The White House said Monday that President George W. Bush plans to lift a ban on oil drilling off the U.S. coast.

Bush said, "This means the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress." He blamed the Democratic Congress and its failure to lift the ban on offshore drilling for increased gas prices.

His move won't automatically allow drilling on the continental shelf off California's coast, because Congress has consistently renewed a ban on the drilling first passed in 1981. The executive branch ban Bush is lifting dates to his father's administration in 1990.

Bush has been hectoring Congress to lift the ban in recent weeks. He spoke at the White House last month saying he would remove the executive order banning offshore drilling if Congress removed its own ban.

Now, however, Bush has decided he won't wait for Congress to move first, said a White House spokesperson.

Lifting the ban is not a popular idea in Congress, which has renewed it every Sept. 30 since 1981. California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein called Bush's speech "a false promise that simply won't deliver," and said drilling would take at least seven years in the best case scenario.

According to John Romero, a spokesman at the Minerals Management Service's Pacific office, there are about 10 billion barrels of oil and 17 trillion cubic feet of natural gas about three miles from the California coast. There are 1,500 active oil wells in California.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opposed lifting the ban, calling California's coast "an international treasure." He added, "We are in this situation because of our dependence on traditional petroleum-based oil."

Republican presidential candidate John McCain supported lifting the ban, and said, "common sense requires that we draw upon America's own vast reserves of oil and natural gas." In 2000, McCain supported the federal moratorium on offshore drilling but now says the decision should be left to the states.

In other news today, oil company BP said it will spend $1.5 billion recovering oil from the Liberty oil field off the north coast of Alaska in an area not covered by drilling bans. The company thinks there are 100 million barrels of oil in the field and it hopes to start producing oil there by early 2011.