THERE'S A MODERN-DAY fairy tale that goes like this: Once upon a time, in a land rich with forests and rivers and beasts of the wild, an evil ogre came to power. This ogre had a co-ruler, a smarter, cagier troll bewitched by the oil industry, and together they sent great wheezing machines to poke holes all over the kingdom, leaving the beasts to founder and the children to cough in the polluted air. But that's OK, the people said. The ogre can rule for only eight years, and then a handsome green prince will come along and save us.

Not so fast, Snow White. The scary part of this story is all too true, but the happy ending will take a lot more than a magic wand.

During its tenure, the Bush administration has opened unprecedented amounts of public land to oil and gas drilling, especially in the West, where the natural-gas frenzy is starting to make the old silver boom look quaint. To be fair, Bill Clinton leased his share of public lands too. But new well starts on federal lands have climbed 125 percent under Bush, according to the industry-tracking company IHS—from an average of 1,532 a year to 3,455. As of last September, 44 million acres of federal land were under lease—the equivalent of 20 Yellowstones. And a lot more is in the pipeline.

But there isn't a prince in sight—not Obama and not McCain—who can make it all better overnight. Bush II has found a way to effectively void Clinton's executive order protecting up to 58.5 million acres of roadless areas, but mineral rights don't work that way: Once leases are auctioned off, they're in private hands, and they can be renewed, traded, or sold. Plus, with some polls claiming that more than half of Americans want more offshore drilling, holding off new proposals has gotten a lot harder. With people hit by the one-two punch of summer gas prices and winter heating bills, you could probably sell a plan to drill under the panda exhibit at the National Zoo.

Anybody still enjoying this bedtime story?I didn't think so. But the new decider in chief can and should make sure that drilling is managed properly, because there's a wrong way and a right way to do it. The wrong way is the fire-sale approach being pushed by industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute, which has been trotting out ads claiming that our untapped domestic resources can run 60 million cars and heat 160 million homes for 60 years. Newt Gingrich, who just last year was arguing for an end to fossil-fuel addiction in his book A Contract with the Earth, is now circulating a Web petition called "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less" that says we've got three Saudi Arabias' worth of oil sitting under the Rockies, just waiting to be slurped.

Are they right? Not when it comes to oil. America is home to only about 2 percent of the world's petroleum reserves, so opening up more leases really is like digging to China with a spoon. That ocean of oil out west? It's locked up in tight geological formations of oil shale. Extracting it through the supposedly low-impact processes touted by Gingrich and others is literally a scorched-earth proposition, one that requires scraping off 100 percent of the topsoil and heating the shale to 650 degrees for three years. Even Shell says it won't know if the technology is commercially viable until sometime in the next decade.