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People usually don't react to a problem until it approaches the proportions of a disaster.

Jefferson made reference to this in the Declaration of Independence:"All experience hath shown," he wrote, "that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves." So we stumble along from one crisis to another, unable or unwilling to take the long view and solve problems before they become looming catastrophes. Take the current furor over rising gasoline prices, for example.

We have known since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 that America's dependence on imported oil was a grave weakness. In those days of long lines at gasoline stations, politicians and pundits loudly proclaimed that the U.S. should become "energy independent." Promising new technologies were touted. Energy conservation was encouraged by tax breaks.

And then it all went away.

The embargo ended, gasoline prices came down, and the automobile industry found that it could sell sport utility vehicles that were exempted from federal gas mileage requirements because they weren't automobiles — they were trucks! I'm reminded of this by a newspaper clipping my sharp-eyed wife pulled out of a file cabinet she was cleaning. It was written by the esteemed journalist Tad Szulc and titled, "Will We Run out of Gas?" Its main illustration showed frustrated Los Angeles residents pushing a car with an empty gas tank toward a service station. The article appeared in Parade magazine on July 19, 1998.

Yet here we are, in 2006, with gas-guzzling SUVs clogging the highways (and blocking your view when you're behind one) and gasoline prices rising above three dollars per gallon.

Those promising new technologies of the 1970s — hybrid engines, hydrogen-fueled cars, ethanol fuel from corn — have hardly advanced over the past 30-some years. When farsighted forecasters urged their development, industry and government replied that it would take 10 years or more to make them practical.

That was 32 years ago! How high will gasoline prices have to go, how deeply enmeshed in Middle East wars will we have to get ourselves, before we use our brains to produce cars that don't depend on gasoline? Our inability to deal with problems before they become disasters doesn't happen only on the national or international scale. There are plenty of local examples, too.

Take the traffic signal at Immokalee Road and Oakes Boulevard. County transportation officials have decided the lights should be removed.

That intersection is close to Interstate 75; it is heavily used. Oakes Boulevard is a convenient thoroughfare between Immokalee and Vanderbilt Beach Roads. Immokalee Road is itself a major east-west artery.

The Immokalee-Oakes intersection will be a dangerous spot without a traffic signal to control left turns off Immokalee and cars either crossing Immokalee or entering it from Oakes. There are going to be traffic accidents there. People will get hurt, maybe killed.

And maybe then the traffic lights will go up again. But, most likely, not before a tragedy or two.

We can see the same lack of forethought on the global scale, as well.

For more than a decade now, scientists have been warning that global climate is warming, and we should be prepared for significant climate change.

What have we done about it? Jawboning, mostly.

Some people argue that global warming is a myth, a dastardly plot by Third World collectivists to euchre us out of our wealth while nations such as China and India industrialize at breakneck speed without any environmental controls at all.

It's not a myth. Last year was the all-time warmest on record. Last month was the warmest April ever.

The elected officials of New Orleans knew that their city was vulnerable to flooding in the event of a major hit from a hurricane.

Much of the city is below sea level, and sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain, with the mighty Mississippi River weaving past, to boot.

Did they prepare for a disaster? Did they strengthen their levees? Did they prepare an adequate evacuation program? No to all of the above.

Did they spend money allocated for rebuilding those levees on a gambling casino? Yes, they certainly did.

The disaster came. New Orleans was flooded. What response did the elected officials make? Finger-pointing, after the fact. We're heading down the same sorry road when it comes to global warming. As Mark Twain said about the weather, everybody talks about global warming, but nobody does anything about it.

Except finger-pointing.

Poor nations point to the energy use of rich nations with a mixture of accusation and jealousy; environmentalists point to profit-hungry big corporations and profligate owners of gas-guzzlers; et cetera, et more cetera.

Global warming is caused at least in part by burning fossil fuels. The steady rise in the Earth's average temperature parallels quite closely the steady rise in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere through our tailpipes and chimneys.

If we're serious about alleviating global warming, we should move as swiftly as practicable away from burning petroleum and coal and natural gas. We should switch to nuclear energy to generate electricity, solar and wind energy wherever we can, and new fuels such as hydrogen to power our cars and trucks and buses.

We're talking about it, but we're not doing it. There is no massive, organized movement in industry or government to wean us away from fossil fuels. And there won't be, probably, as long as the petroleum and automotive industry control so much of Congress and the White House.

Of course, when sea levels start to rise steeply and every coastal city in the world is threatened with flooding, when Florida and much of the Gulf Coast start to go underwater, when the nation's electrical power grid shorts out — then we'll try to do something about global warming.

But by then it may well be too late.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 110 books, including the Asteroid Wars Trilogy, which shows how global warming might inundate the Earth. Bova's Web site address is www.benbova.com.