E2-Wire

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday proposed a complete lift of any liability cap on economic damages paid by oil companies that are responsible for oil spills.

Reid told reporters that a proposal pending before the Senate to lift the liability from the current $75 million to $10 billion is inadequate because the $10 billion figure is "too small."

"We're told that the damage from the oil spill in the Gulf now is $14 billion already," Reid said, referring to the BP spill off the coast of Louisiana. "I'm for no cap."

Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) have written the proposal to raise the liability cap from $75 million to $10 billion. Democrats tried to bring the proposal to a vote last week but were blocked by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

By the end of the week, nine congressional hearings relating to the Gulf oil disaster will have been held. A bunch more are coming. 

Asserting what it calls its “primary jurisdiction” over offshore oil and gas drilling, the House Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday released a schedule for seven hearings into the spill lasting through the month of June.

The hearings will examine both the causes of the Gulf spill and the regulatory implications of the disaster.

“We will vigorously investigate what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, but we will do so in the broader context of what this means for future offshore leasing,” Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said in a statement. “The committee will take a comprehensive look at MMS’s [the Minerals Management Service's] regulations to determine if remedial actions may be necessary to prevent such a tragic disaster from occurring again.”

In Senate panel hearing, Interior secretary reasserts need to overhaul offshore-drilling regulations.

A large coalition of environmentalists wants Obama to step up efforts to win passage of climate change legislation this year.

* BP now says it’s capturing 40 percent of the oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico

The oil giant has doubled its estimate of the amount of oil it’s gathering from the tube inserted into a damaged undersea well pipe.

BP now says it’s capturing 40 percent of the oil gusher stemming from the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon rig.

But not all the news is good, Reuters reports.

“BP's progress in capturing more oil through a tube inserted by undersea robots into the mangled ‘riser’ pipe of the well came amid new evidence that a powerful sea current in the Gulf was pushing the crude closer to the U.S. Eastern seaboard,” the wire service reported.

President Barack Obama plans to create an independent commission to probe the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, an administration official and a Capitol Hill aide said.

The April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig and the ongoing spill have raised a host of questions about industry safety and the adequacy of federal oversight.

A Capitol Hill aide familiar with the plan said Obama will issue an executive order that creates a commission to probe needed improvements to offshore infrastructure. It will examine industry practices and federal and state regulatory programs.

This will include the structure and roles of the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which is the branch that regulates offshore drilling, the aide said.

Reps. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) recently introduced legislation to create an independent probe akin to commissions created after the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident and the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Both lawmakers cheered the decision to create the oil spill commission.

“President Obama creating an independent blue-ribbon panel on this oil spill will help provide the recommendations to ensure that similar disasters do not happen again,” Markey said, while Capps said it shows that Obama is committed to “transparency and accountability.”

The upcoming commission will join several other probes of the rig explosion – which killed 11 workers – and subsequent spill. The Interior and Homeland Security Departments have launched a joint investigation, and multiple Capitol Hill probes are also under way.

The move by the offshore drilling company comes as the number of congressional inquiries into the spill expands.

The Democrats asked Attorney General Eric Holder to explore whether BP made "false and misleading statements."

The new Senate climate change bill has some green groups seeing red. 

Fifteen organizations, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which is a Quaker lobbying group, have formed the Climate Reality Check coalition to oppose the legislation, released last week by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.). 

“The well-being of our nation and the world are being sacrificed for the interests of big polluters, which continue to rake in record profits at the expense of the environment and the public,” the group said in a statement.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is putting new pressure on the Interior Department over its plans to overhaul the agency that regulates offshore oil-and-gas drilling, arguing they may not go far enough.

Grijalva, in a May 13 letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, called plans to divide the functions of Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) a “step in the right direction” but added that several questions remain about the effort.

MMS oversees offshore exploration activities and also collects billions of dollars in production royalties.

Salazar is creating a new agency that will house what had been MMS’s inspection, investigation and enforcement operations, which will now be separate from leasing and revenue programs.

But Grijalva’s letter questions why the leasing function, which involves a number of environmental reviews, will not be housed in the new agency.

He also asks about several other issues, including MMS’s use of “categorical exclusions” that allow some drilling projects to avoid full environmental studies under the National Environmental Policy Act.