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Bush Lifts Offshore Drilling Moratorium

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The New York Times

Published: July 15, 2008

WASHINGTON - President Bush lifted nearly two decades of executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country's shoreline on Monday while challenging Congress to open more areas for exploration to address soaring energy prices.

Democrats in Congress, joined by environmentalists, criticized the step and ridiculed it as ineffectual, while most Republicans and industry representatives applauded it as long overdue.

The lifting of the moratorium - first announced by Bush's father, President George Bush, in 1990 and extended by President Bill Clinton - will have no real impact, because a congressional moratorium on drilling enacted in 1982 and renewed annually remains in force. And there appeared to be no consensus for lifting it in tandem with Bush's action.

Rather than signaling a change in the country's policy, the president's decision appeared only to harden well-established positions, intensifying an already contentious issue in the middle of an election year.

"For years, my administration has been calling on Congress to expand domestic oil production," Bush said in a brief Rose Garden appearance in which he sought to saddle his party's opponents with responsibility for gasoline prices exceeding $4 per gallon. "Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal, and now Americans are paying at the pump."

Bush's critics reacted furiously, restating support for alternative legislative proposals, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., denounced the president's decision as "a political stunt."

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the speaker of the House, derided "the oilman in the White House" and said the plan would not address the immediate spike in energy prices.

"The Bush plan is a hoax," Pelosi said in a statement. "It will neither reduce gas prices nor increase energy independence."

The two presidential campaigns mirror the sharp differences. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, had previously expressed support for opening the continental shelf for exploration and production. The campaign of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, responded that Americans needed to concentrate on conservation and alternative sources of energy, not simply opening new oil fields.

"If offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks," the campaign's spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. "But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither. It would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for 30 years."

Since 1982, the ban on offshore oil and gas leases on the outer continental shelf - vast areas 3 miles to 200 miles offshore - has been renewed by Republican and Democratic presidents and Democratic and Republican Congresses.

But the price of oil has quickly changed the political contours of the debate. When Bush first called on Congress to join him in lifting the ban last month, oil was trading at $130 a barrel; on Monday it reached $145.

Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, said that if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had been opened to drilling a decade ago as part of a comprehensive energy plan, "we wouldn't be in this predicament today."

"But now the chickens have come home to roost," he said. "We can afford to wait no longer."

Democrats accused the White House of exploiting the issue for political purposes and said the administration could take steps to accelerate exploration of tracts already available to oil companies if it was serious about increasing domestic production.

Still, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the majority leader, faces an increasing uneasiness among his colleagues, who have signaled receptiveness to allowing more drilling.

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