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Sierra Club

see Siera Club 2 12/15

How ‘Freeway Revolts’ Helped Create the People’s Environmental Law 6/19 see Environmental Justice and Environmental History.

black panthers and sierra club

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U.S. Forest Service is considering letting Arch Coal, the second biggest coal company in the country, bulldoze thousands of acres of publicly-owned roadless forest in order to mine more than 170 million tons of coal and create hundreds of methane well pads.  12/15

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/mayor-bloomberg-defending-obama-goes-after-state-attorneys-general-protecting-polluters

Michael Bloomberg has not been shy about using his vast personal wealth (estimated at $40.9 billion) on political spending [3]. Last year the former New York City mayor announced plans to spend $50 million building a national grassroots movement to curb gun violence. It's a significant amount, especially considering the fact that the National Rifle Association spends only $20 million [4] on political activities each year.

Now the perennial putative presidential candidate has set his sights on a new target: carbon emissions. Last month, he announced his plans [5] to run a series of political television ads attacking the attorneys general of four states — Florida, Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin — who are suing the Obama administration over new regulations aimed at reducing emissions [6] from power plants. The attorneys general claim the rules will drive up energy costs and destroy coal industry jobs. Notably, the four states have been presidential battlegrounds.

Two of the Bloomberg ads describe the attorneys general as bending to special interests and taking donations from “polluters.” The ad airing in Michigan accuses Attorney General Bill Schuette of “putting polluters and his campaign contributors ahead [5] of protecting Michigan families.” The Florida ad describes Pam Bondi, a Republican, as “an attorney general for polluters, not for us [5].”

“These four attorneys general are trying to stop the president from doing something that I think is terribly important,” Bloomberg told [5] the New York Times. “I want the public to know what they’re doing.”

The regulations, part of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan [7] (CPP), which was introduced in August, are a central element of Obama’s Climate Action Plan [8], which aims to fulfill the president’s 2009 pledge to reduce the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent [8] below 2005 levels by 2020. To meet that goal, the CPP sets state-by-state targets to cut carbon emissions from the energy sector 32 percent [9] from 2005 levels by 2030.

The White House asserts that by setting the goals of CPP and allowing states to create tailored plans to meet them, there will be huge benefits for public health, the national economy and savings for average Americans. Specifically, the White House says it will create tens of thousands of jobs, lower the costs of renewable energy and save consumers $155 billion between 2020 and 2030. The CPP will also:

Still, the CPP has met with fierce, primarily Republican opposition, with conservative critics saying it represents an unconstitutional federal overreach, will drive up energy bills and reduce the electric grid’s reliability. The EPA has firmly dismissed these claims. Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator of the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the plan is “based on a sound legal and technical foundation," adding that it "really puts states in the driver's seat [10]."

The four attorneys general who are the targets of Bloomberg's ads are fighting back. According to the New York Times, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad D. Schimel said in an email statement that Bloomberg is an “out-of-touch billionaire.” And in a statement, Florida attorney general Pam Bondi described Bloomberg as a “billionaire bully [11]”:

Florida has a great and conscientious track record of improving its air quality and protecting its environment … Now a billionaire bully is attacking Florida, and 26 other states, for having the audacity of defending their citizens against the EPA’s heavy-handed and unlawful regulations. This bully wants to defend the federal government; we want to protect the people we serve.

In her announcement [12] about the lawsuit, Bondi claimed the EPA rule sets an "unrealistic" timeframe to cut carbon emissions by 2030 and would "require the use of costly and unproven technologies."

Twenty states are challenging the EPA rule in addition to the four targeted by Bloomberg: West Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, the Arizona Corporation Commission, and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

Environmental concerns are not new for Bloomberg. During his tenure as mayor of New York, 2002 to 2013, he became known as one of the most environmentally minded big city mayors in the country, introducing in 2007 PLaNYC [13], an aggressive program to overhaul the city’s environmental sustainability by 2030 that tackled 10 specific areas: housing and neighborhoods, parks and public spaces, brownfields, waterways, water supply, transportation, energy, air quality, solid waste, and climate change. According to NYC.gov [14], “Over 97% of the 127 initiatives in PlaNYC were launched within one year of its release and almost two-thirds of its 2009 milestones were achieved or mostly achieved.”

