As the public grows frustrated with Obama's oil spill response, environmental groups remain quiet. Enviros give Obama a pass on spill

Last week, it seemed, environmentalists were finally ready to let loose on President Barack Obama over the Gulf oil spill.

Actress Q’orianka Kilcher chained herself to the White House fence while her mother slathered the “Pocahontas” star in black paint meant to look like oozing crude.


Kilcher’s cause? Not the Gulf spill at all but oil-related abuses of indigenous people in Peru, whose president was visiting Obama that day.

As the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history has played out on Obama’s watch, the environmental movement has essentially given him a pass — all but refusing to unleash any vocal criticism against the president even as the public has grown more frustrated by Obama’s performance.

About a dozen environmental groups took out a full page ad in the Washington Post Tuesday — not to fault Obama over the ecological catastrophe but to thank him for putting on hold an Alaska drilling project. “We deeply appreciate your decision. ...” the ad says to Obama.

President Obama is the best environmental president we’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt,” Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope told the Bangor Daily News last week. “He obviously did not take the crisis in the Minerals Management Service adequately seriously, that’s clear. But his agencies have done a phenomenally good job.

Some say there’s little doubt that if a spill like the one in the Gulf took place on former President George W. Bush’s watch, environmental groups would have unleashed an unsparing fury on the Republican in the White House. For their liberal ally, Obama, they seem willing to hold their tongues.

These guys have bet the farm on this administration,” said Ted Nordhaus, chairman of an environmental think tank, the Breakthrough Institute. “There has been a real hesitancy to criticize this administration out of a sense that they’re kind of the only game in town. … These guys are so beholden to this administration to move their agenda that I think they’re unwilling to criticize them.

The most prominent voices of outrage have come not from mainstream environmental groups, but from the likes of political consultant James Carville, comedian Bill Maher and Plaquemines, La., Parish President Billy Nungesser.

Carville’s call for Obama to hold BP’s feet to the fire has penetrated the national consciousness in a way that comments from traditional environmental groups have not.

'Who’s your daddy?’ has become the talking point of the crisis so far,” observed Matt Nisbet, a professor of environmental communications at American University, referring to a comment by Carville. “It’s difficult for the national environmental groups to be critics of the administration — they’re working so closely with the administration. ... They have reacted cautiously and softly."

The White House says Obama has escaped the brunt of environmentalists’ criticism over the spill and the cleanup effort for a simple reason: he doesn’t deserve it.

“We have responded with unprecedented resources, and when you look at what most of the critics say …and you ask them, specifically, what is it that the administration could or should have done differently that would have an impact on whether or not oil was hitting shore, you're met with silence,” Obama said in an interview aired Tuesday on NBC’s “Today Show.”

But analysts say it’s more complicated than that — a practical sense among the groups that Obama is about the best they’re going to do when it comes to their key issues.

The environmental movement as such has nowhere to turn but Obama,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “They’re feeling they have one person to do business with. ... We’re down to like two Republican senators who want to deal with these environmental groups.”

There is a level of confusion,” said Michael Egan, an environmental historian at McMaster University in Ontario. “Part of it is they’re still trying to figure out how to work with the Obama administration, which is sounding more and more like a Clinton one — much to their chagrin.”

While they’re disappointed by a variety of Obama’s actions, the alternatives are much, much worse,” Egan said.

Several analysts said the low profile of the large environmental groups since the disaster is due in large part to uncertainty about the impact of the spill on the strategy for passing pending climate legislation. Environmental groups are leery of alienating Obama as he weighs how hard to push a sweeping cap-and-trade energy bill to rein in carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

Obama implicitly blessed a drilling-for-climate-votes swap back in March when he announced plans to open additional areas in the Gulf, along the Atlantic coast, and in Alaska for offshore drilling leases. Most environmental groups publicly opposed that move, but some accepted the White House’s analysis that allowing more drilling was the best way to win the Republican support needed to pass a climate change bill this year.

“Obama made his ... pledge to lift the offshore drilling ban because he was trying to rustle up votes for Kerry-Lieberman, and that’s what most of the environmental community has been about,” Bill McKibben, a prominent environmental writer and leader of climate change group 350.org, said this week.

The major environmental groups insist they have been actively trying to harness public anger over the spill. However, they concede they haven’t had the kind of media traction Carville and others voices not usually associated with the environmental debate have found.

“We’ve been very vocal about the spill since it started. We’ve been doing field events all over the country at BP gas stations,” said Dave Willett of the Sierra Club. “I obviously don’t think we’ve had the profile Carville has had. … An environmentalist being against offshore drilling isn’t exactly a man-bites-dog kind of angle.”

Asked if Sierra Club has any concerns about the administration’s response to the spill, Willett said, “Overall, we’re satisfied with the cleanup and recovery effort."

A spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Bob Deans, said there’s no need for his group to whip up anger over the spill — recent photos of birds coated in oil have done that just fine.

“I think that made people plenty angry. Every time you see a picture like that, it breaks your heart,” Deans said. “Certainly, we’re outraged, but it’s not our job to generate outrage. It’s our role to try to focus that sentiment on priorities we need to make our country stronger.”

Some say that even though environmental groups aren’t dominating the debate, their issues certainly are —and are driving huge swings in public opinion against drilling and in favor of action on climate issues.

“In some ways, the media coverage is doing a lot of the work for the environmental groups,” Nisbet said. “They have a perfect narrative going right now. …The lower profile is working for them.”

As the criticism of Obama ramped up in the media last month, some protesters did challenge his handling of the crisis — but they often came from groups not commonly associated with environmental causes. The “Make Big Oil Pay” signs outside a fundraiser Obama attended in San Francisco on May 25 were carried by a contingent from the socialist group ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which is mounting a campaign to have the U.S. government seize BP’s assets.

“The national environmental organizations have become very establishment, very hierarchical and have close ties to decision makers. A lot of their influence is based on their reputations, their expertise and their ability to marshal mainstream members,” Nisbet said. “Groups outside the mainstream are benefitting."

So far there has been one modest spill-related protest directed at the White House. On May 11, before significant criticism of the administration got attention, about 50 people marched outside with a banner calling the spill Obama’s “Crude Awakening."

“There is, I think, a tendency of waiting,” said one leader of that demonstration, Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, who attributed some of the sluggishness to most environmentalists being political supporters of the president. “As people were waiting, they were outraged but they were waiting for something to happen. When it didn’t, I think a lot of groups and people said, ‘What is going on?’”

Yearwood said the White House should have had “a higher sense of urgency early in the process.” And he said his group is planning more demonstrations to make sure Obama keeps up the pressure on BP and leads a drive to reduce America’s dependence on oil.

“We’re going to be at the gates again being angry as hell,” he said. “We have to speak truth to power, no matter who that power is.”