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Over the past few weeks, there have been two very distinct lobbying efforts directed at President Barack Obama over environmental and energy policy. One has been done very publicly — more than 1,000 activists, ranging from celebrities and scientists to former Obama campaign organizers — have been arrested outside the White House, protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport half a million barrels a day of carbon-intensive crude from oil-sands developments in western Canada. The other effort has been a bit quieter: representatives from industry groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute have heavily lobbied the White House to abandon a move by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to strengthen air-pollution regulations that limit smog.

So which lobbying campaign won out? Maybe not the one you'd expect for a President who came into office two and a half years ago with the greenest credentials in recent memory. On Sept. 2, President Obama shocked his environmental allies when he pulled back the proposed tougher smog standards, despite the fact that the EPA had been promising stronger rules for months. Meanwhile, the Keystone XL pipeline — which needs White House approval — seems almost certain to go forward, with a State Department assessment last month seen as largely in favor of the project and Administration officials signaling their support. Big business won while activists and environmentalists lost out.

From the extreme to the mainstream, environmental groups reacted to Obama's announcement on smog with the fury of the scorned. It didn't help that Obama's political capital with environmentalists was already dwindling after his perceived failure to push through carbon cap-and-trade legislation and the gradual disappearance of global warming as a White House priority. Greens pondered aloud how a President they had worked so hard to elect, one who had pledged to put science before politics, could screw them over so badly — and they asked whether he was no longer worth the same effort in 2012. "Many MoveOn members are wondering today how they can ever work for President Obama's re-election, or make the case for his to their neighbors, when he does something like this," MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben said in a statement. "This is a decision we'd expect from George W. Bush."

Ouch. It doesn't get much worse than comparing Obama to a man widely considered to be the least environmental President ever. But has Obama really surrendered his green credentials, and given how uniformly hostile the Republican presidential candidates are to any form of environmental or climate policy, is there anything greens can really do about it?

First, a little background. Under the Clean Air Act, the Administration is required to review air-pollution regulations every five years, consulting the latest science to see whether rules need to be tightened to protect public health. Back in 2008, Bush's EPA set the new limit for ground-level ozone — the main ingredient of smog and a health hazard in its own right — at 75 parts per billion (ppb). That was tighter than the existing regulations, but considerably weaker than the 60 to 70 ppb recommended at the time by the EPA's own scientists.

Advocacy groups like the American Lung Association launched lawsuits to force the government to stop the Bush ozone regulations, which they argued would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths; but when Obama took office, they announced a cease-fire at the behest of the new Administration. EPA head Lisa Jackson — who said that the Bush rules were "legally indefensible" — promised that the Administration would issue stronger ozone regulations that would fall into the 60- to 70-ppb levels recommended by the current science.

But industry groups screamed bloody murder over the possibility of tougher regulations, arguing that strict air-pollution rules could cost the economy as much as $90 billion a year by 2020. The EPA has said that the proposed regulations would still have net positive economic benefits, thanks to the reduction of premature deaths, hospitalizations and lost-worker productivity due to bad air. But with the economy worsening by the month and the White House increasingly seen as unfriendly to business, that was a tough argument to make, and EPA delayed the finalization of the new regulations again and again while always promising that they would eventually come. Finally on Sept. 2 — just before the Labor Day weekend — White House regulatory chief Cass Sunstein sent a letter to Jackson urging her to reconsider the new ozone regulations, adding that new rules "would create needless uncertainty" — essentially ending the debate.

Since the announcement, the White House has tried to make the case that issuing new ozone regulations in 2011 would be unnecessary and confusing because the rules are automatically up for review in 2013 under the Clean Air Act. But the EPA, which could have been free under the law to issue new rules now and then, postpone the next review until 2016. In any case, chances are it will take well past 2013 for new rules to actually make it into practice — after all, the EPA is already years past its last deadline.

In a conference call after the announcement, one White House official tried to reassure reporters that the decision "had nothing to do with politics," but that's frankly ludicrous. This decision came from Obama, and he chose to overrule his EPA and disregard science in favor of a political goal — in this case, giving business a break at a time when the economy is floundering and his opponents are trying to paint him as a job-killing bureaucrat. Greens — and the 4,300 people the stronger regulations were predicted to save per year — were left in the cold. "President Obama has come down on the side of the polluters and those extreme forces who deny the value of government safeguards," wrote Natural Resources Defense Council president Frances Beinecke after Obama's announcement.

Of course, those "extreme forces" happen to include virtually the entire Republican Party, including all the major GOP presidential candidates, many of whom would be happy to eliminate the EPA altogether. And that puts the greens in a political quandary — they may be extremely unhappy with Obama, but a Republican victory in 2012 would be an environmental catastrophe. Withdraw their support from Obama, and they'll only be shooting themselves in the foot.

It's hard to see any environmental group actually campaigning against Obama, even after the ozone and oil-sands disappointments, although the effect could be felt in fundraising and grassroots enthusiasm. And Obama has still done a lot for greens, from ambitious new fuel-economy standards to unprecedented funding for alternative energy — not to mention the fact that the President, unlike most of his GOP opponents, actually accepts the reality of climate change. But the events of the past few weeks drive home an unhappy fact: amid a floundering economy and a scarily tight re-election battle, the environment is going to come second for the White House.

Worst of all, there doesn't seem to be much that greens can do about it. More than 1,000 people were arrested over the course of the two-week-long protests over the Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline, engaging in what the writer and activist Bill McKibben called the "largest civil-disobedience action in the environmental movement in a generation." While the protests were going on, reporters asked White House press secretary Jay Carney whether Obama was even aware of the demonstrations going on outside his home. Carney said he didn't know. The President's attention is somewhere else.

• Bryan Walsh
• Greens are mad at the President after he abandoned a promise to tighten air pollution regulations. But do environmentalists have anywhere else to go?