Nearly 24 hours of voting, 425 pages of legislation, over 800 proposed amendments: This is the marathon from which Canadian members of parliament (MPs) emerged on June 15. 

The session, characterized by the Globe and Mail as "22-plus hours of consecutive spanking" of the dissenting opposition parties by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative majority government, will allow the government to push through omnibus bill C-38. 

Canadians are up in arms about the bill because it includes legislation that will weaken and threaten the legal status of leading environmental groups.

Because Harper is determined to build a new pipeline out of the Alberta tar sands, the center of Canada's oil industry with known reserves that rival Saudi Arabia's.  And he is not about to wait for November to get it done.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would have funneled Canadian oil down to refineries on the Gulf Coast, remains in political deadlock after the Obama administration blocked the deal in January. 

Incensed by Obama's decision, Harper claimed the pipeline process was being "held hostage" because "certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America."

In the meantime, Harper's government, as well as impatient oil exporters and Asian markets hungry for Canadian crude, are determined to find new ways out of land-locked Alberta in order to increase oil export volumes.

The New York Times reported on June 14 that the Canadian government has three pipeline route proposals on the table:

"Enbridge, a transporter of Canadian oil exports, announced a $3 billion plan called Eastern Access. It is seeking permission to build a new "Northern Gateway Pipelines" network, to bring 525,000 barrels a day to Canada's Pacific Coast. Kinder Morgan, a Texas-based energy company, said it will nearly double the capacity of an existing pipeline network along a different route."

All of these options will have to overcome staunch opposition by indigenous groups and well-entrenched environmental interests on both coasts.   Which brings us back to the reasoning behind the Conservative government's push to pass the omnibus bill with the intent of weakening these groups' legal footing.

In order to further quell dissent, Harper's government has also been going after anti-pipeline charity and advocacy groups. A variety of groups, including Tides Canada and ForestEthics, have been threatened with having their charity status revoked. Canadian regulations have long maintained that charities cannot devote more thant 10 percent of their budgets to advocacy. Additional laws pushed through as part of the C-38 package "will bring more scrutiny to foreign funding for charities and also how they use money for political purposes. Charities will also have to take more responsibility for the political activities of groups to which they give money."

The government has also insinuated that shadowy foreign entities are responsible for funding charities in their efforts to derail Canada's well-oiled ascendance to the status of petrostate. The Conservatives' new efforts to regulate "transparency" in Canadian charities has gone so far as to alarm large foundations with names like Bronfman, Asper and Bombardier on their letterheads.

Turns out even Canada is not immune to the lure of "black gold."

Wow, that was fast. Just days after South Sudan achieved independence, the Chinese government has already established a vocational training program for welders in Juba. From Chinese state media outlet Xinhua:

JUBA - China has started a welder training course to help South Sudanese master knowledge and techniques relevant to the petroleum industry in which the newly-born nation has a large potential.

A total of 30 trainees selected from about 800 applicants are under the vocational training, the first of its kind in South Sudan, and are expected to be backbone workers in the petroleum industry in the future.

In the wake of South Sudan's vote this February to break away from Sudan, China has been working aggressively with both countries to maintain access to their oil reserves, most notably through Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's visit to Beijing in late June. Before the split, Sudan exported more than half of its daily oil output to China and was China's third-largest trading partner in Africa. Now, though South Sudan contains 75 percent of the two countries' combined oil reserves, it continues to rely on Sudan for the bulk of the processing and transportation infrastructure, including a crucial port on the Red Sea.

The establishment of a program to train welders suggests that China would like to reduce South Sudan's dependency on Sudanese infrastructure. It's a sensible goal. Tensions over oil revenues figure to be a major sticking point in Sudan-South Sudan relations; the countries have yet to establish a plan to divide revenues in an industry that generates 90 percent of the north's hard currency and 98 percent of the south's revenues. Meanwhile, the invasion of the border region of Abyei by forces loyal to Bashir has highlighted the threat of a major conflict between the two countries. There are certainly more stable countries from which to import your oil, but, with domestic demand at near-record levels, China may not have much choice.

