According to Bloomberg News, energy investor and oil industry commentator Matt Simmons has died of an accidental drowning at his home.

Simmons had been frequently mentioned in news reports about the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon. He appeared as a commentator on MSNBC to discuss issues around offshore drilling, and was a proponent of using small nuclear devices to stop the oil flow from the well.

Bloomberg:

Matthew R. Simmons, an energy investment banker and a leading proponent of the “peak oil” theory that claims the Earth is running out of crude, died yesterday.

Simmons, 67, died in an accidental drowning at his home in Maine, local officials said.

Heart disease may have been a contributing factor, according to reports.

Emergency medical workers responded to Simmons’s home a little before 10 p.m. local time yesterday, said John Dietter, a crew chief in North Haven, Maine. The official cause of death is drowning, and he was found in a hot tub, said Tara Harrington, medical associate at Maine’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

“It was an accident,” Harrington said today in a telephone interview. She said “heart disease” was listed for the category of “other significant conditions” on the death certificate.

In addition to being the Party of No, the Florida GOP seems to be the Party of Cutting Off the Nose To Spite the Face. Florida Governor Charlie Crist proposed an amendment to the Florida Constitution banning near offshore drilling off the Florida Coast for all time.

In Florida, the will of the people seems to matter less than party pique at Charlie Crists' choice to run for Senator as an Independent after they endorsed teabagger Marco Rubio as their golden boy.

As the legislature prepares for a special session with the aim of debating a constitutional ban on offshore oil drilling, a new poll shows that Floridians oppose drilling within 10 miles of Florida’s coast, and that 71 percent want a chance to vote on a ban (though the wording of that question does not mention a constitutional referendum).

But the Florida GOP saw it as an opportunity to play political potsie and slap Crist instead, closing the special session called by Crist to address the question after 49 minutes without a vote.

In dramatic political theater, the Republican-led Florida House rejected Gov. Charlie Crist’s call for a constitutional amendment to ban oil drilling near Florida’s shores, calling it a “simple solution designed to produce sound bites, photo-ops and political attacks.”

A special session called by Crist lasted just 49 minutes in the House – from 12:02 p.m. to 12:51 p.m. – before legislators beat a path out of Tallahassee without any hearings or votes, despite objections from Democrats. It likely cost taxpayers around $40,000 to $50,000 for lawmakers to travel to the Capitol for the short-lived special session.

The vote to adjourn the session, without a vote on the drilling ban, broke down along party lines, 67-44.

Republicans' arguments seem to center around the fact that state law already prohibits offshore drilling. This is true. But as Californians discovered last year, state law can be changed when budgets are at risk of being blown out by a bad economy. Amazingly, approvals were considered for offshore exploration off the coast of Santa Barbara, the site of one of the worst oil spills in American history 40 years ago.

Was Crist's call political theater? Sure it was, but it also played for the majority of Floridians who rely on their beaches and tourist industries and who fear the possibility that thirst for oil and money will overwhelm their desire to preserve Florida's beauty and their livelihoods.

At least there's a clear record now for Floridians to consider.

(h/t Beach Peanuts)

This is not a huge surprise, but the oil-soaked 5th circuit Court of Appeals has denied the Obama administration's appeal of the decision to lift the moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — The Obama administration lost its bid Thursday to maintain a six-month moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling which a federal judge ordered to be lifted last month.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government's request to stay that judge's order pending appeal.

The motion was denied because the government failed to show "a likelihood of irreparable injury if the stay is not granted," the court wrote in a 2-1 ruling.

The government also "made no showing that there is any likelihood that drilling activities will be resumed pending appeal."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said he will soon issue a new order to block deepwater drilling regardless of how the court ruled.

The court noted that the Salazar "has the right to apply for emergency relief if he can show that drilling activity by deepwater rigs has commenced or is about to commence."

It also ordered that the appeal be expedited so the case can be argued on its merits during the week of August 30.

Given the depth of cronyism between this court panel and the oil industry, their ruling was to be expected. I'm wondering what steps Salazar will take to block drilling despite the court's order. Perhaps he will revoke permits?

US District Judge Martin Feldman has issued a stay to the President's moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Or put another way, the judge has given a green light for all offshore drilling to restart despite the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Judge Feldman ruled that the government had not taken other companies' safety records into account, nor had they provided compelling evidence for imposing a moratorium.

The Obama administration will appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in an effort to have the ruling reinstated.

The text of the ruling is here (PDF). I will update this post with more information as it becomes available.

On the record now before the Court, the defendants have failed to cogently reflect the decision to issue a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium with the facts developed during the thirty-day review. The plaintiffs have established a likelihood of successfully showing that the Administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously in issuing the moratorium.

Update #1: From the comments (thanks to savannah43), a backgrounder on Judge Feldman.

The primary objection from the other companies drilling in the Gulf to the moratorium is the perception that they are being punished for BP's inattention to safety. However, as commenter jalbert points out, they are all using the same boilerplate emergency response plan which has been shown to be woefully inadequate, outdated, and unresponsive to specific needs of the Gulf of Mexico. Chevron's claim of "perfectly safe without a relief well" is such an example.

