CLINTON ANNOUNCES PROTECTIONS FOR OCEANS.

Byline: Sandra Sobieraj Associated Press 

Scrambling onto the craggy rocks of a protected tidal pool, President Clinton tried to draw attention Friday to rescuing ocean resources and added 10 years to the ban on new offshore oil drilling.

The extension was one of a $224 million grab-bag of initiatives that Clinton announced at the National Oceans Conference, set at Monterey Bay and meant to underscore how reliant man is on the seas.

One of every six U.S. jobs is marine-related, and U.S. residents are moving to oceanside developments at a rate of 3,600 a day. With Americans consuming an average of 15 pounds of fish and seafood every year, fish stocks are in decline.

``These oceans are so vast and powerful, I think most people still blithely assume that nothing we do can affect them very much,'' Clinton said, his back to the blue Bay waters and sea gulls overhead.

``Something you do may be a mere drop in the ocean, but millions - even billions - of those drops in the oceans can have a profound effect on them and on us.''

On Friday, Clinton banned the sale or import of undersized Atlantic swordfish and said he would ask Congress for an additional $194 million to boost monitoring of fish stocks and strengthen safeguards against overfishing.

He signed the executive order extending until 2012 the offshore oil drilling ban, which was set to expire in 2002.

But while the moratorium blankets virtually all of the North Atlantic and Pacific coasts, southwest Florida, New England, the Mid-Atlantic and southern Alaska, his action will not stop existing rigs from pumping oil from beneath the ocean floor. And, in Southern California at least, more rigs could go up if oil companies act on 39 ``undeveloped'' leases.

In 12 national marine sanctuaries Clinton permanently barred new leases for oil and gas drilling.

White House officials said Clinton was not making the ban permanent everywhere in order to allow for flexibility if future science and technology were to lead to safer offshore oil and gas development.

Clinton also ordered efforts to revive damaged coral reefs and prevent further degradation. With international trade expected to triple in the next 20 years, Clinton said a new Harbor Services Fund will modernize ports with $800 million from new user fees on shippers that replace existing harbor maintenance fees.

The president ordered the Navy to declassify some information gathered by underwater listening devices that could be helpful to climate and marine-life research. He proposed building two new unmanned deep-sea observatories to map the ocean floor, which he called ``the world's last great frontier.''

Some 500 environmentalists, ecologists, oceanographers and policy makers gathered for the conference in Monterey Bay, one of the sanctuaries covered by Clinton's permanent drilling ban. The others include: California's Channel Islands, the Florida Keys, Gray's Reef sanctuary in Georgia, Washington's Olympic coast, plus sanctuaries in Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas and American Samoa.

The oceans summit opened Clinton's long weekend of travels that included a commencement address to Portland State University today and Democrat fund-raising stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.

Also today, the president was to visit the Springfield, Ore., high school where a 15-year-old student was accused last month of shooting two schoolmates dead and wounding 20 others.