Iraq is still paying the world back for Saddam's actions -- literally. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Iraqi government has agreed to pay $400 million to American citizens who claimed to have been tortured or traumatized by the Iraqi regime following Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. With a 15-30 percent unemployment rate, ubiquitous violence, and a still lacking infrastructure, why is the new Iraqi regime paying so much money to American citizens when it was all Saddam's fault? Because the payment may help Iraq's case to end U.N. sanctions that have lasted since Saddam Hussein's rule: 

Settling the claims, which were brought by American citizens, has been seen as a key requirement for Washington to be willing to push for an end to the UN sanctions.

"There was a lot of pressure on the Iraqi government to do something that gets Congress off their back," says one senior Iraqi official, adding that the settlement cleared the way for US efforts to bring Iraq out from under the UN sanctions.

That's right, Saddam is long gone but sanctions on the still rebuilding country aren't. In fact, Iraq has already paid Kuwait $27.6 billion in reparations and continues to devote five percent of its oil revenues in accordance with the U.N. sanctions resulting from Saddam's invasion. While many countries have cancelled a lot or all of Iraq's debt to them, Kuwait continues to support Iraqi reparations -- regardless of the $22 billion Kuwaiti budget surplus for the last fiscal year.

So if U.S. citizens get paid by the Iraqi government for Saddam's "traumatizing" from 20 years ago, what will the United States pay the families of Iraqi citizens that are actually killed by U.S. forces? Well, the U.S. government is trying to find ways for Iraq to pay for that too.

Hillary Clinton wasn't the only high-profile visitor to stop by Baku for some "reassuring" this week. BP CEO Tony "embattled" Hayward was there as well:

BP's embattled chief executive on Tuesday visited oil-rich Azerbaijan in a bid to assuage fears that his company may sell assets in the country to help pay for the clean-up of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. [...]

While in Baku, Hayward met with President Ilkham Aliyev and "reiterated BP's commitment to Azerbaijan and continuing successful cooperation" with the government and the state-owned oil and gas company SOCAR, the British oil company said in a statement.[...]

BP's three major projects in the Azerbaijan comprise an offshore oil field in the Caspian Sea; a 30 percent share in an export oil pipeline which goes to Turkey; and 25 percent in Shah Deniz, a massive Caspian Sea gas field. Russia's Gazprom voiced an interest last month in BP's share in Shah Deniz, but the British company has so far ruled out any sale.

Hayward also visited Moscow last week -- where the government has made life difficult for BP in the past -- to reaffirm his company's commitment to investors there. With his yacht racing and less than stellar performance in congressional hearings, Hayward hasn't done much for his company's public image in the United States. BP may have decided that his time will be put to better using reassuring investors and competitors abroad that there's no blood in the water along with all that oil.

As Congress reconvenes the most recent of the BP executives' unenviable appointments in Washington this afternoon, a word about Tony Hayward's current inquisitor: California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. There's an interesting symmetry between today's hearing and one that Waxman held a quarter century ago, when he was a subcommittee chairman. The news peg, then as now, was an unprecedented environmental catastrophe: the December 3, 1984 chemical leak at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, which killed over 3,000 people. And then as now, Waxman (whose committee drafted the House climate change bill last year) was engaged in a protracted, long-odds battle for a game-changing piece of environmental legislation: the expanded pollution regulations that would eventually be signed into law as the 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act.

Among the pollutants that Waxman was hoping to regulate were the same categories of air toxics that had caused the Bhopal disaster, and shortly after the incident he and his staff pulled together a field hearing in West Virginia, near another Union Carbide plant that produced the same chemicals as the one in Bhopal, and posed similar risks. It was a canny political set piece, and while the Clean Air Act reauthorization wouldn't make it into law for years, the spectacle whipped up by the Bhopal hearing prompted Congress to pass a precursor law requiring chemical plants to inventory and disclose their toxic emissions. It was a milestone in environmental regulation in the United States: Never before was anyone but the chemical companies understood the sheer quantity of the toxic pollutants, 2.7 billion pounds of which were emitted in 1987 alone.

