With a bill passed by the House and about to be passed by the Senate for signature by President George W. Bush, the American people are going to be asked to believe that America's energy situation is on the way to being improved.

Unfortunately that is only a little bit true. It isn't the ordinary American who will benefit from this bill. He will continue to get hosed at the tank, pay higher heating bills and pay higher prices for every item that has an energy component in its cost -- which is to say, just about everything.

It will be the oil companies, their cups already running over as a result of oil having soared above $60 a barrel, and the oil-producing countries, those wonderful people who seem to provide an unsettling number of the warriors on the other side -- in what the Bush administration is now calling "the violent struggle against global extremism" to get our minds off the war -- who will profit from the Bush energy bill.

It should not be forgotten that the Bush effort started out in a first-term meeting between Vice President Dick Cheney and a choice group of oil company executives, probably including Enron's Kenneth Lay, whose names the Bush administration fought in court successfully to keep from the American public.

Americans were then distracted mightily by the prospect that the bill might authorize drilling by the companies in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The current bill does not include this authority; it was cleverly excluded from the final form of the bill in order that the administration might claim it isn't as bad as it could have been. The elk, moose and polar bears are saved; it's just the consumer who gets skinned and nailed to the wall.

For the bill does not call for the lowering of gas consumption standards that is probably the only road to reducing American petroleum imports, not to mention to attacking the global warming problem. Neither Mr. Bush nor the spineless Congress wanted to spoil the joy of the American driver at paying $70 to fill his SUV tank.

And the bill provides tax breaks to the oil companies for searching for and pumping more oil. First of all, nobody should get any tax breaks with the United States facing a $300- or $400-billion budget deficit because of the tax reductions the Bush administration has already given to the rich. But the oil companies, rolling in the record profits that the rise in world price has given them, should be the very last to get $11.5 billion in new tax breaks.

There are some positive elements in the bill. Use of renewable fuels such as wind and solar power and ethanol is encouraged as is nuclear power plant construction.

But all of this is small. Gas prices will continue to rise. The oil companies will make even larger profits. The Bush administration and the campaign finance-fed members of Congress will continue to prosper.

Perhaps worst of all, the more than four years it took to pass this energy bill makes it unlikely that anyone will revisit this vital issue for a long time to come. Passage of this bill helps the companies and their owners, not the ordinary American who has to run his car and heat his house.