Lazarus specializes in environmental law and has participated in 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The co-chairs of the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling have selected a highly regarded Georgetown University law professor to serve as the commission’s executive director, the U.S. Department of Energy said today.
The move comes as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill continues unabated, with the government consistently raising its estimate of just how much oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, along with ongoing damaging revelations of how government regulators failed, once again, to do their job in ways that could have prevented the disaster. Every day 1.5 to 2.5 million gallons oil enters the Gulf, according to the latest estimates.
The environmental crisis has the Obama Administration, with its green rhetoric revealed as just that according to critics, scrambling to make the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history an election year issue against what it deems are pro oil industry Republicans. (See Will We Drive Less because of the BP Oil Spill?)
Following a meeting with the President of the United States last week, the BP Board announced a package of measures to meet its obligations as a responsible party arising from the Deepwater Horizon spill, including the creation of a $20 billion claims fund over the next three and a half years.
Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas) – the leading Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee – said early last week that President Obama’s insistence that BP establish an escrow fund to help pay for the growing ecological and economic damages from the spill was a “shakedown” and that the U.S. Congress owed British Petroleum an apology.
Barton has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industries.
In the latest development, Richard Lazarus and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professor of Law at Georgetown, will lead the staff of the commission and work at the direction of co-chairs – former two-term Florida Governor and former U.S. Senator Bob Graham and former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency William K. Reilly – and the other commission members.
Lazarus specializes in environmental law and has participated in 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. For the past three summers, he has co-taught a course on the history of the Supreme Court of the United States with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Professor Lazarus worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, both in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1979-83) and the Solicitor General’s Office (1986-89), where he was Assistant to the Solicitor General. He also serves as Faculty Director of the Supreme Court Institute. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and earned a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in economics at the University of Illinois.
On May 21, 2010, President Obama signed an Executive Order establishing the commission that is to take a comprehensive look at how the oil and gas industry operates and how it is regulated. The commission will examine the facts and circumstances concerning the causes of the Gulf oil spill and develop options for safety and environmental precautions to prevent a similar disaster from happening again.
The stated purpose of the commission is “to examine both the relevant facts and circumstances concerning the causes of the disaster and to develop options for safety and environmental precautions necessary to prevent a similar disaster from happening again.”
After naming the other members of the commission last week, the President asked Congress to approve $15 million to fund its work.