Natural gas is another story. Americans use 22 trillion cubic feet of the clean-burning fuel a year—a dumpster's worth per person per day—and we get about 80 percent of it right here at home. When Gingrich asks what people are supposed to do while we wait for renewable alternatives to both oil and gas, he's got a point. "Are we to say," he wrote me in an e-mail, " 'Sorry, just deal with it for ten years while we hope that these other transportation fuels become affordable and catch up with your life and the lives of your loved ones'?"

It does get difficult to whine about sage-grouse habitat when you put it like that. And serious environmentalists know we can't just frown and hope the big, bad drillers go away.

"People don't understand the energy basis of our civilization," says Carbondale, Colorado–based energy analyst Randy Udall. Ten years ago, he explains, we needed 10,000 wells to supply our natural-gas needs. "Now it takes about 30,000 simply to keep production flat. If you stop drilling for 12 months, you'd have to turn a bunch of stuff off—big stuff like New York or Illinois."

Even so, Udall thinks the drill-it-now mentality is misguided. By leasing western lands all at once, he argues, we're burning the house down to stay warm for a night. If we auctioned off those leases at market rates over decades, we'd buy ourselves much more prosperity. And with the West as rich as it is in solar, wind, and geothermal potential, dialing back on leasing while we push hard on renewables makes better economic sense.

All of this doesn't mean the new president won't have options. He will, and by using them aggressively, he can make a huge difference. Opposition to drilling has been growing in surprising quarters—from local governments to traditionally conservative groups like ranchers and hunters. That broad-based resistance can provide political leeway. Just as Bush issued an executive order in 2001 telling federal land managers to expedite applications for "energy-related projects," the new prez can tell the Bureau of Land Management to stop issuing new drilling permits until we get a handle on what's been leased so far. He can direct land managers to enforce regulations often waived under Bush and Cheney—like man­datory directional drilling, which uses far fewer wells, and drilling bans in wildlife breeding grounds and winter ranges. And he can work to pass a carbon cap, making carbon-heavy resources like oil shale compete on a level field with renewables like wind.

Meanwhile, he can attack from the demand side. "The case that we need more and more natural gas is based on our supply-side mentality," says Ned Farquhar, an energy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If we did efficiency halfway intelligently, we could eliminate 20 to 30 percent of our demand for natural gas in the next 15 years." As slackened demand lowers gas prices, he argues, it can also make Rocky Mountain drilling, which can be expensive and infrastructure-heavy, a much less attractive proposition financially.

That efficiency push includes enlisting regular citizens as well, says Gloria Flora, the former U.S. Forest Service supervisor who famously halted new drilling in 356,000 acres of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front and who now directs the public-lands nonprofit Sustainable Obtainable Solutions. "People get it. They want to do something, and they don't know what to do. Imagine if we had an administration that could actively engage the population and say, 'Look, this is what we're going to do.' Instead of saying after 9/11, 'Go shopping,' what if, after the 2008 energy spike, they said, 'Let's go conserving'?"

But we'll also have to swallow hard and compromise. Even as it works on a "western energy greenprint" to phase out fossil fuels by 2050, for example, the NRDC is supporting a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska, where more gas than the U.S.'s proven reserves of 211 trillion cubic feet may lie underneath lands that have already been drilled for oil.

"You have to pair the big no with the big yes," says Udall. "To get 20 percent of our electricity from wind would be a wonderful thing, but you'll have to build 19,000 miles of transmission lines. To get a bunch of electricity from the sun, you've got to cover thousands of square miles of desert with solar panels. We're gonna lose some desert tortoise, and we're gonna piss some people off building those transmission lines."