A main benefactor of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal [15] campaign, Bloomberg has been a longtime opponent of coal, characterizing it as a naturally dying industry. In an August op-ed, he wrote [16]:

The overblown political rhetoric about the plan tends to obscure the market reality that the coal industry has been in steady decline for a decade, partly as a result of the natural gas boom, but mostly because consumers are demanding cleaner air and action on climate change … King Coal is dying of natural causes: Market forces, technological advances, and public demands for clean air and climate action have combined to make alternative sources of energy more financially attractive. The price of new wind power, for example, is lower than that of coal in most parts of the country.

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said that Bloomberg’s new ads “amount to a defense [5] of the White House over its Clean Power Plan.”

Whether this defense will work remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain: Coal is on the decline and fewer Americans are dying because of it. “A decade ago, coal pollution was killing 13,000 people a year,” Bloomberg wrote in his op-ed. “Today, the number is down to 7,500, which means that more than 5,000 Americans are living longer, healthier lives each year thanks to cleaner power [16].”

Reynard Loki is AlterNet's environment and food editor. Follow him on Twitter @reynardloki [17]. Email him at reynard@alternet.org [18].

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10/15

he card-carrying climate-denier was referring to his recent grilling of Sierra Club President Aaron Mair during a Senate hearing, in which Cruz pushed Mair for nearly 10 minutes on climate change.

Mair was at the hearing to explain how communities of color are disproportionately affected by pollution and climate disruption. However, Cruz used this time to push Mair on climate change with classic denier arguments, saying satellite data shows the Earth isn’t warming and that there has been a “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming, which NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has refuted. Mair has also posted a response to Cruz’s attack, refuting these claims.

During his interview with Beck, Cruz explained, “We had an exchange where I simply asked him about the data and he couldn’t answer the most basic questions … He couldn’t answer the most basic fact that for the last 18 years the satellite data showed no significant warming whatsoever.”

Cruz continued to Beck:

You know part of the reason he didn’t know the facts? Because climate change is not science, it’s religion.

Look at the language where they call you a “denier” Denier is not the language of science. Look, I’m the child of two scientists. My parents are both mathematicians, computer programmers. My dad was self-taught geophysicist. The essence of the scientific method is to start with a hypothesis, and then look to the evidence to disprove the hypothesis. You’re not trying to prove it, you’re trying to disprove it. Any good scientist is a skeptic, if he’s not, he or she should not be a scientist.

But yet the language of the global warming alarmists, “denier” is the language of religion, it’s heretic, you are a blasphemer.

The response from the Sierra Club, “We have decreed this is the answer, you must accept it.” And so he didn’t know his facts because he just knew his religion.

Earlier in the interview, Cruz said he does not understand why his fellow GOP candidates did not readily admit to being climate change skeptics when they were asked this question by CNN’s Jake Tapper during the last Republican debate.

“For whatever reason, they were afraid to say yes and they sort of bobbed and weaved on that question. I tried to jump in I said ‘Jake [Tapper], you want a skeptic? I’m right here,’” Cruz said.

It’s not the first time that a right-wing politician has compared climate change to religion, which has “become a go-to GOP talking point during the run-up to next year’s elections,”according to a post from the University of Southern California’s Religion Dispatches.

“The basic premise of these comparisons is that extreme environmentalists exhibit some hallmark features of religion: rituals and taboos (such as recycling or avoiding meat); apocalyptic beliefs (global ruin due to climate change); and ideals rooted in an Edenic past (Earth before humans),” the article says.

“The recent GOP strategy is to point out superficially religious elements of environmentalism and, by way of loose association, assign ideological bias to the incontrovertible scientific evidence of climate change.”

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5/15

Inside the war on coal

How Mike Bloomberg, red-state businesses, and a lot of Midwestern lawyers are changing American energy faster than you think.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.

