Nothing could make more obvious good sense: Gasoline is more than $4 a gallon, already a painful and disruptive price and sure to keep rising, with other energy prices in tow. So for goodness sakes lift more oil and, bingo, prices will start receding. Drill and drive. It's the American way.

Unfortunately, what seems obvious is sometimes chimera.

President Bush, of course, wants to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Always has. ANWR is the Big Rock Candy Mountain for every American oilman. Bush wants to start sweating the shale oil out of the Rockies, too, and to take up drilling off every shore.

And, with jaw-dropping arrogance, the president says that if Congress doesn't reverse 30-plus years of U.S. energy policy and law by -- wave the flag, boys -- July 4, high energy prices will be the fault of Democrats, who control both houses, though barely.

But:

The estimated yields of ANWR and our offshore sites would increase international supplies only about 3 percent, shaving just 13 cents or so off a gallon of gas, not for another decade at the earliest and then temporarily.

We are not our own closed loop. Oil is an international market item, so no company will sell us our oil for less than the world's going rate. And whatever we do, the OPEC cartel nations could, and no doubt would, keep the price up just by lifting a little less oil themselves.

Oil is a they-win, you-lose game -- if, that is, you play by oil's own rules. So why not play by different rules? We are not helpless.

We can create huge new supplies, in effect, by conservation, a barely tapped resource, which the Bush White House mocked and disdained. We can hurry already existing alternatives to market and accelerate other, promising alternatives by incubating them with tax incentives, though Bush and most congressional Republicans oppose extending the modest incentives we have now.

We can mandate the manufacture of efficient appliances. We can spring for mass transit and regional rail. We subsidize highways and air travel, so why not local transit and rail?

And, yes, we do have to reexamine some old taboos. Nuclear power generation is a candidate for that. Even with its risks and the very nettlesome issue of handling its wastes, nuclear may be a better option than the other touted fuel. "Clean coal" is an oxymoron that insults both the environment and our intelligence.

We must find not more oil but more ways to use less. The biosphere can't take more of its burning, and we can't scrounge up enough by any means to mitigate our sticky political dependence on the big producer states, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The politicians and industry hustlers who tell us there is a way back to cheap gasoline, and thus to avoid any awkward adjustments, aren't offering us petroleum oil cheap. They are trying to sell us snake oil dearly.