Tucked inside the Senate bill aimed at cracking down on oil drillers after the Gulf spill is a long-sought measure to protect groundwater from natural gas drilling.

The bill, called The Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act, would require that drilling companies make public a complete list of chemicals injected underground in proprietary formulas to break up rock deep underground and extract natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing.

It would not, however, reverse the exemption that prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating the fracturing process like other forms of underground injection, another important regulatory change that was initially proposed in House and Senate bills last June along with the chemical disclosure.

That bill, called the Frac Act, was sponsored by Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., who pushed for its inclusion in the accountability bill now being considered.

“Proper regulation is another essential element in protecting drinking water and public health. That is a battle that we still need to fight,” Casey told ProPublica in an e-mail. But he emphasized that disclosing the chemical names “is an important step toward informing the public and building accountability for oil and gas companies.”

A push for disclosure and stricter regulation of the fracturing process began in earnest last year after a series of articles by ProPublica reported more than a thousand cases of ground and surface water contamination in drilling areas where the process was being used. The articles examined drilling records in more than seven states, and found both a consistent pattern of water contamination in drilling areas, and a gap in scientific knowledge about the way hydraulic fracturing affects underground layers of rock and aquifers.

Problems were severe in Casey’s home state, where fast-paced development of the Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit quickly led to a cattle quarantine and dozens of reports of drinking water well contamination in places where hydraulic fracturing had been employed. Residents reported flammable tap water, and state investigations found that methane had seeped into water supplies underground as a result of the drilling activity.

Investigating the cause of such incidents has been difficult in part because the EPA does not have the jurisdiction to regulate fracturing the way it does other injection processes, and because the chemical makeup of the fracturing fluids has been guarded as a trade secret.

Several states, including New York, Colorado and Wyoming, have recently passed disclosure laws of their own, and industry representatives have begun to support the notion. But the language of the Senate bill is the most specific, and would apply to all of the states where oil and gas is produced.

The disclosure proposed today would still allow companies to withhold the exact recipes they use, meaning they wouldn’t have to disclose the concentrations to the public. But they would — in case of emergencies — be required to share that information on a confidential basis with doctors and hospitals responding to an accident.

It’s not clear how far the bill will get in the face of Republican opposition. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who added the disclosure component to the accountability bill, has said he hoped to bring the bill to a vote next week. Even if it passes, it will need to be reconciled with a House version that does not include the fracturing disclosure language.

Update: Politico notes that Reid may have added the disclosure language as a note to environmentalists, who have been upset that the Senate has moved away from a bill on global warming.

Boise is an unlikely hot spot in the BP oil spill controversy this week. Idaho’s capital was randomly selected as host city for a public meeting of a federal panel that will decide how the more than 150 civil cases filed so far will be handled.

It is likely cases will be consolidated, and a judge to handle those proceedings must be identified. Cases have been filed related to the deaths, personal injuries, economic losses and environmental damage associated with the oil rig explosion and leak.

At the same time, Congress is also considering those interests, with a stack of 80 bills related to oil industry reform. Pew Environment Group manager Eleanor Huffines says much of the legislation is bipartisan, and some will be of assistance to those who have filed cases.

“People are taking a hard look at our laws that haven’t been changed for over 32 years and saying, ‘What can we do differently, and what can we do better, to take care of the coastal communities, the people and the environment?’”

She says 10 bills are already out of committee and ready for votes before the August recess. Several focus on research that would put oil companies and the nation in a better position to prevent future accidents, and to respond more efficiently when there are spills, she adds.

“A lot of the technology for drilling has advanced, but the technology for oil spill response has not advanced. Our laws have not advanced, our oversight.”

Listen to the Northern Rockies News Service podcast by Deborah Smith.

BOOTSTRAP: WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY

Attend the hearing: The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation meets Thursday, July 29 at the James A. McClure Federal Building, Courtroom No. 3, 6th Floor. Oral arguments begin at 9:30 a.m.

Check Govtrack.us to see if your congressional representative is sponsoring the pending oil industry regulation reform bills. Click on the Apture link above for a list of proposed laws compiled by the Pew Environmental Group.

