As the BP-Halliburton oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico grows, President Barack Obama vowed to change the “cozy relationship” between government and the oil and gas industry. The Minerals Management Service (MMS), a 1700-person bureau in the Department of the Interior that manages $13.7 billion per year in revenues from drilling leases, will be restructured, though in ways that fail to solve essential problems.

In an exclusive interview with the Wonk Room, top offshore drilling lobbyist Allen J. Verret raised concerns that this “chaotic situation” in the Gulf of Mexico could lead to the “opportunity for draconian measures to be taken against the oil and gas industry that fit the adminstration’s plans.” Verret worries greatly that the Obama administration’s response to this “watershed moment” will fit the pattern he sees of government taking over private commerce:

Recently the government is running automotive companies, running financial companies, running banks. They’re getting more in the business of running commerce, much to the dismay of the business owners. . . . You’re going to have a Communist Party member sitting on everything.

Verret is the executive director of the Offshore Operators Committee (OOC), a coalition of Gulf of Mexico offshore drillers that negotiates with the federal agencies that oversee the industry. With the American Petroleum Institute, the OOC helps write the rules for the industry that the MMS enforces. BP officials Marshall Maestri, Scherie Douglas and Randy Josacek chair OOC’s legal, drilling and pipeline subcommittees.

Verret believes that the objections that API and his organization raised to mandatory safety and environmental rules proposed last year are “twisted” by the “liberal” media. “We have no problems with good regulations,” he told the Wonk Room in the telephone interview, but “none of these agencies have the expertise to do the things they’re given the authority to look over.” Despite his fears of creeping socialism, Verret recognized that “you can over-regulate and you can under-regulate an industry.”

The laws which govern the way business coalitions like his write the rules under which they operate are the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act and the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

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BP still channels Goldman Sachs: CEO says, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

NPR’s Richard Harris has learned that much more oil, 70,000 barrels a day or more than ten times the official estimate, is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon pipe, based on scientific analysis of the video released Wednesday.

That’s the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez tanker full every four days.

Some people weren’t sure about my earlier metaphor, “Time to stop calling the BP-Halliburton oil disaster a ‘leak’ or a ‘spill’ “” Try ‘an undersea volcano of oil’.”  But now it seems clear that even my May 1 post questioning the official “leak” rate — Oilpocalypse Now: WSJ reports BP oil disaster may be leaking at rate of 1 million gallons a day — was an understimate.

And it’s now as clear as unpolluted water exactly why BP suppressed for weeks the release of their video of the gusher:

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The E.P.A. Announces a New Rule on Polluters

The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a final rule on Thursday for regulating major emitters of greenhouse gases, like coal-fired power plants, under the Clean Air Act.

Starting in July 2011, new sources of at least 100,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year and any existing plants that increase emissions by 75,000 tons will have to seek permits, the agency said.

As I’ve been saying, EPA’s focus will be new sources of emissions.  If you want to sharply reduce emissions from existing facilities, you’re going to need a climate bill like, say, the American Power Act.  The story continues:

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As the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico continues to ravage the southeastern coast of the United States, Congress is working on federal reforms that would decrease the likelihood of future disasters and force oil companies to take more responsibility for the financial cost of such catastrophes.  One senator who claims to be in support of such reforms is Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).  TP reports on her hypocrisy in this repost.

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As BP attempts to once again plug the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, balls of tar have begun washing up on the “prized white sands” of the Louisiana and Alabama coasts, alongside dead dolphins, sea turtles and 600 dead catfish. The Coast Guard released these photos yesterday of tar on Raccoon Island in Louisiana, “a protected bird breeding sanctuary with a variety of breeds“:

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Plus the cartoonist’s commentary

The WashPost cartoonist Tom Toles has a couple of great cartoons on the VA Attorney General’s witchhunt and the oil spill.  He also explains his thinking:

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