Last week Governor Corzine and Senators Menendez and Lautenberg of New Jersey held a press conference on the beach in Belmar, New Jersey to attack Senator McCain’s proposal, echoed by President Bush last week, to lift the federal moratorium on offshore drilling and allow individual states to decide whether they want oil and natural gas exploration to take place off their shores.

Mr. Menendez has also authored the Clean Ocean and Safe Tourism Anti-Drilling Act, which would permanently prohibit the U.S. Department of Interior from issuing leases for the exploration, development, or production of oil, natural gas, or any other mineral off the coasts of all states from Maine to North Carolina.

According to the federal government’s Minerals Management Service, there is probably not much commercially recoverable oil and natural gas off the coast of New Jersey — although no exploration has been attempted in 30 years — but there may be significant amounts of oil and natural gas located off the coast of the mid-Atlantic states. The 2006 Federal Outer Continental Shelf assessment assigned technically recoverable resources of 1.5 billion barrels of oil and 15.13 trillion cubic feet of gas to the MMS Mid-Atlantic Planning Area, located off Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.

In their efforts to permanently prohibit any offshore drilling in the Atlantic, New Jersey’s politicians are out of step with public opinion — a recent Zogby poll found 74% of Americans support offshore drilling — as well as many of their Democratic colleagues. Virginia’s Democratic governor and its two Democratic senators, John Warner and Jim Webb, have introduced legislation asking the federal government to give the state a waiver from the federal moratorium that would allow drilling for natural gas.

One of the reasons that many governors of coastal states, including Charlie Crist of Florida, have changed their minds regarding offshore drilling is that a 2006 law dramatically changed the way the federal government shares oil and gas revenue with the states. In the past, the federal government received most of the revenue from offshore leases, but the 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act opened up 8.3 million acres in the east-central Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration with the provision that 37.5% of the revenues were returned back to the Gulf States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. Louisiana alone will receive billions of dollars from this agreement, which will be used to restore the levees, barrier islands, and wetlands destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

With this new revenue-sharing philosophy, governors and state legislators now have an incentive to undertake a careful consideration of whether offshore drilling makes sense for their states. Even if New Jersey and other coastal states don’t have much oil or natural gas off their shores, we should all realize that energy is now a national security issue. By purchasing 60% of our oil from foreign countries, every day America transfers more than 1 billion dollars to nations such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and, indirectly, Iran.

Mr. Menendez cites a 1979 oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident as evidence that drilling for oil and natural gas in the Atlantic would pose a grave threat to New Jersey’s beaches. But drilling technology has improved greatly since the 1979 accident and the Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker, dozens of which safely come in and out of New Jersey’s ports every month.

Ironically, Senator Menendez and other Democrats have recently been extolling Brazil as an example of a country that has become “energy independent.” They talk about Brazil’s laudable efforts to expand the use of sugar-derived ethanol, but what they don’t mention is that the real key to Brazil’s energy independence is that they’ve become a world leader in deep-water oil drilling.

Thanks to free-market reforms initiated by Brazil’s president in the mid-1990s, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Brazilian energy firm Petrobras has been transformed from an inefficient state-owned company to a highly-regarded, publicly-traded energy firm over the past decade. (Are you listening, Mexico?) By investing in incredible new technologies that allow oil companies to find — and safely extract — oil from thousands of feet under the ocean, Brazil’s domestic oil production has doubled, reserves have tripled, and Petrobras now has a market capitalization of more than $200 billion, with operations in 27 countries, including America.

No one loves their beaches (and the tourism dollars they bring) more than Brazilians and, as their example illustrates, modern deep-water oil drilling is not incompatible with a clean environment.

The burning of fossil fuels for energy is, quite literally, a dinosaur technology. The country will need to pursue all energy options in the years ahead including nuclear energy and other alternative fuels, as well as new technologies such as solar and wind power, plug-in hybrid cars, and fuel cells. For the foreseeable future, however, oil and natural gas will remain a major part of our overall energy picture. It makes sense for us to look for it and pull it out of the ground when and where we find it.

Mr. Sahm directs a Latin American initiative for the Manhattan Institute.