The move is designed to eliminate conflicts of interest between the various functions of the agency amid heavy criticism that MMS officials have grown overly chummy with the companies they’re charged with monitoring.

“The Minerals Management Service has three distinct and conflicting missions that — for the benefit of effective enforcement, energy development, and revenue collection — must be divided,” Salazar said in a statement announcing the overhaul.

A more detailed breakdown of those divisions is here:

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management: A new bureau under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management will be responsible for the sustainable development of the Outer Continental Shelf’s conventional and renewable energy resources, including resource evaluation, planning, and other activities related to leasing.

Office of Natural Resources Revenue: An office under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget that will be responsible for the royalty and revenue management function including the collection and distribution of revenue, auditing and compliance, and asset management.

Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement: A bureau under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management that will be responsible for ensuring comprehensive oversight, safety, and environmental protection in all offshore energy activities.

This looks great on paper — and doing nothing was never an option in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. But there’s a precedent for such a split that should serve as a cautionary tale for federal officials aiming to prevent the next big energy disaster.

In 1977, the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration — then a branch of the Interior Department — was overhauled to become the Mine Safety and Health Administration under the Labor Department. The move was made to eliminate conflicts of interest between safety enforcement and energy development. Many would argue that it didn’t work so well.

Writing in The New Republic, the former vice president blasts the idea that offshore drilling would lead the country to energy independence, calling that notion an “illusion.”

“The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial,” he wrote. The image he included — based on Energy Department data — tells the tale more convincingly:

Translation: By 2030, the country will be slurping up 16.6 million barrels of oil per day, and only 200,000 (or 1.2 percent) will come from expanded offshore drilling.

If that’s not convincing enough, the Bush administration’s Energy Information Administration has reported that expanding offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.”

This is what the fight is about?

Now the bad news: Oil executives said today that the leak could grow to 60,000 barrels per day if BP fails in its efforts to plug it.

(For reference, current estimates put the gusher at around 5,000 barrels per day.)

Today, as the oil from an enormous spill in the Gulf of Mexico creeps toward the shores of the southern U.S., the administration is having its doubts about the new policy. David Axelrod, senior adviser to Obama, told “Good Morning America” today that there’s a moratorium on the expansion until the recent spill can be controlled and investigated.

“No additional drilling has been authorized and none will until we find out what happened here,” he said.

For the White House, the timing of the spill couldn’t have been worse. If Obama had stuck with his guns in opposing new drilling, he’d be seen as a prophet in the wake of this week’s Gulf disaster. Instead, by trying to make concessions to Republicans — most of whom won’t support a climate bill in any event — he’s simply alienated his conservation-minded supporters to no tangible benefit. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune makes the case.

“This disaster changes everything,”  Brune said today in a statement. “We have hit rock-bottom in our fossil fuel addiction. This tragedy should be a wake up call. It’s time to take offshore drilling off the table for good.”

There’s also a good economic reason that offshore drilling isn’t the best way to secure the country’s energy independence. The Energy Department has determined “that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.”

And that was under the Bush White House.

What a difference a year and a half can make.

With President Obama today proposing to loosen the ban on offshore drilling, Pelosi just issued a statement that largely eludes the topic altogether. She applauds, for example, tomorrow’s scheduled announcement to finalize vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. And she celebrates (without specifics) the Democrats’ efforts “to lower our nation’s dependence on foreign oil.” Only afterward does she get into the drilling controversy. It’s not quite the same tone she used with the Republicans:

The Obama Administration’s initiative regarding drilling on public lands must ensure that any offshore and onshore plan proceeds in an environmentally and fiscally responsible manner. Taxpayers who own these resources have been historically shortchanged from the huge profits received from drilling on public lands, and must receive a fair return in the future.

Let’s just say there’s a bit of a theme:

•           Increase clean nuclear energy in America

•           Expand exploration of offshore areas for oil and gas development

•           Develop Clean Coal technologies

•           Expand American exports through free trade agreements

McConnell’s plan brings to mind the charges leveled yesterday by House GOP leaders against Obama’s plans for health care. Bipartisanship, the Republicans said, is not best accomplished by forcing one party’s ideas on the other. Seems that McConnell, at least as it pertains to his call to expand offshore drilling, didn’t get the memo.

Every year since 1993, U.S. offshore oil drilling has spilled an average of 47,800 barrels of oil into the water. At that rate, it takes about 10 years to spill as much as was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster. Offshore oil drilling, seen that way, is just a slow-moving spill.

Wrong. At that rate, it would take 230 years to equal the Exxon Valdez spillage.

Update: As a commenter pointed out, our math is wrong as well. We confused gallons with barrels. It will actually take just more than six years. We regret the error.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Tuesday that Democrats have no plans to reinstate the drilling ban, which Congress let expire at the end of September amid a charged partisan debate over sky-high gas prices. Instead, Hoyer said party leaders will probably search for ways “to delineate” the vast swaths of ocean now available for drilling.

“At this point in time, no one is suggesting that we return to the same position we were in [before the ban expired],” Hoyer said. “We’re going to be looking at parameters, not necessarily reinstatement of the [moratorium].”

President-elect Barack Obama could also reinstate a (separate-but-equal) White House ban, which President George W. Bush repealed over the summer. Obama, however, has welcomed expanded offshore drilling as part of a comprehensive energy reform package. He’s given no indication that he would reinstall the presidential ban next year.

Meanwhile, fuel prices have nosedived since the drilling debate peaked in August, leaving oil companies with much less incentive to expand their expensive deep-sea drilling operations. If prices stay low, environmentalists can probably sleep well, even if the ban isn’t reinsated.

That move, the companies postulate, “may prove to be a significant measure in addressing our long-term fiscal health.”

Really?

Forget, for a moment, that oil is a finite resource that’s difficult to locate and filthy to extract. Forget that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spilled 685,000 gallons into the Gulf in 2006, and Hurricane Ike spilled at least another 500,000 gallons more this year. Forget also that the United States sits on just 3 percent of the planet’s known reserves.

The real issue is economic, and the Energy Dept. has determined that opening the outer continental shelf to new exploration won’t have a tangible impact on production or prices before 2030.

That’s 22 years away.

Imagine, while we continue to peck away at fossil fuels, what Europe and Japan will be doing over that span to develop renewable energies, cleaner fuels and the engines that will run off them. Imagine the myriad industries that will arise from that development, the remarkable products devised and the countless jobs created.

In 2030, just as our expanded oil drilling is projected to benefit consumers, consumers may very well have graduated to another generation of vehicles fueled by something much cleaner than petrol. Honda, after all, is already selling zero-emission hydrogen-cell cars in California.

As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has pointed out, clean energy remains a fledgling enterprise, and “the country that most owns the clean power industry is going to most own the next great technology breakthrough.” The focus on more drilling, he adds, “is a strategy for making America a second-rate power and economy.”

That’s a prediction much different from the one (unbiased, we’re sure) put forth by the energy industry. But if he’s right, new drilling — while it might prove a wonderful short-term boon to the oil industry — will have come a far cry from healing our long-term economic troubles.