Colorado is one of a handful of states being targeted by a new campaign to get big money out of national politics. You might have already seen one of the TV commercials on cable that features images scrolling on an iPad in support of the Fair Elections Now Act in Congress.

Celinda Lake, Democratic pollster with Lake Research Partners, asked voters if they would support such a measure that encourages candidates to raise money from small donors in their states rather than from large special-interest and corporate donors.

“Every single demographic group had almost two-thirds support for this measure, whether you’re talking age, whether you’re talking about every region of the country, including more conservative regions.”

She says they found majority support among Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

Some opponents of the bill say it would likely end up using taxpayer money to support far-left or far-right candidates with potentially offensive ideologies. But, Republican pollster Mark McKinnon says that even after hearing that objection, a majority of Republicans still support the measure.

“Nothing strikes hotter in the values category for Republicans than the idea of accountability, and that’s really what this proposal is all about.”

Under the bill, candidates would be able to run campaigns for office on a blend of Fair Elections Funds and small dollar donations. H.R. 1826: Fair Elections Now Act legislation has 157 co-sponsors in the U.S. House and 21 for the companion bill S. 752 in the Senate. Mountain state Democratic Reps. Martin Heinrich (NM-1), Ben Luján (NM-3), Betsy Markey (CO-4), Walter Minnick (ID-1), Jared Polis (CO-2), Harry Teague (NM-2) and Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) are co-sponsoring the tandem bills.

Listen to the Colorado News Connection podcast by Eric Mack.

BOOTSTRAP: WHAT CAN YOU DO TODAY
Fair Elections.org offers a grassroots campaign finance reform activists toolkit to bird-dog elected officials and candidates to pledge support for clean, small donor-based elections.

During President Obama’s speech this week at Carnegie Mellon University, he signaled emphatically that he would go after the votes to pass a clean energy bill this year, assuring that while “the votes may not be there right now… I intend to find them in the coming months… and we will get it done.”This is exactly the sort of presidential resolve that’s needed. The president went on to say:

[T]he only way the transition to clean energy will succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed. And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.

He got it exactly right — investors are waiting to see what Congress decides. And once we do set a price for carbon pollution, a huge amount of money will be back in play to invest in clean energy.

This infusion of capital is critical to job creation. Every study that is done to assess job creation potential of the new energy economy builds off assumptions about how much capital will be devoted to energy efficiency, renewables, and the like. For example, the June 2009 University of Massachusetts report, “The Economic Benefits of Investing in Clean Energy,” assumed that the provisions of the House version of New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s bill, the American Clean Energy Leadership Act (ACELA), building on stimulus funds already committed, would bring $150 billion in new investment per year for the next decade — creating 2.5 million jobs. If that capital came 100% from the oil and gas sector, the net job creation (net of jobs lost in oil and gas) would be 1.7 million jobs.

While I believe some of that capital will come from diverting money from oil and gas, not all of it will. And, given unemployment numbers, there is quite a bit of capital sitting on the sidelines.

But don’t just take it from me, listen to a venture capitalist. In his testimony before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, delivered April 2008, Mission Point venture capitalist Dan Abbasi noted:

We testified before Congress that we and other leading investment firms have mobilized billions of dollars from blue-chip investors with a mandate to invest in the decarbonization of our economy. And we stand ready to do much more if Congress passes a law to set some long overdue rules of the road.

A long-term stable price signal for carbon is imperative to encourage innovation and to promote investment. It needs to be long enough to reward investors for locking up their capital in asset-intensive, long lead-time energy projects and taking on the associated technical, construction and market risks. Moreover, only a long-term carbon price will motivate investment in the supply chain companies that must scale up and thrive if we’re to drive down the price of low-carbon energy.

While we’re finding some attractive investments today, candidly we are also holding back a lot of “dry powder” — or uninvested capital — and the economic downturn is only partly to blame. The biggest factor is continued uncertainty over whether Congress will pass a bill capping carbon. Renewable loan guarantees, grants and tax credits from the stimulus package are helping us to finance the supply of low-carbon solutions, but without a cap we won’t see the market demand needed to fully pull those solutions through.

