It's still at the same level it was in 1990. After the 2010 BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a brief effort to raise that cap, but it never became law. The Department of Interior is now moving forward with a measure to raise the liability on its own, noting that it is "necessary to keep pace with the 78 percent increase in inflation since 1990." But that would only apply to offshore facilities.
Environmental groups also argue that the fee oil'panies pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, currently set at 8 cents per barrel of oil, should be increased. And there is an effort underway in the Senate to get tar sands oil included in the types of oil for which'panies must pay into the fund.
Asked what it would take to get Congress to update laws governing oil spills, if not the BP spill, Alaska Wilderness League Executive Director Cindy Shogan wasn't particularly optimistic. "You'd need a new Congress," she said. "It's just that the oil industry has a lot of power. And until we hold them accountable … that's not going to change."In a phone interview with The Huffington Post, Dennis Takahashi-Kelso, the Ocean Conservancy's executive vice president, said both Exxon and BP were reminders that plans for dealing with spills are meaningless if'panies can't actually execute cleanup. Takahashi-Kelso was the Alaska Commissioner of Environmental Conservation during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and says that the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was a "very substantial improvement."
After the BP spill, the'pany was widely mocked for its spill response plans, which included animals that don't live in the Gulf like sea lions and walruses, as well as contact information for an expert who had been dead for five years at the time of the spill."OPA did not try to address the actual performance," Takahashi-Kelso said. Twenty-five years after the Exxon Valdez spill, he said, "We know a lot more about how to get oil out of the ground or out from underneath the Gulf of Mexico, but we have not had the kind of gains in response technology … You really have a widening gap between actual performance and the standards for having equipment and response capacity on hand."