Will $4 Gasoline Trump a 27-Year-Old Ban?

WASHINGTON — One was an oilman from Texas, the other a high-paid energy executive. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, for seven years George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been unable to persuade Congress and the public that domestic oil drilling is an answer to America’s energy needs.

With the clock running down on his presidency, Mr. Bush made one last push Wednesday by calling on Congress to end the 27-year moratorium on most offshore drilling. With oil at more than $130 a barrel, gasoline over $4 a gallon and the broader economy threatened, the White House is betting it can finally break a decades-old Washington deadlock between those who favor domestic oil exploration and those who say conservation is the key.

The question is whether Americans are feeling enough pain at the pump to force their elected leaders to go along, and whether it will make any real difference if they do.

“If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday in the White House Rose Garden. “And Americans will rightly ask how high oil — how high gas prices have to rise before the Democratic-controlled Congress will do something about it.”

Other Republicans, notably Senator John McCain, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, are abandoning their long-held opposition to drilling in coastal waters. Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, recently posted an online petition, headlined “Drill Here, Drill Now,” to strengthen support for domestic oil exploration, and gathered 650,000 signatures in two weeks.

“My prediction is that unless oil prices go down below $60 a barrel, you are now at a fundamental turning point at which you will see a new political coalition emerge,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. “This is a huge populist issue, and politicians who ignore it do so at their own peril.”

But Democrats do not feel especially imperiled. Although one moderate Democrat — Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, who has long advocated expanding drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — is drafting legislation aimed at increasing domestic production, the leadership is holding fast. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Wednesday, “We cannot drill our way to energy independence.”

If anything, Democrats say, the White House action gives them a chance to paint Mr. Bush as beholden to the oil industry and Mr. McCain as a clone of Mr. Bush, a message that will only grow louder as the November election draws near.

“To have President Bush be the face of this issue for the Republicans means having the worst possible spokesman,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“What Republicans are doing for themselves right now,” Mr. Garin added, “is deepening the impression that they are the party of Big Oil.”

Whether $4-a-gallon gasoline is producing more support for domestic drilling is hard to discern. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that 57 percent of those surveyed favored drilling for oil in coastal and wilderness areas that are now off limits, but there are no earlier data for comparison. In March, before the latest spike in gasoline prices, a Pew Research Center survey found that 50 percent opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in Alaska, while 42 percent were in favor.

Mr. Bush has long supported the proposal to drill along a coastal strip of the refuge. But he has not before taken up the cause of offshore drilling, partly because it was such a hot-button issue in the state of Florida, where his brother Jeb was governor. Congress first adopted its moratorium against drilling on the outer continental shelf, 3 to 200 miles offshore, in 1981. In 1990, Mr. Bush’s father signed an executive order reinforcing the ban; Mr. Bush promised Wednesday to rescind the order if Congress ended its moratorium.

In the Rose Garden, the president made the case that in the long run, the solution to high prices was to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative-energy technologies, a view widely shared across the political spectrum. But “in the short run,” he said, “the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home.”

The federal Energy Information Administration estimates that 18 billion barrels of oil are in the area covered by the moratorium, and the White House says that is enough to match current American production for 10 years. But a 2007 analysis by the agency concluded that opening up drilling in the moratorium area “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.”

The primary concern about offshore drilling has been that unsightly oil rigs would dampen tourism, or that spills would threaten the environment. Advocates, and even critics, say new technology has greatly reduced the risk of spills. But David B. Sandalow, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who advises Democrats, argues that the amount of oil that could be recovered is so small as not to be worth the environmental risk.

“It’s like walking an extra 20 feet a day to lose weight,” he said. “It’s just not enough to make a difference.”

But Robin West, who managed the offshore leasing program for the Reagan administration and is now chairman of PFC Energy, a consulting company, argues that additional supply could make a difference in price, especially if domestic drilling were coupled with aggressive conservation efforts. He said it would take time, though — a minimum of five or six years, even if drilling were to begin today.

“A logical energy policy,” Mr. West said, “is to encourage production and discourage consumption. And prices will go down.”

But with just seven months left in his presidency, the relationship between Mr. Bush and Congressional Democrats is already set, and unlikely to produce fresh agreement on what might be a logical energy policy, especially in the thick of a presidential election season.

As Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman from Minnesota, said: “I think we have been deadlocked on energy over ideological concerns for a long time, and the urgency in the country was not there to break out of this debate. And now the urgency of the country is there, and it’s too late for this administration.”

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.

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