From Algeria to Venezuela, leaders of OPEC nations must be paying off bets made with one another during the past several weeks. Imagine the phone calls:

"See, sheik, I told you those stupid Americans would forget about energy policy once we gave them a temporary break. Now, pay up on that bet. We shook on it, remember, after you said we'd gone too far this time."

It's true: Once again, OPEC may have gotten away with keeping us hooked on foreign oil. With gasoline prices in the $1.80 range, many of us have decided $4 was just a bad dream. Some people who were talking about hybrids last summer are shopping for SUVs with the biggest engines available.

That's why we have "leaders," of course. They're the people in government who are supposed to help us do what's best for us, even when we don't recognize it.

President-elect Barack Obama is, according to his many admirers, our most fearless, farsighted leader. We'll see.

And we may see quickly. A litmus test of sorts already exists in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Obama, to his credit, understands that we need a radical new energy policy. The big question is whether he understands the difference between one that will please liberals and one that will work.

Liberals in Congress are talking about a new "economic stimulus" bill, costing as much as $600 billion. A substantial portion of the money would be used to promote "renewable energy." That means wind power, solar power, etc. It does not mean coal.

America would shut down immediately and catastrophically without coal, of course. More than 50 percent of our electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants. Some of those wonderful electric and hybrid cars everyone seems to like run on - you guessed it - power from coal plants.

Thoughtful people have said for years that we ought to be producing liquid and gaseous fuels from coal. But to date, no one has gotten really serious about it. Low-priced petroleum makes a major campaign of building coal liquefaction and gasification plants even less likely.

Therein comes the litmus test.

Last summer, U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., was joined by other rational lawmakers in introducing a bill that would mandate production of 6 billion gallons of coal-to-liquid fuel by 2022.

It is a very, very modest goal - in comparison with requirements for production of ethanol. But it's a start.

Will Obama and his liberal chums in Congress support the bill? That's the test. It's sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere on Capitol Hill, just waiting for the green light from the new regime.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., have said they hope to have the "stimulus" bill ready for Obama's signature when he takes office Jan. 20. That bill isn't even written. Capito's is. It would be just a matter of bringing it up for a vote for it, too, to be signed into law on Jan. 21.

Will Congress do it? Not if Pelosi and Reid, who absolutely hate coal, have their way. But they would go along with the measure if Obama sent word that he'd like to see it on his desk early in January. Now, in case it has escaped your notice, Obama gets what Obama wants.

So that's the question: Was Obama serious about making coal an integral part of a new energy policy? Or were the critics - yours truly among them - right in cautioning that his praise for coal was just politics?

We'll see. In the meantime, I wonder what the betting among OPEC leaders is in regard to coal.

Myer can be reached at myer@theintelligencer.net.