It's been just seven weeks since President Bush finally was able to sign a comprehensive energy bill. It had taken five years and a lot of compromising. But in the wake of back-to-back hurricanes that battered the Gulf Coast, damaged oil refineries, and boosted already-high gas prices, lawmakers and special interests are scrambling to amend - if not rewrite - US energy policy.

Some proposals have been dusted off in the wake of Katrina and Rita. But new or old, they all have an added urgency to them. Among them: lifting the ban on oil and gas exploration and development on the Outer Continental Shelf, opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, toughening auto mileage standards, expediting permits for new refineries by loosening air quality regulations, and giving the federal government the final word on where refineries and crude-oil pipelines should go.

Is the political landscape changing?

Four years ago, as head of the White House task force on energy, Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed conservation as "a sign of personal virtue ... not a basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

This week, Mr. Bush urged Americans to conserve fuel supplies, saying Uncle Sam should set an example. "We can encourage employees to carpool or use mass transit," he said. "There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation."

Still, the former Texas oilman seems a long way from former President Jimmy Carter, who, during the 1970s oil crisis, put solar collectors on the White House roof and wore sweaters when it got cold.

Bush's main interest isin increasing supply, not in curbing demand. That is also true of most of the bills moving through the Republican-dominated Congress. "If there is a silver lining in this, it is that it may finally bring home to the American people how fragile our energy sector is and our energy infrastructure is," Rep. Joe Barton (R) of Texas, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said on proposing his bill.

Among other things, Mr. Barton's proposal - the "Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005" - would ease the restrictions on where refineries and oil pipelines may be built, designate certain closed military bases as refinery sites, and change certain requirements under the Clean Air Act applying to refineries and power plants when older facilities are upgraded.

No new US oil refineries have been built since 1976, and the idea here is to increase domestic refinery output so that capacity, now at 17 million barrels per day, more nearly matches average demand, which is 21 million barrels per day. Another oil state lawmaker, Sen. James Inhofe (R) of Oklahom., who chairs the Committee on Environment and Public Works, this week put forth a similar bill in the Senate.

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