“The drive to drill is like an obese man saying he is going to lose weight by eating more,” said Dan Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a research group in Washington.

Less than a month ago in the Senate, the Democrat assailed supporters of offshore drilling, citing a federal study that suggested it would not make any “appreciable difference in the price of gas until 2030.”

And last year, Brown opposed an amendment to an energy bill that would have allowed Virginia to ask the federal government for permission to search for oil and natural gas off the coast. The amendment was defeated 44-43.

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The Ohio Republican predicted that Congress will pass a comprehensive bill this year to clear the way for drilling off U.S. coasts while providing more money to develop cleaner energy sources.

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“I would say this is one of those difficult times for a political party when their ideology leads them into direct conflict with the facts,” said Ted Hollingsworth, a Republican lobbyist and a former Voinovich aide.

Environmentalists have reacted with alarm to the idea of ending a 1981 federal moratorium on drilling offshore, primarily along the coasts of California and Florida. The ban grew out of a 1969 disaster off Santa Barbara when 3 million gallons of crude oil from an offshore platform covered 35 miles of coastline.

Late yesterday, the Bureau of Land Management opened 3.9 million acres of land in Alaska for drilling and exploration. The land had already been reserved for petroleum production, but had been kept in limbo by complaints and legal action by environmentalists.

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According to the New York Times, the field could contain as much as 3.7 billion barrels of oil. It could start producing oil by 2010, far shorter than the seven years that opponents of drilling claim for both off-shore and interior use.