Before Obama’s Alaska Trip, Climate Group Charges Hypocrisy

President Obama’s environmental critics are using his own words and images against him as they argue that his planned trip to Alaska next week is proof of what they call his “self-defeating hypocrisy” on global warming.

The progressive social-change group Credo on Thursday will release a mash-up of a slick, White House-produced video previewing the trip in which the group criticizes Mr. Obama for allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic at the same time as he is traveling there to call for urgent action to combat climate change.

“Really?!? Is President Obama trolling us?” reads a message at the start of Credo’s version.

“Here’s your wake-up call, Mr. President,” it says, echoing Mr. Obama’s oratory in the video, in which he speaks directly to a camera to appeal for swift action to deal with climate change.

“Climate leaders don’t drill the Arctic.”

The video takedown is part of a campaign the group is starting, five days before Mr. Obama becomes the first American president to visit the Alaskan Arctic, to call attention to the dissonance between aggressive actions he has taken to tackle the planet’s warming and policy choices he has made that could exacerbate it.

Mr. Obama’s decision last week to allow Royal Dutch Shell to go forward with planned drilling in Arctic waters makes for a particularly vivid and timely contrast.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to leave on Monday for the three-day trip to Alaska, where he will speak at a State Department climate change conference and hopscotch the state, including journeying to the Arctic city of Kotzebue, to witness the damaging effects of rising temperatures.

Using Mr. Obama’s stunning pictures of melting sea ice and crumbling glaciers, the group is asking activists to sign a petition and phone the White House to urge Mr. Obama not to allow Arctic drilling.