The industry and its supporters use “war on coal” as shorthand for a ferocious assault by a hostile White House, but the real war on coal is not primarily an Obama war, or even a Washington war. It’s a guerrilla war. The front lines are not at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Supreme Court. If you want to see how the fossil fuel that once powered most of the country is being battered by enemy forces, you have to watch state and local hearings where utility commissions and other obscure governing bodies debate individual coal plants. You probably won’t find much drama. You’ll definitely find lawyers from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, the boots on the ground in the war on coal.

Beyond Coal is the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the Club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement. It’s gone largely unnoticed amid the furor over the Keystone pipeline and President Barack Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon, but it’s helped retire more than one third of America’s coal plants since its launch in 2010, one dull hearing at a time. With a vast war chest donated by Michael Bloomberg, unlikely allies from the business world, and a strategy that relies more on economics than ecology, its team of nearly 200 litigators and organizers has won battles in the Midwestern and Appalachian coal belts, in the reddest of red states, in almost every state that burns coal.

“They’re sophisticated, they’re very active, and they’re better funded than we are,” says Mike Duncan, a former Republican National Committee chairman who now heads the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “I don’t like what they’re doing; we’re losing a lot of coal in this country. But they do show up.”

Coal still helps keep our lights on, generating nearly 40 percent of U.S. power. But it generated more than 50 percent just over a decade ago, and the big question now is how rapidly its decline will continue. Almost every watt of new generating capacity is coming from natural gas, wind or solar; the coal industry now employs fewer workers than the solar industry, which barely existed in 2010. Utilities no longer even bother to propose new coal plants to replace the old ones they retire. Coal industry stocks are tanking, and analysts are predicting a new wave of coal bankruptcies.

This is a big deal, because coal is America’s top source of greenhouse gases, and coal retirements are the main reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined 10 percent in a decade. Coal is also America’s top source of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other toxic air pollutants, so fewer coal plants also means less asthma and lung disease—not to mention fewer coal-ash spills and coal-mining disasters. The shift toward cleaner-burning gas and zero-emissions renewables is the most important change in our electricity mix in decades, and while Obama has been an ally in the war on coal—not always as aggressive an ally as the industry claims—the Sierra Club is in the trenches. The U.S. had 523 coal-fired power plants when Beyond Coal began targeting them; just last week, it celebrated the 190th retirement of its campaign in Asheville, N.C., culminating a three-year fight that had been featured in the climate documentary “Years of Living Dangerously.”

Beyond Coal isn’t the stereotypical Sierra Club campaign, tree-huggers shouting save-the-Earth slogans. Yes, it sometimes deploys its 2.4 million-member, grass-roots army to shutter plants with traditional not-in-my-back-yard organizing and right-to-breathe agitating. But it usually wins by arguing that ditching coal will save ratepayers money.

Behind that argument lies a revolution in the economics of power, changes few Americans think about when they flick their switches. Coal used to be the cheapest form of electricity by far, but it’s gotten pricier as it’s been forced to clean up more of its mess, while the costs of gas, wind and solar have plunged in recent years. Now retrofitting old coal plants with the pollution controls needed to comply with Obama’s limits on soot, sulfur and mercury is becoming cost-prohibitive—and the EPA is finalizing its new carbon rules as well as tougher ozone restrictions that should add to the burden. That’s why the Sierra Club finds itself in foxholes with big-box stores, manufacturers and other business interests, fighting coal upgrades that would jack up electricity bills, pushing for cheaper renewables and energy efficiency instead. ...

hese days, growing concerns about climate have heightened concerns about coal, which produces 75 percent of the power sector’s carbon, and more emissions than all our cars and trucks combined. But even at the dawn of the 21st century, the George W. Bush administration’s main concern about coal power and fossil energy in general was that the U.S. wasn’t producing enough of it. In 2001, an energy task force led by Dick Cheney, after a series of secret meetings with fossil-fuel executives, called for a new power-plant construction boom, warning that the alternative was a national reprise of the rolling blackouts that had just roiled California. Utilities quickly proposed about 200 new coal plants, and faced no organized national opposition. Coal plants have a useful lifespan of at least 40 years, so the U.S. was poised to lock in a new generation of dirty power. And all that new capacity was poised to destroy any incentive to develop clean wind or solar power.