Update #2: Judge Feldman owns stock in drilling companies (Transocean is one).

TPM has the full portfolio, noting cozy relationships between judges in that region and the oil industry:

In his opinion today, Feldman wrote, “Oil and gas production is quite simply elemental to Gulf communities.” Indeed, it is so elemental that the justice system is invested in the oil and gas industry. As TP’s Ian Millhiser has written, “Industry ties among federal judges are so widespread that they are beginning to endanger the courts’ ability to conduct routine business. Last month, so many members of the right-wing Fifth Circuit were forced to recuse themselves from an appeal against various energy and chemical companies that there weren’t enough untainted judges left to allow the court to hear the case.”

Back during the age of Reagan, I was working on a story about the popular meme of "running government like a business." I interviewed one management consultant who explained to me an important difference between government and the private sector. He said that business was focused on getting something out to market that was "good enough" quickly, something they could improve later. He said that government's priority wasn't speed or cost, but compliance with federal regulations, and everything else came second - not a bad thing when dealing with safety issues.

That's why he confidently told me that "no one in their right mind" would ever apply "just get it done" business mentality to safety regulation:

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

“What happened to all the stakeholders — Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government — all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security,” David J. Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview.

Even in one significant instance where the Minerals Management Service did act, it appears to have neglected to enforce a rule that required oil companies to submit proof that their blind shear rams would in fact work.

As it turns out, records and interviews show, blind shear rams can be surprisingly vulnerable. There are many ways for them to fail, some unavoidable, some exacerbated by the stunning water depths at which oil companies have begun to explore.

But they also can be rendered powerless by the failure of a single part, a point underscored in a confidential report that scrutinized the reliability of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. The report, from 2000, concluded that the greatest vulnerability by far on the entire blowout preventer was one of the small shuttle valves leading to the blind shear ram. If this valve jammed or leaked, the report warned, the ram’s blades would not budge.

This sort of “single-point failure” figures prominently in an emerging theory of what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon’s blind shear ram, according to interviews and documents. Some evidence suggests that when the crew activated the blind shear ram, its blades tried to cut the drill pipe, but then failed to finish the job because one or more of its shuttle valves leaked hydraulic fluid.

These kinds of weaknesses were understood inside the oil industry, documents and interviews show. And given the critical importance of the blind shear ram, offshore drillers began adding a layer of redundancy by equipping their blowout preventers with two blind shear rams.

Shorter version: For eight years, we had conservatives doing what conservatives do -- namely, ignoring regulations, taking businesses at their word and doing everything possible to help them maximize profits at the expense of the public good. But appointing Ken Salazar was highly unlikely to reverse that trend.

At least New Jersey gets the benefit of this kind of research before the real battle begins. It's already too late for the Gulf Coast:

The northern Atlantic Ocean, including the Jersey Shore, holds more economic value for activities such as commercial fishing and tourism than it does for oil extraction, according to a report released today by the New Jersey Sierra Club.

For every dollar an oil company would make from drilling off the North Atlantic coast, the more environmentally friendly pursuits of fishing and tourism would generate $12, making sustainable uses of the ocean more prudent than offshore drilling, the report said.

Long pushing for a moratorium on offshore oil drilling, several environmental groups gathered on the boardwalk in Asbury Park today to discuss the results of the report and announce a statewide event on June 26 calling for an end to offshore oil drilling.

"The report we’re releasing…shows that oil and gas is less profitable than sustainable activity," said Grace Sica, outreach coordinator for the Sierra Club. "Just two years of sustainable use of the North Atlantic Ocean almost exceeds whatever and all oil and natural gas resources are in the North Atlantic."

The report, authored by Michael Gravitz, oceans advocate for the Washington, D.C.-based Environment America Research and Policy Center, attempts to put into perspective the value of coastal business for each of the five oil-drilling regions of the United States compared to the value of oil and natural gas under their respective oceans.

The report said New Jersey was responsible for generating $11.5 billion of the estimated $61 billion generated by leisure and hospitality and recreational and commercial fishing among the seven states in the North Atlantic region. The suspected oil and natural gas in the region is estimated at $5.1 billion, according to the report.

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson has written a stunner of an article called "The Spill, The Scandal and The President." It's damned heartbreaking to learn that yes, at least in Interior, this really is the third Bush term:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

The administration's response to the looming threat? According to an e-mail to a congressional aide from a staff member at MMS, the agency has had "zero contact" with Atlantis about its safety risks since the Deepwater rig went down.

Excuse me, I think I have to go scream now...

[...] Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their "royalty" payments – the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource – not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. "This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling – that's his thing," says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling." As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of "a few rotten apples" at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. "The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks," says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. "In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture." One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words "Drill, baby, drill."

Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes – a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this f*ckup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling – a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.

"Employees describe being in Interior – not just MMS, but the other agencies – as the third Bush term," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents federal whistle-blowers. "They're working for the same managers who are implementing the same policies. Why would you expect a different result?"

[...]"People are being really circumspect, not pointing the finger at Salazar and Obama," says Rep. Raul Grijalva, who oversees the Interior Department as chair of the House subcommittee on public lands. "But the troublesome point is, the administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling – yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge."

