out. And you can't go beyond that."