I bring all of this up because in several ways, Waxman is working from the Bhopal playbook today. In The Waxman Report, the autobiography he published last year, the congressman distills the lessons of Bhopal for the sort of long, grueling legislative crusades that are his stock in trade:

In contrast to what many people imagine, legislative debates rarely occur within fixed parameters, or at least not for very long -- the center is constantly moving. In the years it can take to pass a major piece of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the terms of debate often shift significantly. Sometimes the balance shifts gradually and by design, such as from a sustained lobbying effort. At other times, the shift happens suddenly and without warning, the consequence of a new president, a shake-up in Congress, or a major news event that recasts public opinion.

The BP spill has certainly recast public opinion on oil drilling, but its implications for broader environmental policy, particularly a future energy and climate change bill, are far from clear. At the New Republic, Bradford Plumer offers a particularly gloomy reading on the response to the spill among American politicians and the public; plenty of other pundits have noted that in his widely panned Oval Office speech earlier this week, President Obama was conspicuously reluctant to tie the disaster to specific policy goals.

But keep an eye on what comes out of today's hearing. Waxman and his House colleagues are less central to the future of a climate bill than their opposites in the Senate, or the president. Still, the guy knows how to make use of a disaster.

Via Kate Mackenzie at the Financial Times, a graph charting the not terribly surprising impact the Gulf oil spill has had on BP's image, once among the best in the industry:

It's from a firm called Covalence that calculates companies' ethical reputations and, on a neat mapping tool, tracks them against the amount of attention the companies are receiving in the media. (Methodology here.) From this report, a look at how different international industries have fared over the past half-decade, as the volume of information about them has generally increased:

Not only is the oil and gas industry in the basement, but it's one of the only industries whose reputation gets actively worse the more we know about it. For the largest oil and gas companies, the relationship is even starker -- spikes in attention track closely with drops in reputation.

On one level, this is probably just a measure of the very different reasons that different industries find themselves in the headlines. (When a tech company is in the news, it's because it's launching the iPad. When an oil company is in the news, it's because it has befouled a major ecosystem for a generation.) And energy companies are often particularly bad actors on the world stage.

But I suspect it's also a testament to the degree to which both the oil industry and the global public that depends on it are more comfortable when the latter knows less about how the former does its work -- the business of energy production is rarely pretty. Which is why all the unflattering attention is important: The best case for drilling domestically in the United States, rather than somewhere like Nigeria, is that the added scrutiny that operations here receive -- from the government, the media, and environmental organizations -- makes companies behave better than they do in the Niger River Delta, where oil operations are estimated to have leaked an amount comparable to the Gulf oil spill since the 1970s, and garnered a fraction of the international outrage.

Plugging BP's catastrophic oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico, as you may have heard, is difficult. But how difficult, exactly? Nearly a month ago, BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay compared it to performing "open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines."

In the weeks since, the executives, engineers, government officials, and sundry experts who have descended on the Gulf may or may not be much closer to fixing this thing, but they have gotten pretty good at describing just how difficult fixing it is. Here's BP Managing Director Bob Dudley:

"Like arm-wrestling between two equally strong people."

Energy analyst Byron King, riffing on McKay's original:

"It's like doing brain surgery using robots under a mile of water with equipment that's got 30,000 horsepower of energy inside of it."

Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University:

"It's kind of like pushing toothpaste through an obstacle course."

James J. O'Brien, professor emeritus of Meteorology and Oceanography at Florida State University:

"It's like trying to unclog a toilet while you're standing on a ten-foot ladder with a long stick attached to the plunger."

Thomas Bickel, deputy chief engineer at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories:

"It's like trying to do an operation on the moon."

Andy Bowen, an oceanographer at Woods Hole, on the area of the seafloor where the leak occurred:

"It's sort of like being in the Grand Canyon with the lights out and in a snowstorm."

