ver since the Gallup organization reported in May that a strong majority of Americans – 57 percent – want the ban lifted on exploration and oil drilling on the continental shelf, the trend has gained support.

Last week, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll had 76 percent of respondents favoring this.

Opposition had dropped from 47 percent in the Gallup poll to 20 percent in this one. Another poll showed that 45 percent of liberals – the strongest supporters of the ban – now favored lifting it, up from 22 percent a month earlier.

While this trend has been mounting, Florida’s Republican Gov. Charlie Crist reversed his earlier opposition to offshore drilling and Sen. John McCain changed his position from favoring an overall ban to proposing that each state decide for itself.

There are still holdouts, notably, Sen. Barack Obama, most Congressional Democrats and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Congressional Democrats and Obama, who want to continue the 1980 ban, are so wedded to it that they repeat its catechism endlessly: It will take up to 10 years to see any oil from such activity; it won’t lower prices by one penny today. They forget to tell us that nothing else Congress does will lower gasoline prices today. Moreover, had the ban not been put in place in 1980, we would have been seeing the fruits of offshore production by 1990—nearly 20 years of new domestic oil.

The other day, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine, surrounded by other politicians, stood on a Jersey beach and said that drilling for offshore oil was “irrelevant.” What we needed to do was turn to wind and solar power. After hearing this, we called on several automobile dealers.

Some offered us gasoline-electric hybrid automobiles, but not one offered a model propelled by a windmill or a solar heating panel.

Gov. Schwarzenegger has his own fish to fry. While describing new domestic drilling as “blowing smoke” he was going about the country promoting his Global Warming Solutions Act, which is supposed to eliminate “greenhouse” gasses in California by 2050. This will cost more than $10 billion a year in a state unable to solve its current fiscal year deficit of $16 billion.

Ronald Reagan once said that Congress passes remedies for which there are no known diseases.

To update it, the governator is pushing something that ultra-environmentalists want us all to believe, but for which there is no worldwide consensus, no matter how many times Al Gore says there is. In fact, this spring, 31,000 scientists signed a declaration casting doubt on the notion that man-made generation of carbon dioxide is causing – and will cause – extreme global warming.

If Schwarzenegger continues to pursue his quixotic program, he may be able to enjoy its culmination in 2050, about the time to celebrate his 103rd birthday. Meanwhile, he claims that if we put our minds to it, we can have wind and solar power providing one-third of California’s energy needs by 2020. So far, no further comment from him that lifting a ban on the state’s offshore oil drilling now would produce oil several years earlier, nor does he tell us how to get windmills installed on our automobiles.