President Bush urges Congress to end offshore drilling ban

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

– The New York Times

Washington-President George W. Bush (photo) urged Congress on Wednesday to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling and open a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration, asserting that those steps and others would lower gasoline prices and “strengthen our national security.”

President Bush also urged Congress to approve the extraction of oil from shale on federal lands, something he said can be done far more economically now than a few years ago, and to speed the approval process for building new refineries.

The president’s move to end the ban on offshore drilling reverses his longstanding position on the issue. Together with the other proposals he laid out on Wednesday, it underscores how $4-a-gallon gas has become a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. A growing number of Republicans are lining up in opposition to the federal ban.

The Congressional moratorium was first enacted in 1982, and has been renewed every year since. It prohibits oil and gas leasing on most of the outer continental shelf, 3 miles to 200 miles offshore. Since 1990, it has been supplemented by the first President Bush’s executive order, which directed the Interior Department until 2000 not to conduct offshore leasing or pre-leasing activity in areas covered by the legislative ban. In 1998, President Bill Clinton extended the offshore leasing prohibition until 2012.

Reporting was contributed by Carl Hulse from Washington; Elisabeth Bumiller from Houston; Jeff Zeleny from Taylor, Mich.; Jad Mouawad from New York; and David M. Herszenhorn and David Stout from Washington.

Editor's Note: Article reprinted in abridged version from Texas Insider.org.