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.

One of the most senior regulators of the offshore drilling industry is stepping down, effective at the end of this month, according to this report in the Washington Post.

Chris Oynes, associate director for offshore energy and minerals management at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), has been criticized for being too close with industry, according to the Post. He announced his retirement in an e-mail.

Oynes' decision comes as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a series of changes at MMS to improve oversight of the oil industry in light of the ongoing spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The committee requested the appearance and Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) expressed his unhappiness about the failure to appear.

Combined global land and ocean surface temperatures for the first four months of 2010 were the warmest on record

Transocean Ltd. recently signed Capitol Hill Consulting Group after a massive Gulf Coast oil spill.