Last night, before the August recess, the House of Representatives completed work on a series of bills responding to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. As Andrew Restuccia explains, the main bill, called the CLEAR Act, which passed 209-193, has a variety of different elements, many of them similar to the Senate energy and oil spill response package which could get a vote next week.

If signed into law, the package, among other things, would:

Remove the cap — currently at $75 million — on a company’s liability for economic damages from an oil spill
Facilitate the restructuring of the now-defunct Minerals Management Service, which was responsible for permitting and licensing offshore oil and gas drilling
Require that oil companies use new safety technologies meant to avoid blowouts at an oil well
Provide whistleblower protections for workers who report safety violations on oil rigs

That’s not all. Under the plan, BP would be blocked for seven years from securing additional offshore leases, as permits would be granted based on a company’s safety record. It would also add a conservation fee of “two dollars per barrel of oil and 20 cents per million British thermal units of natural gas” for all onshore and offshore oil and gas leases. Speaker Pelosi called it the biggest overhaul of the oil industry in decades.

The whistleblower protections actually came in under a separate bill, which passed 315-93.

Again, I’ll trot out my line, “the bill now moves to the Senate, which makes me wonder why I reported on this at all.” It’s looking unlikely that the energy/oil spill bill that Harry Reid introduced last week will clear a cloture vote on Wednesday. Dave Roberts has the latest on that, but basically, members of both parties want the bill opened up for amendments, some good, some bad. Mark Begich and some other oil-patch Senators want to change the lifting of the liability cap for oil spills. Some liberal Dems want to restore a renewable energy standard at least at the level of what was in Jeff Bingaman’s ACELA bill, if not higher.

After all this finishes, if it does, the question will be how to conference this bill. The Senate combines some energy measures and the oil spill response package, while the House passed it separately, with a climate and energy bill last year, and individual measures like Home Star this year. The Waxman-Markey climate bill doesn’t seem to bear any resemblance to the Senate package whatsoever, meaning that this idea that the White House could sneak a carbon cap into the bill in conference is ridiculous, since it wouldn’t be in either the House or the Senate’s version.

There’s another bill hanging out there that could play into this mix. Eliot Engel (D-NY) introduced a bill that would block oil companies from deducting expenses from oil spills. It’s not quite a bill of attainder, but it’s certainly a response to BP’s claim that they would take a $10 billion tax deduction this year because of losses from the spill.