Bush's plan

Four days before leaving office, the Bush administration issued a new plan to open huge sections of California, Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, Florida and the Atlantic Coast to new drilling between 2010 and 2015.

"American consumers have been demanding access to the oil and natural gas located off our coasts," Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said that day.

For California, the plan calls for leasing ocean waters between Shelter Cove in Humboldt County and Point Arena in Mendocino County, starting in 2014. Oil companies also would be able to drill in two other areas: along the Santa Barbara and Ventura county coasts from Vandenberg Air Force Base roughly to Oxnard, starting in 2012, and from Laguna Beach to La Jolla on the Orange and San Diego county coasts, starting in 2015.

Environmentalists and fishing groups are calling for the Obama administration to dump the entire proposal. They say the risk of spills, harm to the state's $90 billion coastal tourism industry and the threat to sensitive kelp forests, otters, whales, fish and sea turtles off California's world-famous beaches is too great.

"Wind and tidal energy should be the energy future of America's coastlines, not drilling for oil, which only keeps America wedded to its addiction to fossil fuels," said Carl Pope, national executive director of the Sierra Club.

According to federal estimates, the California coast has 10.5 billion barrels of oil sitting untapped. That would satisfy total U.S. demand for 17 months but is also roughly as much as the nation imported from Saudi Arabia over the past 20 years.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, and California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein oppose any new drilling off California.