For Jeff Bingaman, the upcoming 111th Congress — and the next few to follow — offer his greatest opportunity to serve his country — as well as his greatest challenge.

Bingaman is chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Chances are he'll keep that position if Democrats retain control of Capitol Hill next month. With luck, his party will win 60 seats in the Senate, giving that deliberative body the supermajority it would take to avoid Republican filibusters of the many reforms our nation needs.

The ones Bingaman could lead lie in energy, and in our most precious resource: water.

As the senator well knows, water and energy, for the time being, are inseparable. Thanks to an excellent article in the current issue of Scientific American, more people — politicians and their taxpaying supporters — might come to realize it, too.

The article's author, Michael Webber, puts it well: We consume massive quantities of water to generate energy and we consume massive quantities of energy to deliver clean water.

Nowhere is that clearer than in New Mexico, where coal-fired steam generators, close to coal supplies but wastefully far from electricity consumers, are our main source of power. According to Scientific American, it takes somewhere between 21,000 and 50,000 gallons of water to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity — enough coal to power perhaps 600 homes.

In the fast-growing Southwest, water already is running short. Yet the push for more coal-steam generators is on — in the Four Corners area and along the already-overdrawn Río Grande. Nuclear power, too, is gaining more supporters, even though it needs lots of water. In Arizona, the answer has been recycled water — but, as the demand for treated effluent grows, will there be enough to supply power-plant needs?

The other great consumer of water is agriculture — which, in New Mexico, is becoming an ever-smaller part of our state's economy, but which, in the north and in many other areas, plays a crucial cultural and environmental role.

How to keep our rivers, creeks and acequias flowing when the demand for electricity keeps rising?

In our sunny and windy state, some answers should be obvious: Wind generators and solar power are emerging. Out in the plains oilman T. Boone Pickens is pitching massive wind farms.

Can science and technology improve on today's wind- and solar-power systems? Surely they can.

Beyond water use are issues like global warming and that political canard, "dependence on foreign oil." We've got to be less dependent on anyone's oil — and coal, too, before we choke our planet to death.

As Barack Obama, Tom Udall and many others
seeking roles in America's leadership are urging, we've got to have a multi-faceted approach to energy that's far more sustainable than today's. And that, it's becoming clearer, means less dependence on water
to generate it.

Sen. Bingaman — and Sen. Udall, if he's chosen to replace Pete Domenici — should be in excellent position to adjust America's energy goals from hydrocarbon dependence to longer-term supplies. Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, longtime beneficiaries of congressional funding, must devote more of their enormous talent to what's known today as alternative energy — but what tomorrow should be routine sources.

This will take planning — and laws backing it up. It'll take money, too — and there's little of it left. Yet failure to act costs our country more every day.

In his gentlemanly manner, Jeff Bingaman has been making that case for years. If he gains the congressional and executive allies America might choose just over a week from now, he can — and must — lead a revolution in resources and energy.