Dudley again, on the gas that's escaping with the oil:

"It's like a soda can, shaking it up and popping it off ... it's difficult to measure."

Does BP have someone on staff coming up with these all day? Does the company have Thomas Friedman on retainer?

Help us out here -- there must be more of these lurking among the talking points.

In a move that is sure to set conspiracy theorists aflutter, former Vice President Dick Cheney popped up yesterday in Saudi Arabia, where he met with King Abdullah. Accompanying him was former State Department diplomat and its top interpreter, Gamal Helal, who recently left the government to form a consulting firm, Helal Associates.

While the Arabic press has caught on to this story, I haven't seen it reported in the U.S. media as of yet. But still, it raises a few eyebrows: Cheney, a private citizen who has reportedly been working on his memoirs, doesn't have any obvious reasons to sit down with the Saudi monarch. The details behind the meeting could go a long way toward unraveling what the former vice president plans to do with his retirement. Here's hoping that the inevitable theorizing about his plans doesn't generate more heat than light.

The NASA sattelite image above terrifyingly shows both how big the Gulf of Mexico oil slick is -- compare it to the size of New Orleans -- and how close it's getting to the Louisiana coast. 

For more on the ongoing cleanup effort, see this week's FP explainer. 

Uganda's Chief Magistrate's court dismissed a landmark case on Wednesday that had been filed by two Ugandan journalists, Angelo Izama and Charles Mwanguhya Mpagi. The file was introduced by the journalists as an attempt to use Uganda's Access to Information Act to force the Ugandan government to release the details of five oil Production Sharing Agreements that it has signed with oil companies. The government and the oil companies has resisted pressure to divulge even the smallest details to the public -- both attempting to deflect criticism by citing the other's insistence in maintaining secrecy over the deals.

Oil explorers have long been skeptical of Uganda's potential for holding large oil deposits but in the last few years oil exploration has proved wildly successful. The estimates now lie upwards of 6 billion barrels of oil -- if on the higher end, Uganda would surpass Sudan for the fifth largest oil reserves in Africa.

Observers are not optimistic at the implications of Uganda's oil finds. Although it would inject billions of dollars annually into Uganda's economy, widespread corruption (Uganda was ranked 126^th out of 179 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index) increases the risk that the country could slip into the feared "resource curse". While the government and the oil companies paint a rosy picture for the public, analysts are less sanguine. As Taimour Lay writes in The Guardian, the components for a bad situation are all there:

The ingredients for the so-called "resource curse" are all in place: contract secrecy, government corruption, commercial disinformation campaigns, with environmental protections ignored, and a simmering border dispute with the Democratic Republic of the Congo frozen rather than resolved.

Although the Chief Magistrate's reasoning behind the dismissal of the case was less than convincing (he cited "national security"), it certainly highlighted Uganda's press freedom, right? That is, until Angelo Izama was slapped with a charge of libel and driven to jail on the very next day. The complaint? A December 2009 article in which Izama suggested parallels between President Yoweri Museveni and Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Although this is not a new tactic -- typically used by the Ugandan government to intimidate journalists -- such cases have certainly picked up in the last year. In a country where press freedom is one of the most important aspects of its "partly free" rating by Freedom House, this is a disturbing trend.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports on the Ugandan government's widespread use of defamation statutes to coerce its critics:

"If anything proves that a government is authoritarian, it's jailing journalists who raise questions about the government," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Tom Rhodes. "It's regrettable that the magistrate charged Angelo Izama and Henry Ochieng with criminal libel. It's time for Uganda to join the ranks of democracies by eliminating criminal defamation statutes."

...

Izama and Ochieng are among several Monitor journalists facing criminal charges in connection with their coverage, according to CPJ research. Sedition charges also hang over radio journalists Robert Kalundi Sserumaga and Betty Nambooze, while a government ban remains on popular debate programs and Central Broadcasting Services, the station of the traditional kingdom of the Baganda, Uganda's largest ethnic group, since last September.