That’s when the Sierra Club got into its first big coal fight over a proposed billion-dollar plant south of Chicago, a welcome-to-the-NFL episode. The Chicago area already had poor air quality—the coal plants around the Loop were known as the Ring of Fire—and local volunteers, led by an indefatigable German immigrant named Verena Owen, were desperate to block the project. Their cause seemed hopeless, but for Owen, who is now Beyond Coal’s lead volunteer, it was personal. Her best friend had struggled to breathe whenever the air was hazy and eventually died of lung disease, leaving behind a daughter in kindergarten. “I don’t know how many people we ended up saving, but I know one we didn’t,” Owen says.

The first time Nilles, at the time a lawyer for the Sierra Club’s Midwest office in Chicago, tried to attend a hearing about the plant, union members who supported the project came early and packed the hall while the Club was holding a news conference. Illinois regulators soon rubber-stamped the permit. Owen and Nilles can still recite the date and time of the news dump: Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 5:10 p.m., so the bureaucrats could ignore their calls and escape for the weekend. And the industry had an even easier time of it elsewhere. Nilles later reviewed the record for another billion-dollar plant that broke ground in Iowa about the same time, and discovered there hadn’t been a single public comment in opposition.

“Everything was going full speed in the wrong direction, and we had no capacity to fight,” he says. “We realized we needed a strategy. Fast.”

The strategy that Nilles devised was to fight every new plant from every conceivable environmental, economic and political angle. The Sierra Club began organizing boot camps to teach lawyers and volunteers around the region how to block coal permits. Demand for the seminars was so intense that, at one point, Nilles’ boss had to remind him that Texas was not part of the Midwest. But he figured Texans who breathed air and drank water had as much to lose from exposure to coal-fired pollutants as Midwesterners had. Some of the Club’s funders thought his fight-everything-everywhere approach was unrealistic during a national coal rush, but every proposed plant was in someone’s backyard, and the Club had members in every corner of the country. Nilles couldn’t imagine telling any of them their communities would have to be sacrificed for the greater tactical good.

Environmentalists have always been good at blocking stuff, and over the next few years, the kitchen-sink strategy produced some improbable victories. ...

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on-coal-000002

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peacock says good vet pgm http://www.booktv.org/Watch/16197/In+the+Shadow+of+the+Sabertooth+Global+Warming+the+Origins+of+the+First+Americans+and+the+Terrible+Beasts+of+the+Pleistocene.aspx

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http://ecowatch.com/2014/04/30/dirty-money-dirty-fuels-politics/

What if fighting dirty money in our elections was the key to fighting dirty fuels in our economy?

That’s the question asked in a recent reportreleased by the Sierra Club and Oil Change International. From the perspective of the fossil fuel industry, political contributions are just another form of investment. The only difference is that, for the millions polluters spend on elections, they see billions in bonus profits.

As the report says, “The return these polluters are getting on these political investments—in the form of billions in corporate tax handouts—exceed 5,000 percent, demonstrating that Congress remains the best ‘investment’ possible for the coal, oil, and gas industries.”

The oil and gas industries are among the worst offenders. Between 2009 and 2010, the report estimates that they spent $347 million on lobbying and campaign contributions, and in return netted a handsome $20 billion in federal subsidies. Most of these came in the form of**accounting gimmicks**that help hide corporate profits and obscure tax breaks that help cover**drilling**and**refining**costs. Because of loopholes like these, the actual taxes paid by most big energy companies fall**well below**the top corporate rate of 35 percent.

You would think that at a time when both Democrats and Republicans are preoccupied with deficits and debt, cutting subsidies for polluters should be an easy move. After all, these are some of the most profitable companies in world history; surely they need government support like Bill Gates needs food stamps. The fact that many of these giveaways are nearly a century old, dating from a time when fossil fuel extraction was a much riskier game, only adds to their irrelevance. At a time of significant fiscal strain, decades-old free money for rich polluters should be the first thing on the chopping block.

