by Randy Rieland
These are tough times for buddies of Big Oil on Capitol
Hill. How do you stand by your men amid photos
of thick pools of oil lapping into the marshes of southern Louisiana and more video of BP pipes
gushing oil?
But love, as always, finds a way.
In the Senate, fossil-fuel fans James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have managed
to grab hold of an issue that shows oil execs that they’ve still got their
backs: liability.
Senate Democrats Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New
Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida are pushing a proposal to raise the liability
cap on oil spills from its current paltry level of $75 million to a more
realistic $10 billion. Last week, Murkowski
blocked it. Yesterday, Inhofe did.
And he trotted out the same contorted logic Murkowski’s been
using: If you set the cap too high, you
risk putting smaller independent oil companies out of business. Then only BP, ExxonMobil, and other oil
giants will be left, he argued. In
short, he and Murkowski say they’re looking out for the little guys, all things
being relative.
Then things really got strange. While testifying before the Senate’s Energy
and Natural Resources Committee, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar started
channeling Inhofe and Murkowski, saying that Congress should avoid setting
an “arbitrary” cap, and that, yes, we don’t want to hurt smaller oil companies.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), another Big Oil booster,
commended Salazar for “taking your time” on setting a cap.
All that, of course, didn’t play very well with a lot of
Democrats, starting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who
earlier in the day had said
the cap should be eliminated altogether so companies responsible for spills
would face unlimited liability. And then
there was Nelson, who had already blasted away at a Republican idea that the
cap should somehow be tied to a company’s profits. Here’s what he said:
For the life of me, I can’t understand someone objecting, as they are going to do, in raising an artificial limit of $75 million, up to at least $10 billion, and it’s probably going to exceed $10 billion. But the argument you’re going to hear is they are going to say, “Oh, it shouldn’t be this, it ought to be tied to profit.” Now, is it really responsible public policy to say that because of a company makes less money that it should be responsible for less damage? No.
By late in the day, the White House was trying to run damage control and
back away from Salazar’s ambiguous comments.
It issued
a statement from Obama that condemned Republicans for playing “special
interest politics” and blocking efforts to raise the liability cap.
The world, or at least the Capitol Hill slice of it, was back in balance.
See more play-by-play from yesterday’s hearings in The
New York Times’ Green blog.
Why didn’t we think of that?
Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) has his own special take on the oil spill. It never would have happened, he says, if we
had only gone ahead and drilled,
baby, drilled in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Timing is everything
This week, the BP Sea Otter Habitat exhibit opens at the Aquarium of the
Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. Although
the oil company donated $1 million for the facility, no BP officials are
expected to attend. The
Los Angeles Times has the story.
Related Links:
Obama admin overhauls MMS, the agency in charge of offshore drilling
Rand Paul’s Copenhagen rant and other election notes
Robert Redford and green groups tell Obama to step up on Gulf oil leak
