In the Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant, Grasshopper fiddles away the summer months while Ant stockpiles food for the winter.

When snow and ice cover the earth, Grasshopper is miserably cold and hungry while Ant is warm and fully fed inside his ant hill.

When it comes to finding alternatives to fossil fuels, the United States is like the grasshopper.

During the week, millions of Americans can be seen blissfully driving their H2 Hummers, Ford Expeditions, Lincoln Navigators, Cadillac Escalades and umpteen different models of SUVs to and from work – usually with just one person in each vehicle – and all the while complaining that the $4.50 per gallon they are paying at the fuel pump is cutting into their daily allowance for $5 Starbucks venti lattes.

On weekends, those same Americans are either out at the lake tooling around in their 250 horsepower bass boats or clogging up the mountain roads with their big-as-a-barn luxury motorhomes and custom-converted buses that get a whopping 5 to 8 miles to the gallon.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world is hard at work investing in sustainable energy, according to a United Nations report released Tuesday, July 1.

In 2007, global investment in sustainable energy amounted to $148 billion, a 60 percent jump from 2006. By 2020, it is estimated that amount will grow to $600 billion, according to New Energy Finance, a consultant to the United Nation’s Environment Programme.

Public investment in wind-generated energy topped $11 billion globally in 2007, but none of that came from the United States. Rather, Iberenova, a publicly traded company that develops wind generators, chose to launch their initial public offering in December 2007 in Spain.

Investment in solar companies grew by $9 billion during 2007, thanks largely to a consortium of Chinese companies who, get this, are aiming their products for the U.S. market.

Look for them soon on the shelves of your neighborhood Wal-Mart.

Biomass and waste-to-energy technologies expanded by a whopping 432 percent, but not in the United States where we still plant our garbage in landfills and cover it up with a fresh layer of dirt.

In Europe, sustainable energy added 31 gigawatts to that region’s capacity, a growth of 23 percent.

Meanwhile, drought-stricken California is still debating whether to spend increasingly rare bond funds on additional reservoirs or simply increase the holding capacity of existing catch basins regardless of the cost to surrounding communities, resorts and natural resources.

Developing nations are a widening target of new investment that grew 22 percent to $26 billion between 2004 and 2007.

Back home, the U.S. Congress finally lifted its ban on solar applications on public land.

And so it goes. Americans continue to fiddle while the rest of the world is working like ants to invest, invent, expand and broadening their alternative energy choices.

Come winter we’re going to wish we had made other plans, I’ll bet.

Editor’s Note: Aesop’s fables refers to a collection of short morality tales credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620–560 B.C.