The president's Oil Spill Commission—officially the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling—has presented its report to the White House and will officially disband on March 11. The report concludes that BP was long aware of problems with cementing work performed by Halliburton, which was among the contractors on BP’s Macondo well. The report finds that the "root technical cause" of last April's blowout was inadequate cementing. "BP's failures are especially troubling because it had previously identified several relevant areas for concern during a 2007 audit of Halliburton's capabilities," the report states.

Officials from the Ensco Offshore Company appeared in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana on Jan. 12 in connection with a lawsuit the company filed last year against the moratorium on issuing drilling permits. The moratorium was enacted after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Ensco told the court that although the moratorium has been lifted, officials continue to unreasonably delay action on deepwater drilling permit applications. Ensco is seeking a preliminary injunction compelling the US Department of Interior to "expeditiously" process five pending permit applications the company has filed. The US Department of Justice denies there are delays and says that the additional time is due to new safety precautions to which the DoI must adhere.

Sixty years ago, on Jan. 12, 1951, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, took effect, its text for the first time defining the crime of genocide under international law, establishing punishments and the responsibility of signatory nations to act against it. The world has nonetheless witnessed several genocides since then.

The biblically-obsessed are already calling it a prophecy of the End Times. (Examiner.com, Jan. 4) (Actually, contrary to the breathless and spelling-challenged spewings of the paranoid, there is no reference to birds falling from the sky in Revelations. It is in the far less sexy pseudepigraphic Apocalypse of Elijah.) But does anyone else out there find the official explanations singularly implausible? From the PBS News Hour, Jan. 4:

California voters defeated Proposition 23 in the Nov. 2 elections, voting 61.3% in favor of keeping the state's 2006 greenhouse gas reduction law, the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), considered the strongest in the nation. A "yes" vote on Prop 23, backed by Texas oil money, would have suspended the law until the state's unemployment rate stayed at or below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. Assembly Bill 32 requires industry to report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and is set to go into effect in 2012.

United Nations talks on climate change in China's port city of Tianjin are nearing a close with no clear consensus yet in sight. The meeting is aimed at laying the groundwork for progress at the UN's annual climate change summit that opens in Cancún, Mexico, on November 29. Chinese and Brazilian officials have blocked discussion of the legal framework for a further set of emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol after the first commitment period expires at the end of 2012.

BP says it plans to complete the sealing of its Macondo well on Sept. 18 as subcontractor Transocean Ltd.'s "Development Driller III" rig has drilled the final 45 feet of a relief well. The well, in the Mississippi Canyon Block 252, has been sealed from above since July 15, but is being intersected from below to complete Macondo's shutdown. The relief well's drilling was halted for nearly a month, first due to weather impacts, before resuming this week. An estimated 4.9 million barrels leaked from the well, of which BP estimates it captured 800,000. (Oil & Gas Journal, Dow Jones, Sept. 17)

In a successful operation Sept. 2, BP replaced the "blowout preventer" on the Deepwater Horizon well, although the "bottom kill" relief well is still underway five months and counting after the disaster began. (VOA, Sept. 2) Also Sept. 2, a new explosion ripped through an offshore oil platform off the Louisiana coast, throwing 13 crew-members into the water. All were rescued alive by a Coast Guard vessel. Mariner Energy of Houston, Texas, the owner of the platform, deployed three firefighting vessels to the scene and extinguished the fire. No oil is believed to have leaked from the platform, called Vermillion Block 380. (ENS, Sept. 3)