In Europe, after the passage of their Emissions Trading System, the ETS, James Graham, Director of the Commercial Division for Camco International, noted that “If you look at the pricing for credits from renewable energy projects before and after the creation of the EU ETS, the pricing was much higher afterwards. Higher prices means more projects are happening. More capital is being allocated to investing in renewables because of enhanced returns from the addition of a carbon revenue stream to such projects.”

According to Clean Tech Venture Network, California saw a 20% compound annual growth rate in clean technology investments in 2002 after passage of a Renewable Portfolio Standard, but that jumped to 98% compound annual growth rate when AB 32 (putting a price on carbon) was introduced and passed 18 months later. (Clean Tech Venture Network data)

Last month, columnist David Brooks discovered capital sitting on the sidelines as well. If the American Power Act (the Senate version of comprehensive energy and climate legislation passes with a price on carbon) passed, utility executives noted just 4 weeks ago that they would move capital off the sidelines:

“Regarding wind energy investment at our NextEra Energy Resources subsidiary, we think we might invest about $1.5 billion to $2 billion more per year. Regarding solar, we think NextEra Energy Resources might invest $500 million or more per year outside of Florida and that our Florida Power & Light subsidiary might invest about $1 billion a year inside Florida.” — Lew Hay, chief executive of the power provider FPL Group.

“[NRG] could double the number of clean energy projects, from 17 to 36; it could triple the megawatts of clean generating capacity it is planning to add; it could produce three times as much nuclear power and 40 times as much coal with carbon capture and sequestration. — David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy.

“The Renewable Portfolio Standard should be considered a short-term technique to “jump-start” a new industry but seen as a temporary incentive. In contrast, monetizing carbon and placing a cap on carbon signals a major shift in the industry framework and provides a long-term market signal that is very different than the RPS approach,” according to BJ Stanbery, founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of HelioVolt, a Texas-based manufacturer of thin film solar.

Getting this capital off the sidelines and into clean energy projects is a clear path to job creation. But it’s not just about getting capital off the sidelines, it’s about keeping capital here in the U.S. Who can forget Jeff Immelt saying at a Wall Street Journal event in 2008 that “If the U.S. doesn’t buy my wind turbines, I’ll go to Turkey.” In this economy, we can hardly afford to have the next generation of energy projects shipped overseas. The U.S. can and should be a leader in clean energy, and with the right investment, we can make it happen.

This post was originally published at the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate 411 blog.

With all due respect, we can only wish those Tea Party activists who gathered in Washington and other cities this week weren’t so single-minded about just who’s responsible for all their troubles, real and imagined. They’re up in arms, so to speak, against Big Government, especially the Obama administration.

If they thought this through, they’d be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who in the coming weeks will be demonstrating in Washington and other cities against High Finance, taking on Wall Street and the country’s biggest banks.

The original Tea Party, remember, wasn’t directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.

It may seem a bit of a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same: when enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt — badly. That’s what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse.

So the Tea Party crowd should be demanding accountability from Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and scores of hedge funds and private equity firms that constitute what we loosely call Wall Street.

But are the culprits taking responsibility for devastating the lives of millions of ordinary Americans? Don’t kid yourself. If you’ve been watching them appear before congressional committees and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the independent inquiry that’s supposed to find out what really happened — you’ve no doubt been reaching for the Pepto-Bismol.

Here’s Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary and director of Citigroup, testifying last week. “Almost all of us involved in the financial system, including financial firms, regulators, ratings agencies, analysts and commentators missed the powerful combination of forces at work and the serious possibility of a massive crisis,” he said. “We all bear responsibility for not recognizing this, and I deeply regret that.”

Okay, maybe you didn’t have a crystal ball. But what about good, old-fashioned business sense? How could you make so much money and not know the score? “You are talking about a level of granularity no board will ever have,” Rubin claimed. Citi paid you $120 million as a senior advisor and rainmaker and you’re not responsible for knowing what’s happening below you? You didn’t bother to assess the risk you were peddling to clients?

