Noah Sachs, an associate professor at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia and an expert in regulation of hazardous waste, said he had been hoping for movement on a bill in Congress that would overhaul and strengthen the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act and allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to control the use of some chemicals more tightly. So far, however, not much has happened. “I think the oil spill in the spring has deflected attention from that bill,” Mr. Sachs said.

In Texas, Mr. Metzger said that while the spill was important to focus on, “definitely the trade-off is putting less resources into some of the other issues we’re working on.”

In some ways, the relentless focus on the spill over the past two months has paralleled the constant attention to climate change over the past several years. In 2005, the Sierra Club, a leading American environmental group, decided to switch its attention more fully to climate, and most other groups have also increased their attention to the issue.

As with the oil spill, concerns have arisen that climate change has crowded out other causes. “As a conservation biologist I am continually frustrated by all the attention given to climate change by the media and politicians,” wrote Reed Noss, a professor at the University of Central Florida, in the Conservation Northwest Quarterly in 2007. He urged a stronger focus on the fragmentation of wildlife habitats — in other words, humans’ habit of building houses or roads almost everywhere.

But climate change has the potential to affect just about everything — and it has conversely afforded a range of groups the opportunity to hitch their causes to the climate bandwagon. This has resulted in some odd pairings: for example, the magazine of the Audubon Society, an American bird conservation group, has advocated “feed-in” tariffs, said John Farrell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a U.S. group. Feed-in tariffs are a mainly European method of requiring utilities to pay above-market rates for electricity from solar panels and other green sources. They have nothing to do with birds, except insofar as clean energy can moderate climate change in a small way, thus helping to preserve habitats.

As for the spill in the gulf, Mr. Plater of Boston College suggests that it may become a “wake-up call” for environmental causes across the board. Mr. Plater should know: he spent two years heading the legal task force of the Alaska oil spill commission after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989.