I would think if we don't have money for unemployment benefits, we certainly don't have money to clean up this catastrophe. And yet, I guarantee you that many of the same politicians who are screaming about the jobless will be more than willing to pay the tab for these

Democrats in Congress and officials in the White House are making yet another major push to pass legislation to make the liability for oil companies involved in damaging spills unlimited.

On Monday evening, the White House confirmed that it favors the most recent piece of legislation that would drop any numerical ceiling to the amount of money an oil company like BP would have to pay for economic damages caused by a spill. Currently, the cap is $75 million.

"The president supports removing caps on liability for oil companies engaged in offshore drilling," said spokesman Ben LaBolt. "Oil companies should have every incentive to maximize safety and arbitrary caps on liability create a disincentive to achieve that goal."

The statement was the most detailed the administration has offered to date with respect to the debate surrounding BP's liability. And it reflects a growing sentiment within the White House that more aggressive action (if not optics) need to be in place to stem the fallout of the Gulf crisis. Several weeks ago, U.S. Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli made the case for an unlimited cap without formally endorsing the policy.

The government, he said before a congressional hearing, needs to "ensure that there is no arbitrary cap on corporate responsibility for a similar major oil spill."

Gov. Bobby Jindal's contradictions may confuse you at first. While shaking his fist at BP and the federal government's inability to stop the river of oil poisoning the Louisiana coastline and wetlands, he's also unbending in his support for offshore drilling to continue.

"The last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs while preventing the creation of thousands more," he added.

"I fully understand the need for strict oversight of deepwater drilling," Jindal wrote. "However, I would ask that the federal government move quickly to ensure that all deepwater drilling is in proper compliance with federal regulation and is conducted safely so that energy production and more importantly, thousands of jobs, are not in limbo."

The problem I have with Jindal's appeal? Current federal regulations around deepwater drilling are inadequate. Deepwater drilling is a frontier. There are many unknowns, including how to handle blowouts at a depth of 5,000 feet under the sea, how to handle the oil once it begins spilling, and how to properly preserve ecosystems which have existed for centuries.

Of course, David Vitter couldn't resist peeking over his diapers to pile on:

Louisiana has been witnessing a severe lack of urgency and understanding from the Obama Administration and BP. Our state and our way of life continue to be under attack from the devastating oil spill, and now to make matters worse, President Obama's has imposed a moratorium and shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless we lift Obama's moratorium, it could kill thousands of Louisiana jobs.

Rigs won't wait idly for six months, they'll move overseas to places like West Africa or Brazil and take jobs with them. I have called on President Obama to replace his recently announced shutdown of deepwater rigs for immediate rig safety inspections.

Their concern isn't without merit, though, and it's the reason you won't hear the President simply rule out offshore drilling, whether in deep or shallow waters. Louisiana receives a substantial chunk of its revenue from royalties for offshore drilling activity, and expects to receive much more. He's also right about the jobs. Shutting down the rigs in the Gulf means job losses for thousands in that area with no real prospect for re-employment as long as the rigs are shut down.

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Rachel's segment on the 1979 Ixtoc I oil spill was instructive. It follows the same conclusions I've seen in my research; namely, solutions for stopping undersea oil leaks haven't changed much over the years. Not only haven't they changed, they're as destructive to the environment as the spill itself.

Even though the Ixtoc spill occurred in 200 feet of water, it is on record as the second worst oil spill in history. The worst in history was the intentional destruction and dumping of oil resources in the Persian gulf by Saddam Hussein at the end of the first Iraq war. Despite studies and simulators, there is very little new technology to fight an out-of-control oil leak. Here are the options:

1. Isolate the well - This is the "top hat" method that didn't work on the Deepwater Horizon spill, where a cement dome was to be lowered onto the leaking pipe.
2. Plug the hole - This is the "top kill" method BP is using now to stanch the flow of oil until they can encase the opening in cement and finish drilling relief wells to pull the pressure away from this one. This method failed in the Ixtoc spill effort.
3. Drill relief wells - This is the best and most effective measure to stop the flow. It's also the longest-term solution. It took months for the Ixtoc relief wells to take effect and stop the flow from the blown well. In the best case, the "top kill" method will buy enough time for relief wells to come online and control the leakage.

I've been struggling to understand all the nuances of the debate in front of us with regard to offshore drilling. It's easy to frame it as Big Oil versus the Environment, but there's more to it than that. Jobs, state economies, and even our national economy can rise or fall based upon oil prices and availability. If we were to stop drilling in the Gulf tomorrow, the economic impact would likely devastate an already-fragile economic truce.

And yet, there is an unmistakable arrogance to the studies I read about the relative safety of drilling offshore. Many of these studies refer to "better safety measures" and "environmental protection". I don't see it. The same methods and technology are being used to drill wells today as were used 30 years ago. Go no further than the video at the top of the page for evidence.

If we have to accept offshore drilling, it seems to me it should be on our terms, not theirs, for a finite period of time, and with a goal of making a scheduled shift with defined benchmarks to alternative energy sources.