The committee heard a similar alibi from Chuck Prince, who served as CEO of Citigroup during its meltdown: “Let me start by saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry that the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact on our country… And I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.”

Commission Chairman Phil Angelides, the former state treasurer of California, wasn’t buying it. “The two of you, in charge of this organization, did not seem to have a grip on what was happening,” he said, and to Rubin, “I don’t know that you can have it two ways: you were either pulling the levers or asleep at the switch.”

Nonetheless, the financiers wail, it was all an enormous accident, a once in a century calamity, an act of God. But of course that’s not true. Lots of people saw it coming and made a bundle, taking off with the loot at the expense of the millions who lost their jobs, homes and savings.

There’s no longer any question that many bankers continued to game the system after the collapse — still paying themselves exorbitant salaries and bonuses while hitting everyday people with usurious same day paycheck loans, credit card fees and other charges – and refusing to help small and medium-sized businesses that could be creating employment.

The Tea Party gang really should have dropped by those Senate hearings this week looking into the failure of Washington Mutual, the bank that went belly up during the meltdown in September 2008 — the largest such failure in American history.

As an 18-month Senate investigation revealed, WaMu made subprime loans that its executives knew were rotten, then packaged them as mortgage securities and pawned them off on unsuspecting investors.

Loan officers were paid by the number of mortgages they sold, and ran up the numbers by lying to customers and falsifying data so they could make bigger bucks and win trips to Maui and the Caribbean. At one Washington Mutual office in Montebello, California, 83 percent of the housing loans contained bogus information.

Then there’s Lehman Brothers. Their misfortune, apart from some chicanery only now coming to light, was being small enough to fail.

During those black September days two years ago, the Feds decided it was expendable and let it go, leading to America’s biggest bankruptcy ever. In an admirable job of journalism this week, The New York Times reported that Lehman secretly controlled a company called Hudson Castle. Critics say it was used by Lehman to borrow money and to hide bad investments in commercial real estate and subprime mortgages.

But the week’s award for sheer gall goes to a Chicago area hedge fund called Magnetar, named after a kind of neutron star that spews deadly radiation across the galaxies.

Thanks to the teamwork of the investigative reporting Web site ProPublica, as well as public radio’s Planet Money project and “This American Life,” we learned that Magnetar worked with Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and other investment banks to create toxic CDO’s — collateralized debt obligations — securities backed by subprime mortgages that management knew were bad. Then Magnetar took that knowledge and bet against the very same investments they had recommended to buyers, selling short and making a fortune.

To simply call all of this “creative accounting” is to do it an injustice. This is corruption, cynicism and greed on a scale that would make the Roman Emperor Caligula cringe. Or rather, the Emperor Nero. He didn’t just poison the citizens of Rome; legend has it that he burned the place down, fiddling around in the ashes just like our Wall Street tycoons.

But since we know all this, why is it so hard to hold Wall Street accountable? Which brings us to what the Tea Party people should have been complaining about this week. The banking industry and corporate America are fighting against proposed financial reform with all the money and influence at their disposal, attempting to preserve a system that would enable them to ransack the country once again.

Look at Eric Lichtblau’s report this week, also in The New York Times, under the headline: “Lawmakers Regulate Banks, Then Flock to Them.” The financial services industry has hired more than 125 former members of Congress and congressional staffers from both parties to help them fight off accountability.

No wonder, too, that this headline appeared in the Times this week: “GOP Takes Aim at Plans to Curb Finance Industry.” That’s not surprising. Earlier this year Republican politicians told Wall Street: Give us the scratch and we’ll scrap reform.

The GOP’s SWAT team — also known as the United States Chamber of Commerce — has already spent three million dollars to try to kill or cripple a key part of reform — the proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. With the Chamber as their front, corporations have bankrolled ads that make it seem like the Red Army is at our doorsteps.

