The tragedy is that it's too late to do something today that will help bring down oil and gas prices tomorrow.

While Americans, and Mainers, suffer through the growing hardships of $4.10 per gallon gas prices and nearly $5 per gallon heating oil prices, everybody wants a solution. But there will be no quick fixes to our current energy crisis, and any politician who peddles a quick fix is guilty of pandering.

President Bush nevertheless proposed his solution to high gas prices this week: Lift a ban on offshore oil drilling that's been in place for more than a quarter-century. It was a solution with a political edge: "Americans will rightly ask how ... high gas prices have to rise before the Democratic-controlled Congress will do something about it." Bush on Wednesday called for lifting the 27-year-old ban on drilling in U.S. coastal waters, ignoring that the ban had been upheld by Republicans as well as Democrats over its history.

Yet the federal government's own data predict that "access to the Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030." The oil industry's trade association claims that it will be seven to 10 years before new offshore drilling would even produce oil.

So it's disingenuous, deceptive and not a little bit cynical for Bush to propose lifting a longtime ban on offshore oil drilling as a solution to today's high energy prices.

The problem is that the time is long past for Congress or the White House to have done the kinds of things that would lower gas prices now.

That historic moment was 20 years ago, when government-supported research and development programs for alternative, renewable technologies should have been pursued on a grand scale.

Given the time it takes to bring innovations to market, undertaking such programs two decades ago would likely bring into production just about now systems and technologies to lessen our addiction to oil.

But you can't turn a country on a dime. You also can't stem an addiction easily, because the price of the addiction has to be greater than the pleasure it brings.

For far too long, both Democrats and Republicans were unwilling to exercise leadership and ask Americans to make sacrifices to move our country out of its dangerous, and growing, reliance on fossil fuel.

Now, the time has finally arrived when the cost of running our gas-guzzlers and the price of heating our big and drafty homes and offices has finally driven Americans to a long-delayed awareness of just how fragile and unsustainable our fossil fuel-based economy really is.

There are reasons Congress established a moratorium on offshore oil drilling 27 years ago, and those reasons are still relevant now -- even in the midst of punishingly high oil prices.

Our coastal waters and coastlines are ecologically and economically important places.

Our oceans are home to a rich biological diversity of species, from plankton and the lowly sea cucumber to that great leviathan, the whale. The oceans provide a livelihood for the fishing industry and a healthy source of protein for dinner tables. Our picturesque coastlines provide a valuable tourism economy to most coastal states.

Both oil drilling and oil spills are a direct threat to the vitality and viability of those resources and the industries that depend on them. Just ask the people around Alaska's Prince William Sound, who say the day the Exxon Valdez went aground and spilled its cargo of crude oil was "the day the water died."

The risks are so great that President Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, supported the offshore oil drilling ban when he served as president, as did brother Jeb Bush when he was governor of Florida.

America, as Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., reminded us the other day, consumes 25 percent of the world's oil supply but possesses only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves.

No amount of exploiting those reserves can change that essential imbalance, which translates into dependence on foreign sources of oil. If we want to be energy independent, then the wise strategy would be to lessen our reliance on oil in general.

Furthermore, the argument that we must lift the ban on offshore drilling in order to access more oil reserves flies in the face of the fact that, according to the House Committee on Natural Resources, the oil industry has yet to exploit 68 million of the 90 million acres of federal land they're leasing for energy production. That unused acreage includes very productive and oil-rich areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.

If politicians in an election year that also features an energy crisis really want to make points with voters, there are ways they can lessen the impact of high oil and gas prices.

They can approve an increase in LIHEAP, the heating oil subsidy for low-income families. They can fund more programs to weatherize homes so that people don't need to use as much heating oil.

And, if they toss caution to the wind and say to hell with politics, they can do even more: Lower the interstate highway speed limit to 55 mph. According to a General Motors analysis, driving at 55 mph rather than 70 mph will help you get 20 percent better mileage. That's a lot of money these days, as well as a lot less oil consumed.

There are far too many forces at play in our high gas and oil prices for just one action to bring them down. It's abundantly clear that even if there were legitimate reasons to drill in our offshore areas, such action would do nothing to lower today's high prices.

But given the unexploited potential of leases that already exist, the unexploited potential of conservation and the proven value of oil-rig-free coastlines, there aren't any compelling reasons to allow drilling -- except, perhaps, the desire of politicians to turn our pain into votes.