Unfortunately, in the new world of campaign finance born after Citizens United and supercharged earlier this month by McCutcheon vs. FEC, money speaks much louder than fiscal and environmental sanity. The report points out that solid majorities of Americans support action on climate change, investment in renewable energy, and a repeal of fossil fuel subsidies. And yet, Congress is arguably in its most rabidly anti-environment phase in U.S. history, voting repeatedly to block action on climate change, cut support for renewable energy, and hobble enforcement of clean air and water provisions.

The only way to solve this disconnect is through a new system of public financing. As such, the Sierra Club and Oil Change International are throwing their weight behind the recently sponsored Government By The People Act, which would allow federal candidates to receive money from small donors matched on a six-to-one basis. This would not end money in politics, or even strip polluters of their ability to purchase influence.

Winning those fights has to be part of a much longer campaign against corporate personhood and the idea of money as free speech. But in the meantime, it would give candidates who share the increasingly pro-environment sentiments of the American people a chance to be heard. Friends of the Earth supports the Government By The People Act and its vision for a more healthy and just world.

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Mississippi Power And Sierra Club Settle Litigation Over Coal Plant Construction

AP  |  By By JACK ELLIOTT JR.Posted: 08/04/2014 1:55 pm EDT  |  Updated: 08/04/2014 2:59 pm

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi Power will convert from coal to natural gas or retire several units at plants in south Mississippi and Greene County, Alabama, as part of an agreement to end litigation over construction of a coal-fired power plant in Kemper County.

The company and the Sierra Club announced Monday that they are ending the litigation.

"The Sierra Club had the opportunity here to do something the Sierra Club is best in," said Robert Wiygul of Ocean Springs, the attorney for the environmental group.

The agreement is "going to help clean up the air in Mississippi, get some help to the people most affected by rate increases with Kemper and move Mississippi toward a future where homeowners and businesses owners can install clean air equipment," Wiygul said.

Wiygul said the Sierra Club will drop regulatory challenges before the Public Service Commission and legal a

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NV Energy has announced that it will close three of its four coal-fired units at the Reid Gardner power plant in southern Nevada by the end of this year, and the fourth by 2019. The Sierra Club has worked for years with the Moapa Band of Paiutes to retire heavily polluting Reid Gardner, which sits next door to the Moapa Paiute reservation. Soon the tribe will build a 200-megawatt solar array -- the first commercial solar project on Native American lands -- from which the city of Los Angeles will be purchasing enough energy to power over 110,000 homes. 

Read about this major victory for the climate, clean air, and renewable energy. 

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newsbuster shepard:MARC MORANO, CLIMATE DEPOT: It's a wild theory. They had similar theories in the 1970s trying to blame extreme weather on these kind of variables. The bottom line is the Arctic ice was started monitoring in 1979 at a high point of the 1970s global cooling scare. We lost ice. This year by the way we rebounded depending on what dates you want to pick almost a third or more of the ice, and global sea ice currently is highest in 25 years. Antarctic sea ice is at or near record, which no one wants to talk about Antarctic sea ice because it's inconvenient to the narrative.

But the idea that we’re having extreme weather, listening to Michael talk there, it's mind boggling. I mean, the earth is geologically billions of years old and we're sitting around here scratching our heads saying wow we had a hurricane last year which was barely a category 1 when it hit. And then, by the way, it's not me, and he's mentioning funding by the way which I think is funny. The Sierra Club took 26 million from natural gas and Michael has the audacity to try to imply that skeptics are fossil fuel funded.

Story Continues Below Ad ↓weight loss miracle

Not surprisingly, Morano was right. TIME magazine reported in February 2012:

TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past.

:{

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/12/11/morano-smacks-down-sierra-club-director-sierra-club-took-26-million-n#ixzz2naE0yYER}:

now: http://content.sierraclub.org/naturalgas/

Environmental advocates are mounting pressure against the U.S. State Department over a Keystone XL review process they say is "plagued by conflicts of interest."

