With the price of gasoline at or approaching $4 per gallon, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s announcement last month that private companies would be allowed to conduct seismic mapping surveys of the Atlantic continental shelf for the first time in three decades was widely hailed as a “significant first step” toward the goal of increasing domestic oil and gas production. But in fact, it was one step forward after several steps back. Had Salazar not canceled previously scheduled drilling leases off the Commonwealth’s coast last year, Virginia would already be the first state on the East Coast to tap its estimated 130 million barrels of oil and 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Permission to map — but not to drill — is an election-year ploy designed to make it appear as though President Obama is doing something about high gas prices. What he really has done is delay drilling off the Virginia coast for at least five more years — and possibly even longer.