Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach on Tuesday said he plans to appeal to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) “sense of reason” when the two meet with other leaders in Canada Wednesday about his province’s oil-sands development.
 
Pelosi will be in Ottawa, Canada, to attend a G8 Speakers’ Conference that starts Thursday. But she will also have a dinner meeting Wednesday with Stelmach, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and Quebec Premier Jean Charest on energy and environmental issues, including oil sands. “The purpose of the meeting is get the energy-producing premiers together over dinner,” Stelmach told reporters. “Our goal there is to appeal to her sense of reason.”

Microbes eating subsurface oil in the Gulf of Mexico are reducing dissolved oxygen levels, but not enough to create new “dead zones” devoid of marine life, according to a federal report Tuesday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and two other agencies reported  “dissolved oxygen levels have dropped by about 20 percent from their long-term average in the Gulf of Mexico in areas where federal and independent scientists previously reported the presence of subsurface oil.”

“Scientists from agencies involved in the report attribute the lower dissolved oxygen levels to microbes using oxygen to consume the oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill,” states a summary of the report released by NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

BP became one of Google’s top advertisers in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill dilemma, spending $3.6 million in the month of June alone, according to a report in Advertising Age.

The reports cites an internal Google document that indicates BP was thrust into the upper echelon of advertisers on the search engine and was the sixth biggest buyer of search ads in June. The company was behind only AT&T Mobility, Apollo Group, Expedia, Amazon and eBay.

Advertisers pay only when their ads convert or get a click, which occurred when keywords such as “oil spill,” “leak,” “top kill,” and “live feed” were used.

A new report says areas for improvement are “apparent” and calls for a broad array of steps by spill responders.

A leading environmentalist is calling on the green movement to pull back from pitching emissions curbs as a way to jolt the economy and improve national security.

Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, tells the National Journal in an interview that advocates should instead emphasize the “peril” facing the planet.

Climate-change legislation collapsed in the Senate over the summer after narrowly passing the House last year.

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President Obama, at a labor union event in Milwaukee Monday afternoon, announced a new push by the administration for Congress to approve $50 billion to fix and expand roads, railways and runways.

The upfront first-year funding would be part of a larger effort to enact a new six-year surface transportation strategy.

It won quick praise from AAA, aviation groups and at least one key Democrat, House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar of Minnesota.

Oil and gas tax incentives take center stage

But business and industry groups – not to mention their Republican and oil-state Democratic allies – will certainly not accept Obama’s idea of paying for at least some of that $50 billion through scaling back oil and gas industry tax breaks.

This includes repealing the "dual capacity" tax credit used by domestic companies to offset foreign-sourced income and denying oil and gas producers the Section 199 manufacturing deduction for keeping most of their operations within the U.S. “We’ve given tax cuts – except we give them to folks who need them,” Obama told the crowd.

Industry and business interests push back

Official reaction to the announcement – which was on Labor Day after all – was rather sparse. But one influential lobbyist in the business community told The Hill that trying to use the oil and gas tax incentives to pay for the infrastructure spending is going to be a big problem. “Right now we’ve got considerable consternation about the payfors,” the lobbyist said. “Way to take something that should be bipartisan and make it partisan.”

Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) has requested to see permits related to Mariner Energy's Vermilion 380 platform.

The number of oceanic "dead zones," or waters severely deprived of oxygen, has increased 30-fold around U.S. coasts since 1960, according to an inter-agency report released Friday. 

The report noted that the growing incidence of hypoxia, or depressed oxygen levels, in U.S. waters "represents a significant threat to the health and economy" of coastal ecosystems."

If current practices are continued," the report read, "the expansion of hypoxia in coastal waters will continue and increase in severity, leading to further impacts on marine habitats, living resources, economies, and coastal communities."

"Dead zone" refers to the absence of non-bacterial organisms in waters that would otherwise host vibrant ecosystems.

The smart meter technology the Obama administration is rolling out nationwide under the stimulus bill is not overcharging consumers in California, an independent review has found.  

Consumers in California cried foul after the state’s largest utility, PG&E, began replacing analog meters with the digital technology in 2007. Many claimed the new meters were raising their utility bills, prompting municipalities and counties in the state to try and block their installation.    

The meters transmit data on energy use to utility companies through a wireless connection, eliminating the need for in-person readings. 

But a review by the Structure Consulting Group of Houston released Thursday found the smart meters have not been cheating customers. The report said an unusually hot summer last year, along with a general increase in electricity use, drove the bill increases.    

"I hope these findings help ease minds about the accuracy of SmartMeters," Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said in a statement.

The commission ordered the review of the meters in April.

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