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The deal is expected to be completed within the next two months, the company said.

In the past week, there's been a long back-and-forth about how big, exactly, the Gulf oil spill is and how much crude is leaking out of BP's well. First the oil company said 5,000 barrels per day were gushing out. Then that was shown to be false. Now some experts estimate it might be closer to 95,000 barrels per day, and various members of Congress have been accusing BP of a "cover-up" and demanding a precise barrel count.

Is any of this even important, though? For awhile, both BP and the federal government argued that all this gallon-guessing was beside the point, and they had better things to do than analyze videos of the leak and conduct estimates. But, as Lisa Suatoni explains here, knowing the size of the oil flow is quite crucial for a whole bunch of different practical reasons—and not just because people have a right to know:

1. Scale. The flow rate estimates differ by a factor of ten. Differences on this scale are not quibbles; they are big, fundamental differences.

2. Response. The discrepancy is sufficiently large enough to influence response strategies. For example, to promote the efficacy of dispersants, they are applied at a specific ratio to the volume of oil. This is not possible if the volume is unknown, by this large of a degree. In addition, the ability to successfully cap the well, engineer a dome, or pump the oil to the surface depends on a good estimate of the oil flow rate (both in terms of volume of oil and the force with which it is exiting the pipe).

3. Law. Under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, a natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) must be conducted. This entails assessing the input of oil, its fate (i.e., where it goes, what it coats and contaminates), and the damage it caused. The ability to fully conduct this accounting—or ‘mass balance’—requires knowing the initial volume of oil.

4. Financial Penalty. Following discharge of oil into a water body, the federal Clean Water Act allows for a civil penalty of up to $1,000 per barrel of oil spilled. This penalty can not be calculated to its fullest extent without knowing the total volume of oil.

5. Future emergency plans. Knowing the magnitude of this spill is necessary to inform future emergency response plans. Substantial underestimates of the volume of oil leaking from Deepwater Horizon will leave us unprepared in the future.

The financial penalty part is interesting. If BP's leak estimates were correct, then it'd be facing something like a $140 million fine so far. But if the high-end estimates are right, well, the oil giant could be facing penalties in the billions. Yesterday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the government would make its own independent assessment of the numbers, though it's unclear why this wasn't done earlier.

Now that financial reform has passed through the Senate, is energy next? As always, that's… unclear. A big problem right now is that no one actually seems to be at the forefront of shepherding the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act through the chamber. As Darren Samuelsohn reports, Harry Reid was supposed to take charge of the process, but he's still trying to figure out whether to move ahead with a big climate bill or a smaller "energy-only" bill (which, in its current form, is basically a grab bag of subsidies that wouldn't actually accomplish all that much).

Reid is waiting to see how a couple different things unfold. First, he wants the White House to get actively involved—the way Obama helped salvage a deal at Copenhagen or stepped in during the intra-party skirmishes over the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House. But so far, the administration has stayed aloof. (That's not too mysterious: According to Eric Pooley's excellent book The Climate War, Rahm Emanuel was extremely skeptical of having the House pass a climate bill, deeming it a political loser.) True, a few officials here and there have tried to make the link between the Gulf spill and energy reform, but the president certainly hasn't been pounding on that connection publicly, and he's done little more than voice perfunctory support for the climate bill.

Lately, a handful of frustrated green groups have begun running ads imploring Obama to get in the game. But this quote from ClimateWire pretty much sums up the state of affairs:

"The silence from the White House is deafening," said a former Clinton-era White House aide. "Clearly without a White House push there does not seem to be adequate political momentum."

The second thing Reid wants is a Republican ally who can help corral a few votes on the other side of the aisle. That point-person used to be Lindsey Graham, until Graham got in a tiff with Reid over immigration and bowed out of the whole process. Will he come back? That seems increasingly unlikely. Here's the latest from the South Carolina Republican:

Since leaving the Kerry-Lieberman talks, Graham has added to his list of demands for what needs to happen before he returns to the bargaining table. Now, Graham says he also wants a resolution to the uncertainty surrounding the month-old Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

"I know we need to enhance on- and offshore drilling, to make us more energy independent, but I'm not willing to say let's go forward boldly now until I find out what happened," he said. ...

Graham also said he could vote for a Senate energy and climate bill, but he must see offshore drilling provisions he originally negotiated with Kerry and Lieberman added back into the bill. At issue is language stripped out at the behest of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) that would maintain a 2006 law to keep rigs 125 to 235 miles off Florida's Gulf coast.

It's quite unclear what sort of clarity Graham needs before he's willing to work on an energy bill, but this is vague enough that he's essentially giving himself an all-purpose out—after all, this Gulf Coast mess is going to linger on indefinitely. And his second new demand looks like a deal-breaker. Opening up Florida's coast for further drilling would undoubtedly cause Florida's Bill Nelson to filibuster the bill. So unless Graham can haul in a slew of additional supporters for a climate bill (and he hasn't been able to so far), you'd just be swapping Graham's vote for Nelson's and getting nowhere.

Are there any other potential Republicans backers? Samuelsohn quotes Georgia's Johnny Isakson as saying he's intrigued by the fact that the Kerry-Lieberman bill would lead to a huge expansion of nuclear power (at least according to the Peterson Institute study I discussed yesterday). Isakson claims he'll keep an open mind until he reads the bill. But how likely is that? And, meanwhile, Kerry and Lieberman are reaching out to Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown, Judd Gregg, and Florida's George Lemieux, but nothing's come of those talks yet, either.

