Clean Energy Works is closing up shop. Formed to push climate and energy legislation through Congress, the coalition of 80 environmental, labor, and other progressive groups is sending its members home empty-handed. Disoriented and dejected, Clean Energy Works’ members are awaiting the election results so they can try and “figure out how to redeploy” in the new political landscape.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Green groups were ecstatic after the 2008 elections. They had the largest Democratic congressional majority in years and aggressively pro-regulatory committee chairs. The Obama administration deployed environmentalist advocates in key positions throughout the federal government, and President Obama even named an energy and climate “czar” in the White House. Environmentalists were poised for aggressive legislative and regulatory action.

And then there was the BP oil spill. For weeks on end the nation was transfixed by the Deepwater Horizon blowout. As oil spread through the Gulf, the media were flooded with stories of the potentially disastrous economic and environmental consequences of BP’s negligent rig management. Environmental groups couldn’t have asked for a better example of the nation’s environmental failures — more fuel for the regulatory fire.

In the past, environmental disasters spurred legislative action. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and fabled Cuyahoga River fire helped galvanize the modern environmental movement and spur passage of the Clean Water Act. Images of abandoned barrels oozing hazardous waste and the contamination of homes at Love Canal drove enactment of the federal Superfund statute. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill prompted adoption of the federal Oil Pollution Act and empowered environmentalist groups to push for more stringent reforms to the Clean Air Act in 1990. And yet the response to the Gulf oil spill has been . . . nothing. Congress may yet eke out a modest energy bill, but no transformative environmental legislation is in the offing.

What happened? Some blame the political power of big polluters, others point to the economy. No doubt the nation’s economic woes played a role, lessening the public’s appetite for expansive governmental initiatives of any sort.

Environmentalists sought unsuccessfully to repackage desired measures as economic stimulants. “Green jobs” were all the rage among political elites, but the public wasn’t sold. The environmental movement had overestimated its political pull and salesmanship skills.

Walter Russell Mead argues that the environmental movement has become a victim of its own success. Environmentalists began as progressive Davids taking on industrial Goliaths. Now, however, the established environmental movement is a Goliath all its own. In Mead’s formulation, Bambi had become Godzilla: “The greens didn’t fail because they were too loyal to their ideals; they failed because they lost touch with the core impetus and values of the environmental movement. Bambi wasn’t crushed by Godzilla; Bambi turned into Godzilla, and the same kind of public skepticism and populism that once fueled environmentalism have turned against it.”

There are elements of truth in Mead’s thesis. Washington’s environmentalist lobby has indeed become “the voice of the establishment.” But the environmental movement’s problems run even deeper than its detachment from its grass-roots origins. All too often, the professional environmental lobby puts left-wing ideology and partisanship ahead of ecological protection.