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WASHINGTON — More oil production suddenly has become the mantra for Republican and Democratic politicians alike as voters seethe over $4-plus gasoline — and the most powerful people in Washington can't find any way to provide relief.

Still, they don't agree on where to drill, and if they did, it still wouldn't provide any help to motorists struggling at the pump and people facing record heating bills next winter.

For the second time in three weeks, President Bush called on Congress Friday to lift a moratorium that has blocked energy development over 80 percent of the country's coastal waters and to allow drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge that environmentalists have fought successfully for decades to protect.

A few months ago, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the far northeastern corner of Alaska was considered a dead issue.

Bush has argued for drilling in the refuge since he first stepped into the White House, but opponents repeatedly have voted it down in the Senate.

And the idea of opening the Atlantic and Pacific coasts or the eastern Gulf off Florida's beaches to oil and gas companies has equally been long seen as a non-starter.

A succession of presidents from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to the current president have sided against drilling in these waters as has Congress each year for 27 years, seeking to protect beaches and coastal states' tourist economies.

But high crude oil and gasoline prices are affecting everything from food costs and summer vacations to the ability of volunteers to provide food to the homebound elderly.

America clearly is anxious and angry over energy.

And that has prompted Republican calls for more domestic oil and natural gas production to resonate — even in areas once thought securely off limits for environmental reasons — although no oil would be expected to actually flow for close to a decade, if then.

Nearly half the people surveyed by the Pew Research Center in late June said they now consider energy exploration and drilling more important than conservation, compared with a little over a third who felt that way only five months ago.

The message has reached Democrats. "Let me be clear. Democrats support the domestic production of petroleum and other energy resources," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said the other day.

But new drilling means something different to congressional Democrats than it does to Republicans.

Democrats argue that oil companies aren't going after the oil on 68 million acres of federal land and waters on which they already have leases, so why open new, protected areas.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, calls lifting the offshore drilling moratorium "a hoax, subterfuge, a decoy" that won't lower gasoline prices and won't produce any more oil anytime soon.

Randall Luthi, who heads the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which operates the federal offshore energy leasing program, is a proponent of expanding offshore oil and gas production including in some areas now off limits.

But, he says, "It will be 5 to 10 years or longer for actual production" even if leases are made available today.

And how much oil is there?

The Interior Department estimates 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil likely will be found beneath coastal waters now off limits, or about 50 percent more than already has been pumped from the Prudhoe Bay fields on Alaska's North Slope since it opened in 1977.

But unlike Prudhoe Bay oil, this oil is scattered with more than half believed to be off the West Coast, where states are less likely to go along with offshore drilling.

Only 3.8 billion barrels are believed to be off the Atlantic Coast where some states, principally Virginia, have shown interest in offshore energy production.