A leaking Australian oil well is likely to pour oil into the Timor Sea for nearly two months before it can be stopped, the operator said on Sunday, as environmentalists expressed grave fears for rare wildlife.

Rig operator PTTEP Australasia said it planned to drill a relief well and pour mud to stop the leak, which began on Friday with a blow-out more than three kilometers (two miles) deep.

It would take 20 days to bring a new offshore drilling rig by barge from Singapore, plus four weeks to drill, the company said in a statement.

Asked if this meant the well would flow for nearly two months, a company spokesman told Reuters: ‘That is pretty much the estimation.’

At a ‘grassroots’ rally organized by the American Petroleum Institute in Houston on Tuesday, activists bearing American flags were turned away. Oil company employees were bused in to the ‘Energy Citizens’ gathering to hear billionaire Drayton McLane Jr. attack President Barack Obama’s clean energy agenda as an economy-destroying energy tax.

The earth moved here on June 2. It was the first recorded earthquake in this Texas town’s 140-year history — but not the last. There have been four small earthquakes since, none with a magnitude greater than 2.8. The most recent ones came Tuesday night, just as the City Council was meeting in an emergency session to discuss what to do about the ground moving.

The council’s solution was to hire a geology consultant to try to answer the question on everyone’s mind: Is natural gas drilling — which began in earnest here in 2001 and has brought great prosperity to Cleburne and other towns across North Texas — causing the quakes?

‘I think John Q. Public thinks there is a correlation with drilling,’ Mayor Ted Reynolds said. ‘We haven’t had a quake in recorded history, and all the sudden you drill and there are earthquakes.’

At issue is a drilling practice called ‘fracking,’ in which water is injected into the ground at high pressure to fracture the layers of shale and release natural gas trapped in the rock.

There is no consensus among scientists about whether the practice is contributing to the quakes. But such seismic activity was once rare in Texas and seems to be increasing lately, lending support to the theory that drilling is having a destabilizing effect.

>> Steven Chu: Nobel Prize in Physics 1997

>> Video: “Steven Chu proposes an aggressive research program to transform the existing and future energy systems of the world away from technologies that emit greenhouse gases”

>> Berkeley Lab’s Steve Chu on what termite guts have to do with global warming

I haven’t seen anything about it in the national news, however.

Senior Justice Department officials blocked the U.S. attorney in Colorado from supporting a whistleblower’s suit last year, jeopardizing the government’s prospects for recovering as much as $40 million from a major oil company for its alleged underpayment of royalties.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said Washington overruled his request to enter the case against the Kerr-McGee Corp. A lawyer for the whistleblower said he was told that decision was made ‘at the highest levels’ of the Justice Department, then run by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

‘I recommended strongly that we intervene,’ Eid said. ‘My view did not prevail.’

Moreover, McClatchy found that the Justice Department has participated in only a handful of the 80-whistleblower cases brought against the oil industry since 1995.

Whistleblower suits are generally less successful without the Justice Department’s intervention, and if a whistleblower prevails on his own, taxpayers get a smaller share of the damages.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

‘A culture of ethical failure’ besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

The twittering astroturfers on the right call for a march on Washington to demonstrate their support for oil companies. If only they cared as much about our country as they do the big industries they shill for. And why can’t the modern conservative movement do any better than astroturf? The evangelical right may have been nutters, but at least they’re real people.

With energy issues taking center stage in the presidential campaign, 81% of Americans see development of new energy sources as an urgent priority. Only 9% disagree.

For nearly two-thirds (65%), finding new sources of energy is more important that reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume. Twenty-eight percent (28%) think reducing current usage is more important.

At the time President Kennedy announced the beginning of the Space Race, much of the fuel behind it was a belief that America was lagging behind the Soviet Union in science and math. To win the cold war, it was believed, required a massive investment in our tech infrastructure and the Apollo mission was the most visible outgrowth of that.

We are faced again with another crisis, with effects far more wide reaching than the gap with the Soviet Union ever turned out to be. We need fuel to make our economy grow and sustain our livelihood. At the same time, we need for that source of fuel to not have the side effects of leaving us beholden and in debt to despots and robber barons, while also not destroying the planet in the process.

I think that even in the middle of an economic crisis the American people are ready to invest in a serious mission to get off of oil and find a new energy source. We’ve spent decades now in the fairytale of belief that the oil companies are working on this issue. They likely spend more on commercials claiming that they’re working on alternatives than they actually are spending. They are focused on their bottom lines, their quarter to quarter profits (recently at record levels) and not on a long term solution that might have the added side effect of putting them out of business. It’s like expecting Horse & Buggy Inc. to invest in creating the internal combustion engine. Not going to happen.

At the same time, finding an alternative to oil is not a cheap mission, and not the sort of thing likely to be invested in by a startup or other private company. Like the audacious idea of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth, this is a job for the much derided government. Much like how the Internet evolved from a military research project into one of the greatest economic engines of all time for private industry, we have to put up the resources and get the best people working on this issue immediately.

Instead of empty slogans like “Drill now!” – a feel good bit of marketing whose best result is likely a few barrels of oil and a few more Exxon Valdez incidents – we need to do what America has a long history of doing well, mobilizing nationally against an oppressive force.

Despite what appears to be a middle-class lifestyle, the couple has written $61,600 in checks to John McCain’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, most of it within days of McCain’s decision to endorse offshore oil drilling.

At a June fundraiser, the Rocchios joined top executives at Hess Corp. — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hess, his wife, Susan, his mother, Norma Hess, and six other officials in giving a total of $313,500 to a joint McCain-RNC fundraising committee, Federal Election Commission records show.

The donations, first traced by Campaign Money Watch last week, were part of $1.2 million in oil industry contributions to McCain’s Victory ‘08 Committee, 73 percent coming after McCain reversed his long-held opposition to offshore oil drilling. The non-partisan watchdog group said oil executives and their spouses from Colorado, Mississippi, Louisiana, California, Indiana, New Jersey and Florida also donated.