The decision to expand offshore drilling in the Atlantic Coast, eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska caught progressive and environmental groups by surprise, and they are reacting negatively.

Repower America, Al Gore’s coalition of environmental activists, has a petition at their site calling on the President to rethink his decision. They also put up the video you see to the right, with then-candidate Obama talking about drilling in one of the Presidential debates. Even in this clip, however, he says that drilling is “important,” though we cannot “simply drill our way out of the problem, and we cannot deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use fossil fuels that create global warming.”

Similarly, MoveOn.org sent an email to their list decrying the decision.

President Obama announced this week that he plans to open vast sections of protected coastlines to oil and gas drilling.

This is a really terrible idea. We need to break our addiction to oil, not feed it. And especially with clean energy solutions like wind and solar, it makes no sense to destroy our pristine coasts for oil.

The good news is that some progressives in the Senate have said that they’re really going to fight this. We need to help them push back by showing that voters don’t want more off-shore oil drilling.

That’s why we’re launching a petition urging President Obama to drop his plan for more off-shore oil drilling. We’ll also share the petition with your representatives in Congress to make sure they’re hearing the public opposition as well.

Let me be clear: these petitions do nothing. President Obama will not get a stack of e-signatures and say “Why, I had no idea. Call my Interior Secretary, let’s rethink this.” You have a better chance reaching the President with a personal letter; at least we know he reads 10 of them every day. Seriously, write a letter.

But this does show a level of opposition among traditional allies that we really did not see to this degree previously. There was a bit more neglect of the data before, and certainly not broadsides against the President, saving those for wayward members of Congress.

Maybe this is a sign that progressive groups are waking up a bit and filling their function of pushing the debate their way.