The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has voted to have its own commission investigate the BP disaster. The Committee finds that necessary, according to Mary Landrieu, because Obama hasn’t appointed a representative from the oil industry to his own commission. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted Wednesday to create a congressional bipartisan [...]

I just got back from driving across the rust belt – Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, MI – and am catching up on all the interesting conversations you’ve been having this week while I was celebrating my mom’s birthday (thanks, once again, to bmaz for watching the liquor cabinet while I was gone). So for the [...]

A couple of interesting, tangentially related things happened today. First, in a bid to wall off the PR disaster of the Gulf spill from the rest of the company, BP has assigned someone–an American BP employee–to take charge of cleanup efforts. BP is to hive off its Gulf of Mexico oil spill operation to a [...]

The other day, when Sheldon Whitehouse asked Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar why BP had gotten an exemption from the full-blown NEPA process from which it presumably should have been categorically excluded, Salazar referenced a 30-day deadline from Congress to approve exploration plans. Senator, there has been significant environmental review, including Environmental Impact Statements that [...]

At yesterday’s Environment and Public Works hearing on the BP disaster, Sheldon Whitehouse asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Council on Environmental Quality Chair Helen Sutley why BP had been exempted from doing an Environmental Impact Study on the Macondo drilling site. He listed a number of things that should categorically exclude a project from [...]

As we go through another round of hearings on the BP disaster today (at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee this morning, Bernie Sanders asked Ken Salazar whether the risk of a disaster like this was worth the $.03/gallon decrease on the price of gas in 2030; Salazar didn’t really answer), Obama has leaked his [...]

As you may have read, Transocean (the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig) made everyone rescued from the rig sign statements laying out whether they were involved in the incident, and whether they had gotten hurt. Lawyers for the oil rig’s owner, Transocean, requested that workers who had survived the blast sign the form [...]

The eye-popping part of this exchange is the news that all the efforts to protect the Gulf Coast are only going to collect a fraction of it from reaching the shore. But the whole comment is worthwhile, because Capps expresses so well the outrage we should all be expressing about the inefficacy of oil spill [...]

The House Commerce Committee is holding the third hearing into what went wrong on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig (CSPAN is showing it on CSPAN3). As is typical for a Waxman/Stupak hearing, the Committee has done its homework, advancing the understanding of what went wrong. Henry Waxman’s opening statement reveals that the well failed a [...]

One of the highlights of the first of several Deepwater Horizon hearings in Congress this week came when Maria Cantwell tried to get BP American President Lamar McKay to commit to what BP would pay as “legitimate claims.” She asked about: Long term and short term harms to the fishing industry Business loss to tourism [...]