The president’s decision this week to create a 2 million-barrel heating oil reserve for the Northeast is a necessary short-term move, even as OPEC’s member nations feud over increasing oil production.

President Clinton said he would draw the fuel from the 586 million barrel Strategic Oil Reserve that the United States already has stockpiled, swapping that oil for a Northeast reserve. Congress has to grant the president the authority to make the withdrawal and create the region-specific reserve.

As the president noted in creating the reserve, it won’t stand up, on its own, to the rigors of an entire winter. But it could be released to temporarily drop the cost of heating oil if supplies remain short and prices remain higher this winter. So long as the reserve is taken in context, it’s a good idea. The reserve will not ensure stable supplies of heating oil for an entire winter; the entire Strategic Petroleum Reserve couldn’t see U.S. oil needs through much more than a month and a half. But if employed wisely, it could provide price relief.

Further, the reserve makes sense because asking people to change from oil heat to an alternative heating method during the next three or four months is entirely impractical, not to mention that even with oil prices at least half again as high as they were last year, few alternative heating schemes, over the short term, would be cost-effective compared with oil.

In the end, the only permanent and significant cost savings on oil of any sort will come from the nation, through government policy and consumer decisions, changing habits, reducing the demand for oil, or from an upsurge in production. And while increased fuel supplies might come, it’s unlikely to happen soon and will take even longer to be reflected in consumer prices.

To that end, Americans should continue to work on lessening their dependence on oil, while embracing the heating oil reserve as a tool to help them through the time they’ll need to weatherproof buildings, investigate alternative heating methods and find other, long-term fixes to the pain of the pump.