Environmentalists give Barack Obama a pass on oil spill - Josh Gerstein - POLITICO.com
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.
To mention Obama's name with TR's is sickening...Roosevelt was not an environmentalist, he was a Conservationist. He didn't want to waste our resources, but to not use them was never on his mind.
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.
Little doubt?????...is the earth round guys?
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...
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.” ...
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.”
...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.
Finally we get it...these leftist groups (sometimes called environmental groups) want to pass a bill to destroy American industry and that is more important than anything...and they will not let anything like Obama's incompetence in handling the spill stop that...
America, what the hell have we gotten ourselves into.
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