Bribing the states.

Byline: The Register-Guard

For a quarter century, Congress has banned offshore drilling along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and for good reason: The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and gas on the vulnerable outer continental shelf far outweigh any potential energy gains.

But the drill-at-any-cost crowd in Congress never stops trying to give the energy industry carte blanche access to this nation's coastal waters. Although their efforts haven't received as much publicity, they're every bit as intense as the relentless push to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on a bill that would eliminate the federal moratorium on oil and gas drilling in coastal waters subject to state approval.

House Republicans have tried to lift the drilling ban many times before without success. But this time they've added a devious new twist: A bill sponsored by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., offers coastal states billions of dollars in royalties if they don't petition the federal government to continue the moratorium on drilling within 125 miles of their shores.

Under Pombo's proposal, states would receive 75 percent of all royalties for drilling within 12 miles of their coastlines and half of all revenues for projects up to 100 miles offshore. The revenue-sharing agreement would apply to states such as Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that already have drilling rigs off their shores in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana alone would receive an estimated $50 billion over the next three decades.

The bill is likely to pass in the House, where the Republican leadership obstinately refuses to recognize the bedrock reality that a nation that consumes a fourth of the world's oil but possesses only 3 percent of its reserves cannot drill its way to energy independence.

If the bill passes in the House, the Senate should tie a concrete block to it and send it to a watery grave. Lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling is a bad idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that the amount of oil and gas that's available is not worth the environmental damage that removing it would produce.

Three-fourths of the known U.S. oil and natural gas reserves are located in areas where drilling already is allowed, and thousands of leases have yet to be tapped. As for the destruction to coastal ecosystems and economies, West Coast residents need only recall the disastrous 1969 spill from an offshore oil platform near Santa Barbara. More recently, there's the nearly 200,000 barrels of oil that were spilled when Hurricane Katrina ripped through refineries and pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico.

While individual states could petition to continue the moratoriums on drilling off their coasts, that would provide no guarantee that they would be immune from environmental destruction from offshore drilling in neighboring states. If there's a blowout at an oil rig in one coastal state, the resulting oil spill won't turn back before crossing state lines.

Then there's the very real concern of visual pollution - what Oregonian wants to gaze out from Cape Perpetua and see oil and gas rigs on the horizon - or drive past pipelines and other facilities on shore? The proposed 100-mile buffer on drilling isn't even guaranteed under the House bill. The Oregon Legislature could vote to allow drilling within 50 miles of shore - or, if it failed to extend the drilling ban to 100 miles in a timely fashion, oil and gas companies would automatically get the green light.

For coastal states such as Oregon, the risk of damage to the environment and coastal communities that depend on tourism and fisheries isn't worth the royalties trade-off. For the nation as a whole, the oil and gas obtained through offshore drilling would make little or no difference in the cost of gasoline or America's ever-increasing reliance on foreign oil.

So far, President Bush has sent mixed messages on the Pombo bill. He has said he supports the federal ban on offshore drilling, but the White House recently said it will support any state that chooses to opt out of the moratorium. However, administration officials also said they think Pombo's revenue-sharing plan with the states is too generous and would deprive the federal government of an estimated $69 billion in royalties over the next 15 years.

Bush should clarify his position by strongly urging lawmakers to reject the Pombo bill and to protect coastal waters for the same reasons he recently designated nearly 140,000 square miles around the northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a national monument. America needs healthy oceans and a sound energy policy far more than it needs Congress to sell out the Outer Continental Shelf to Big Oil.