So, yes, there's still a slim chance that a big climate bill can pass this year. But something needs to change. Maybe the White House decides to make a full-court press. Maybe some of those Republicans who always claim to care about global warming (Snowe, Collins, Gregg) decide they actually want to do something meaningful about it. Or maybe after the EPA models the bill—and that will be done sometime in mid-June—the results will be so eye-catching that senators take a second look. But until there's some dramatic outside shock, the bill's stuck in neutral.

We've had to wait all week, but Rand Paul has finally decided to bless us with his thoughts on the oil spill in the Gulf:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you don’t want to get rid of the EPA?

PAUL: No, the thing is is that drilling right now and the problem we’re having now is in international waters and I think there needs to be regulation of that and always has been regulation. What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, you know, “I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.” I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I’ve heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill.

And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I’ve met a lot of these miners and their families. They’re very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

Ah yes, the "oops" defense. But let's focus in on Paul's bit about "I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill." We now know that the oil company has been wildly lowballing the amount of oil leaking from the well: BP originally claimed 5,000 barrels per day, but that hasn't survived scrutiny, especially after video of the leaking pipe was made public. And why was the oil giant understating the amount? One possible motivation, as McClatchy reported, is that BP's low-end estimate "could save the company millions of dollars in damages when the financial impact of the spill is resolved in court."

Note also that BP isn't fully on the hook for the spill. Under current law, the company is obliged to pay direct cleanup costs, but its liability for indirect damages to wildlife or fisheries or beaches is limited to $75 million—and with the crude slick now lapping at the coastal wetlands of Louisiana and possibly spreading up through Florida, the total costs are surely going to be much higher than that. In essence, the government has socialized the risk BP and other drilling companies face. Surely that would bother a staunch libertarian like Paul, right? And yet Senate Republicans have been blocking attempts to raise the liability cap to $10 billion, and Paul hasn't said a word on the subject. Odd, that.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics has just put out a great assessment of the Senate climate bill, the American Power Act. Dave Roberts has a post over at Grist with lots of colorful graphs pulled from it, but I thought this drab little chart was maybe the most helpful of the bunch. It shows how we can expect different energy sources to perform under the bill, compared with business as usual:

If this thing ever passed, oil consumption would drop quite a bit, coal use would go down, and even natural gas would drop a bit (this despite the fact that the bill has incentives for natural gas, which is the cleanest of fossil fuels). Nuclear does very well. Interestingly, the bill would make virtually no difference to the solar and wind industries. But that's not too surprising—the Senate's renewable energy standard is woefully weak, and not likely to do much to improve on existing state standards. Meanwhile, here's a graph of how the bill would affect energy prices:

The impact on consumers is relatively minor—by 2030, households can expect to pay anywhere from $136 more to $35 less in energy prices each year than they otherwise would, depending on whether and how cars and trucks keep getting more fuel-efficient.

And, in fact, the Senate bill could do even better on this front. As ACEEE has pointed out, the efficiency provisions in the Senate bill would only save one-third as much energy by 2030 as those in the House climate bill. By and large, efficiency improvements can save households a lot of money, but there are a variety of regulatory reasons why power companies don't always pursue this course (this old TNR piece on the always-fascinating world of electric utilities gets into why).

Again, if environmentalists wanted to strengthen the bill, boosting the efficiency and renewables sections seems like one of the most promising routes of attack. As the House vote on the "cash for caulkers" bill a few weeks ago showed, it's usually possible to pick off a few Republican votes for these items—cutting energy waste is such an obviously sound idea that even conservatives have a hard time objecting. (Well, sometimes.)

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Given the Gulf-induced drilling backlash--all the candidates--Republicans and Democrats --groped to outdo each other in demonstrating their zeal to prevent such a thing with varying degrees of credibility given Canada is a sovereign nation and a lack of clarity concerning what, if anything, a governor could do.

Some of the answers: “I’d fly to Ottawa; I’d phone the premier of Quebec; I’d lobby the Obama administration to stop it; a governor can’t do anything, but I’d try.”

At a moment when the nation is just beginning to pour serious dollars into cleaning the Great Lakes, repairing damage done by the prior carbon-fueled industrial era’s water abuse; and prompted in no small part by our work demonstrating the huge economic importance of clean Great Lakes to the long-term economic revitalization of these industrial metros, there have been some ironic recent twists in the political winds.

Prior to the Gulf BP disaster,  not only was Great Lakes drilling once again sneaking up as a real and potentially “needed” economic opportunity (albeit with Canadians as the stalking horse), but Michigan just gained an unprecedented windfall to maintain its once crown jewel state parks system from the latest round of oil and gas leases that are routinely auctioned. Michigan’s park system, like a lot of Michigan, has been decimated by 10 years of economic and state budget collapse, leading to deferred maintenance and park budget cuts.  The recent round of land-based oil and gas exploration leases earned a surprise $178 million for the parks trust fund--almost as much as the $190 million total netted since the program began in 1929.

Making a choice in the Great Lakes devil’s bargain between long-term economic gain by capitalizing on its spectacular freshwater coast as a place-defining, people attracting magnet or exploiting the rich resources that lie below the Great Lakes, and maybe wrecking the place again, will be held at bay due to the BP moment. But the underlying tensions and Faustian political choice remains.