When President Obama arrives today in the oil hub of Cushing, Okla., his roller-coaster relationship with environmentalists is going to get a lot more complicated.

After winning green hosannas two months ago for rejecting the Canada-to-U.S. pipeline known as Keystone XL, Obama plans to roll out an executive order aimed at fast-tracking that project's $2.3 billion southern leg. The move stands to drive a wedge among conservationists who had linked arms on the anti-XL campaign but now must choose between putting a positive spin on their disappointment with the president or blasting his new warmth toward the pipeline.

Some activists who fueled the fight against the XL link, driven by opposition to the emissions-heavy oil-sands crude that it would carry to Gulf Coast refineries, are irate enough to join Republicans in accusing the president of trying to please both pipeline backers and critics.

"Was the president's initial rejection of the Keystone XL simply a farce to temporarily appease the environmental voters who dared to hold him to his own promises about real leadership on the climate and shifting to 21st-century clean energy solutions?" Friends of the Earth fuels campaigner Kim Huynh asked in a statement yesterday. "It would seem so."

In accusing Obama of "trying to have it both ways" by touting the pipeline's southern stretch, Huynh sounded a similar note to Republicans who likened his stance on the project to former Vice President Al Gore -- one of Keystone XL's most prominent foes -- claiming credit for inventing the Internet.

"There's no reason to think that somehow the line is environmentally safe from Cushing to the Gulf but might be environmentally risky from the Gulf to Canada," Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said this week. "If we can do one, we can do the other."

Other greens temper their frustration with a dose of praise for Obama's push to repeal oil and gas tax breaks, which is effectively doomed on Capitol Hill, and his frequent advocacy for federal clean-energy investments.

"What we're seeing from the president is a pack of solutions, most of which are the right solutions," Natural Resources Defense Council international program director Susan Casey-Lefkowitz said in an interview yesterday. "Where we disagree with him is that we'd need additional tar sands oil pipelines."

Even Bill McKibben, the climate activist who marshaled thousands of pipeline protesters to Obama's doorstep and got arrested in the process, acknowledged that speeding up the "harder to stop" Oklahoma-to-Texas portion of the project could make it easier for sponsor TransCanada Corp. to build the full XL line.

Still, McKibben added in an interview, "from a climate point of view," the southern leg Obama backs is "not as horrific" as Keystone XL.

"I suppose you could say the distance it has to leak oil is less," he said, "but that doesn't do much for the people who live along it. And that's why they'll keep fighting it, and we'll do all we can to help."

Legal challenges to what TransCanada calls the Gulf Coast Project are indeed likely from landowners along the southern stretch of the XL line, which U.S. and Canadian oil and gas companies hail as a job creator that locks down oil supplies less geopolitically whipsawed than Middle Eastern crude. Casey-Lefkowitz said her team is looking at a call to force fresh review of the shorter leg under the National Environmental Policy Act by arguing that it is effectively a segment of the original 1,700-mile proposal.

"If there ever was an example of a project clearly divided up to get easier access to permits, it's Keystone XL," she said.

Obama's argument

But the presidential permitting process that governed the border-crossing XL does not apply to its southern portion, leaving simpler Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service permits as the only obstacles to its construction. Obama's announcement in Cushing today is designed to speed up those permits, billing the shorter pipeline as a valuable solution to the current glut of domestic and Canadian crude now sitting in Oklahoma's oil-storage hub.

"The need for pipeline infrastructure is urgent because rising American oil production is outpacing the capacity of pipelines to deliver oil to refineries," the White House wrote in a preview of the executive order set for release today. "The goal must be to execute federal permitting and review processes with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring the health, safety, and security of communities and the environment while supporting projects that can contribute to economic growth and a secure energy future."

Such rhetorical nods to the priorities of greens and industry did little but stoke the fury of Republicans who savage Obama as falsely courting environmental voters with his January veto of the full XL line.

"Simply put, the southern portion of Keystone -- from Cushing, OK to the Gulf Coast -- is being built in spite of the Obama administration, not because of them," Rep. John Sullivan (R-Okla.) fumed in a statement yesterday.

Even as she sought to balance the White House's support for the southern stretch of XL against his pro-renewables record, Casey-Lefkowitz cast doubt on its depiction of the Oklahoma-to-Texas pipeline as a means to accommodate the fruits of "rising American oil production."

The XL line's predecessor, simply named Keystone, appears to have excess capacity that could be used to bring new Canadian oil-sands fuel to Cushing, where it would then travel through the renamed Gulf Coast Project to be refined, she explained.

"There will likely be some domestic oil in it," Casey-Lefkowitz said, "but there also will be some tar sands oil in it."

This leaves environmental groups increasingly inclined to pivot and hit Obama, even as he uses much of a four-state swing to promote clean energy that they support (see related story).

Today's Cushing order "raises questions about his commitment to a review process that is crucial to protect clean drinking water and the rights of families along the route" of the pipeline, the National Wildlife Federation wrote in a memo yesterday. Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune described himself in a statement as "deeply disappointed" with the "wrongheaded decision."

Perhaps the only cold comfort to Obama came from one of his party's most environmentally active senators.

"Keystone is going to go forward in time," Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said earlier this week, giving voice to a widely held but rarely shared view among Democrats. "People will criticize the president regardless of what he does."