Oil gushes from the riser cap Friday afternoon.

According to a top BP official, the effectiveness of the latest attempt to capture oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout will only be announced once every twenty-four hours. In a press briefing this afternoon, BP senior vice president Kent Wells discussed their latest attempt to capture some of the gushing oil using a funnel placed on the riser pipe at 11 PM last night. Wells refused to tell reporters how much oil and natural gas is being captured by the funnel and drawn to the Discoverer Enterprise, Transocean’s ultra-deepwater drilling ship.

Wells stated that BP arranged with National Incident Commander Thad Allen to only release information on how much oil is being captured once every 24 hours.

Wells said that he expects the success rate of the riser cap to be announced during Allen’s once-a-day briefings.

This is yet another case of the federal government allowing BP to limit information instead of oil damage — a pattern that has emerged as the public and press have unsuccessfully attempted to get clear answers about the blowout flow rate, the damage to wildlife, the status of undersea oil plumes, the toxicity of dispersants, claims processing, offers of assistance and and more. The live feeds from BP’s robot submarines were made public after over a month of wrangling and pressure from Congress.

The live data about the oil recovery efforts — such as pressure, flow rate, and chemical composition — should be made public immediately. Each bit of knowledge assists in the effort by the nation to comprehend and respond rapidly to this growing disaster.

This is a matter not just of public interest but of great financial significance — BP intends to sell the oil being collected for a potential revenue of more than $1.4 million a day.

Under sustained questioning, Wells finally admitted that the limiting factor of the recovery effort is not the flow rate of the gusher — still utterly unknown — but the capacity of the Discoverer Enterprise, which is 630,000 gallons (15,000 barrels) a day. That capacity is not expected to be reached for days, as most of the oil is still being vented into the ocean at the sea bed and injected with toxic dispersants. BP engineers intend to slowly close vents and increase the still-secret capture rate.

Also today, BP announced that it would be spinning off its disaster response efforts as a separate unit to be led by BP managing director Bob Dudley, who believes that CEO Tony Hayward is “doing a fantastic job” and believes that BP’s “spill responses at the surface now are being very, very effective.”

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed by President George W. Bush on August 8, 2005, achieved many of the goals set out by Cheney’s secret task force in 2001 and ushered in a new era of deregulation, self-regulation, and utter disregard for environmental and safety laws. It also coincided with a culture of deep and widespread corruption at the Interior Department, including the Minerals Management Service. This era unquestionably set the stage for the BP oil catastrophe — Cheney’s Katrina.

With two oilmen in the White House and two more Texans leading an emboldened Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Big Oil had an unprecedented opportunity to set U.S. energy policy. Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Task Force concluded in May 2001:

Advanced, more energy-efficient drilling and production methods: reduce emissions; practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources.

Fortunately, the Democratically controlled Senate prevented final passage of a bill during the 107th Congress from January 2001 to January 2003. After Republicans took the Senate in 2003, oil-funded House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) pushed for an even more sweeping bill that fulfilled the pro-oil blueprint crafted by Cheney’s secret energy task force. After months of intense debate, a bipartisan filibuster in the Senate barely killed the bill.

In 2005, after retaking the White House and increasing their majorities in both houses of Congress with the help of over $2.5 million in oil money, Bush and Cheney worked with oil-funded Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) to pass yet another bill that included tens of billions in subsidies for Big Oil and other forms of dirty energy and dozens of other provisions to reduce or eliminate royalties paid by Big Oil to taxpayers, waive or eliminate environmental and safety reviews, and otherwise enhance Big Oil’s ability to exploit our natural resources with little or no oversight and with maximum profit. Andrew Lundquist, the executive director of Cheney’s energy task force, left government to actively lobby for the legislation on behalf of BP and other energy companies.

One of the worst elements of what has come to be known as the “Dick Cheney energy bill” had a direct role in eliminating the kind of regulatory oversight that may have prevented the blowout of BP’s Mississippi Canyon 252 well on April 20 of this year:

Section 390 of the legislation dramatically expanded the circumstances under which drilling operations could forgo environmental reviews and be approved almost immediately under so-called “categorical exclusions” from the National Environmental Policy Act.

The use of such exclusions went on to widespread abuse under the Bush administration. BP’s blown-out well did not undergo an environmental review thanks to a categorical exclusion. BP was lobbying as recently as April to expand the use of such exclusions.

The expansion of categorical exclusions in the bill is far from the only giveaway to Big Oil at the expense of the environment and taxpayers. Cheney’s energy bill also relieved oil companies of paying royalties to the taxpayers for millions of barrels of oil produced from deepwater wells (Sec. 345), weakened states’ ability under the Coastal Zone Management Act to have a say in projects and federal activities that affect their coasts including limiting appeals related to pipeline construction or offshore oil development (Sec. 381-82), and created a loophole to allow oil companies to drill under a national seashore by transferring the mineral rights to private ownership or ownership by the state of Texas (Sec. 373).

Read the extended version of this post at the Center for American Progress.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Task Force concluded in May 2001 that “advanced, more energy efficient drilling and production methods: reduce emissions; practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources.” At that time, with two oilmen in the White House and two more Texans leading an emboldened Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Big Oil had an unprecedented opportunity to set U.S. energy policy.

Big Oil did not miss the opportunity. A deeper look at the energy legislation based on Cheney’s secret energy task force underscores how the unabashedly pro-oil policies and permissive regulatory environment created during the Bush administration set the stage for Cheney’s Katrina“”the BP oil disaster.  CAP’s Joshua Dorner has the story in this repost

Big Oil-backed Republicans move quickly

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EPA sets first new limit on sulfur dioxide in decades

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday set a new health standard that coal-fired power plants and other industries will have to meet on sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that triggers asthma attacks and causes other respiratory problems.

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Yesterday, AP photographer Charles Riedel filed these disturbing images of the effect the BP oil disaster is having on Gulf Coast birds (via Amanda Terkel at Think Progress):

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Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is calling on the Senate’s key committee leaders to come up with a comprehensive energy strategy by July 4, accelerating the push for legislation in wake of the worst oil spill in American history.

Reid demanded “swift” action from Democrats “to address both the existing situation and to reduce the risks of such a catastrophe happening again.”

That’s the Politico story on the letter Reid wrote Thursday to “Committee leaders Max Baucus, Jeff Bingaman, Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln and John Rockefeller.”

Here is the full letter:

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Facing possible jail time for their roles in the largest oil spill in American history, BP and Halliburton are building high-powered legal teams with “deep Department of Justice and White House ties.” But the companies are pursuing other means to defend themselves as well, as TP explains in this repost.

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On Tuesday, “oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit Mississippi shores for the first time,” covering about two miles of Petit Bois Island’s beach.  And that meant more tone-deaf greenwashing from dirty energy lobbyist-turned-Governor Haley Barbour, as reported in this Think Progress repost.

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