Election fever for the 2011 presidential elections starts in the next few months and President Yoweri Museveni will be running for his fourth term. A potential resource curse and press intimidation are not the best of omens for a free and fair election. Ugandan journalists will play an essential role in pushing for transparency -- and I have a hunch they won't be cowed.

(Hat Tip: Michael Wilkerson)

So it looks like FP contributor David Schenker was right: Muammar al-Qaddafi couldn't contain himself in his speech today at the U.N. General Assembly's opening session.

The Libyan strongman has been erratically working toward a rapprochement with the West, including abandoning his fledgling WMD programs, cooperating on counterterrorism, and opening up his country to oil investment. Even his execrable human-rights record has improved.

It's not exactly clear whether the elder Qaddafi himself is driving this process, or whether his son Saif al-Islam -- who hangs out with the Davos crowd and talks a good game on democracy -- is the brains behind this operation.

But as Schenker points out, Muammar is his own worst enemy. He's like that unpopular kid in your high-school math class who makes everyone laugh by saying outrageous things, but still doesn't have any friends (yeah, OK, that was me). And by comparing the Security Council to al Qaeda and suggesting that swine flu was cooked up in a laboratory, he's only reinforced that image today.

There's one reason, though, that Qaddafi's bizarre remarks today won't leave him completely isolated. Anyone have a wild guess?

Photo by EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images

China's Economic Observer has put together the following map of overseas expansion by China's big three oil giants, CNOOC, CNPC, and Sinopec. Click through for the interactive version.

Notably absent from this map is Sudan, where CNPC has extensive and very controversial holdings. 

There's a lot of competition for top crises these days -- what with Somali pirates going overboard, Pakistan and Afghansitan looking increasingly perilous, Mexico's chaos scarily peering over the border... 

But I vote for adding Nigeria to that very pressing list of concerns.

A new report released today, puts last year's death toll from unrest in the oil-producing Niger Delta region at 1,000. The almost-guerrilla war dragged the economy down by $20.7 billion in lost oil revenue, with little sign of abating in 2009. With oil prices already lower, government revenues are falling. More worrisome -- the rebels in that region who earn most of their cash from oil bunkering will be short on dough, inspiring more of the kidnappings-for-ransom that already breached the 300 mark in 2008. NGO workers on the ground tell me that things will really heat up if the prices (or the oil production levels) drop much lower.

To add another twist, the main rebel group in the region, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), today e-mailed a statement rejecting an amnesty offer that members of the ruling party allegedly proposed. In classic form, the rejection is colorful: 

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta rejects this evil agenda by the [ruling party] PDP and its cohorts and vow never to sell our birth right [to Nigeria's oil] for a bowl of porridge."

The deal itself was even more interesting: the government would provide fighter amnesty, prisoner release, and huge payouts to MEND in exchange for a rebel promise to help rig the coming elections in favor of the ruling party. That offer may well be an exaggeration on the part of the rebel spokesman. Then again, given Nigeria's rather wretched election history... it might not.

Why should this mess end up in the top echelon of global worries? Don't forget: Nigeria is the third largest oil supplier to the United States. And when regional powerhouses go down in flames, it can't bode well for any of the unlucky neighbors -- many of whom are recovering from their own bouts of conflict. 

Did I mention that the country's president might be dying? With that, you have it -- my Axis of Upheaval nomination: Nigeria. 

PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP

Petroleum Intelligence Weekly's annual ranking of the world's top oil companies - based on criteria like reserves, refining capacity, and sales - was just released, and there is just a bit of shuffling near the top. Four of the five top oil companies now are state owned - Saudi Aramco, Iran's NIOC, Venezuela's PDV, and China's CNPC. A few highlights:

• Saudi Aramco remains No. 1, and China's CNPC surpasses BP and Shell.

• Russia's Rosneft makes biggest jump, from 24th to 16^th.

• Majority state-owned national oil companies now make up 27 of 50.