Advocates for reform have countered with ads of their own, but Democrats are deeply in hock to Wall Street, too. Remember the hedge fund Magnetar that bet against its own products? The owners covered their bets with ample campaign contributions to Rahm Emanuel.

Yep, the same — President Obama’s White House chief of staff. At the time he was an Illinois congressman and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which collected millions of dollars from the financial services industry.

In fact, the Web site Politico.com reports that “the nation’s ten richest hedge fund managers have dumped nearly one million dollars into campaign accounts over the past several years … consumer advocates and critics from other financial sectors say hedge funds would get off pretty easily” under the Senate reform bill.

Bottom line: “The Wall Street banks are the new American oligarchy — a group that gains political power because of its economic power, and then uses that political power for its own benefit.”

So write Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; and James Kwak, former management consultant and software entrepreneur, in their important new book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.

Their words of warning and the past year and a half make you realize that as usual, Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday we celebrate this week, had it right. Back in 1816, he wrote, “I sincerely believe… that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

Say the word “redistricting” or “reapportionment” and even some political junkies’ eyes glaze over. But for most lawmakers, it’s a subject that can get their “blood boiling, their hearts racing and their dander up,” Texas Senator Jeff Wentworth says, because the redrawing of district lines could cost lawmakers their jobs and their parties power for the next 10 years.

The last time Texas went through the redistricting process in 2003, the Texas Legislature became such a laughingstock that Jay Leno made jokes about it on TV. At the time, 51 Democratic state lawmakers fled to neighboring Oklahoma to deprive the Legislature of a quorum, a move that succeeded in killing a GOP-backed redistricting bill. Later that same year, Texas approved a controversial mid-decade plan engineered by former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Texas Republicans that ultimately gave the GOP six more seats in Congress.

Wentworth, a Republican from San Antonio, last year once again introduced legislation that would take congressional redistricting out of the hands of the Legislature and hand it over to an independent panel made up of citizens, not politicians. And once again the measure failed.

As Census forms begin arriving in Americans’ mailboxes and with elections looming, the political parties have at least $93 million to spend in hopes of winning control of key statehouses and governorships. Those wins would give them the upper hand when new lines are drawn for congressional and statehouse boundaries in 2011, based on the new population counts, and theoretically make it easier for their members to grab those seats.

The U.S. Constitution requires all local, state and federal legislative districts to be redrawn after a census is taken to make the districts roughly equal in population, guaranteeing that each person is equally represented in legislative bodies, explains Tim Storey, an elections expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures. States with shrinking populations will lose seats and states with population surges will gain seats.

The Constitution leaves it up to the state to determine the method it wants to use for redistricting. In all but about a dozen states, state legislators and governors play key roles in the process, while commissions are in charge in the other states (see NCSL link embedded in Apture above).

Democrats currently control 60 state legislative chambers, most of which will draw maps for 383 congressional and 5,074 state legislative seats, the party says. But 21 of those chambers in 17 states are within five seats of changing hands politically. These 17 states will shape 198 congressional districts during redistricting.

Democrats are using the earlier GOP actions in Texas as a rallying cry to get the party faithful to vote and give money. “If we don’t shut down the GOP at the ballot box and stop them from redistricting themselves back into power, all our reforms will be dead in the water,” outgoing New Mexican Governor Bill Richardson said in a recent fundraiser letter for the Democratic Governors Association, calling the 2003 Texas redistricting plan “underhanded” and “deceitful.”

Winning control of legislative chambers is especially important this year, because most state legislatures will be drawing new congressional and statehouse districts based on population changes revealed in the 2010 census. The big winner could be Texas, which would have gained three seats based on latest estimates.

This time, Texas could be awarded three extra seats in Congress, more than any state, because of its population boom. Democrats there hope to swing at least three seats in the state House in November and are also aiming at defeating incumbent Governor Rick Perry, thus depriving Republicans their lock on political control and its advantage in redrawing the political lines.

Other states that are expected to pick up a seat in Congress because of the Census and play a primary role in redrawing districts include Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah. Arizona and Washington are slated to pick up at least one new congressional seat, but these states use commissions to draw new lines.