"Imagine if the surgeon general was replaced with a tobacco executive," Robin Mann, past president and board member of the Sierra Club, said during a press call on Tuesday. "At the State Department, we're seeing something just as outrageous."

The advocacy group filed a lawsuit on Monday asserting that the State Department is withholding key documents related to the latest Keystone XL environmental impact statement, including evidence related to potential conflicts of interest at Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the third-party contractor hired to conduct the analysis of the fiercely-debated proposal to ferry heavy crude from Alberta's oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

During the press call on Tuesday, advocates pushed for a State Department investigator general analysis of the impact statement. Mann added that ERM is a "dues-paying member" of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S trade association for the oil and natural gas industry.

An API spokesman said the group had not yet reviewed the lawsuit and therefore would not comment. ERM deferred HuffPost's inquiry to the State Department....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/11/keystone-xl-lawsuit-sierra-club-state-department_n_3422849.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

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ntbc w sierra fdn

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taking direct action/civil disobediance on xl/agw for 1st time in history but critique; http://www.alternet.org/print/environment/its-not-easy-being-green-are-some-biggest-enviro-groups-giant-sell-outs

nance; Attorney Bruce Nilles, who forged the Sierra Club’s pioneering campaign against coal while most other national environmental groups sat on their hands.

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The Sierra Club lost its tax-exempt status in 1970 because it was seen as being too overtly political. If you apply the criteria that were applied to the Sierra Club to some of these organizations in the climate countermovement, I think you would end up with similar results.

pooley 

3  Sierra C biggest clout, (can stop bills but not get

them thru) 23 Pope

The Sierra Club, considered a Big Green environmental group member, was founded on May 28, 1892 by John Muir and other supporters. It is the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization in the United States. The Sierra club has 1.3 million members. [1]

It is formally allied with 350.org. Executive Director Michael Brune received special permission from his board to be arrested in a celebrity civil disobedience campaign at the White House in 2013.[2]

See also Sierra Club Foundation.

Contents [hide]

Overview

According to their mission statement, the Sierra Club endeavors to:

"Gas-cash fallout"

In February 2012, new Sierra Club national executive director Michael Brune (formerly executive director of the Rainforest Action Network) "came clean" in a blog post: "In 2010, soon after I became the organization's executive director, I learned that beginning in 2007 the Sierra Club had received more than $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries of Chesapeake Energy, one of the country's largest natural gas companies." He clarified that as of the time of his writing, "The Sierra Club opposes any natural gas development that poses unacceptable toxic risks to our land, water, and air. We insist that the volume and content of all fracking fluids and flowback should be disclosed, and that all toxics should be eliminated. . . . Fracking should not be permitted unless it can be demonstrated that drinking water is protected and that all cumulative impacts can be mitigated. And, of course, many beautiful areas and important watersheds across this country should be off-limits to drilling."[4]

The $26 million received represented more than half of the group's net assets as of 2010. The Club held a national conference call with members on Saturday, February 4, 2012, two days after the blog posting. According to Politico, which called the scandal the Sierra Club's "gas-cash fallout," many of these "long-time supporters" were left "feeling angry, betrayed or misled." Kate Bartholomew, a gas activist who at the time was an elected member of the executive committee of the Sierra Club's New York state chapter, told Politico that national leaders should have opened up sooner. "How do you hide $25 million?" she asked. “How do you not know where it comes from? That was my first response. . . . I think it betrays all the grass-roots volunteers.” Anti-fracking activist Walter Hang commented, "It basically looks like they're shilling for the No. 2 natural gas producer in America.”[5]

Others, including fracking activist and director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland Josh Fox, applauded Brune for coming clean. “I think this means the Sierra Club is saying we cannot go down the road of a gas-powered future," Fox told Politico. Climate change activist Bill McKibben said he was “very glad to see the new transparency at the club. . . . I think it will enable the Sierra Club to take a foreground role in the burgeoning battle around fracking.”[5]

Clorox & "Green Works"

In January 2008, the Sierra Club announced a deal with Clorox whereby the company could "use the Sierra Club's name and logo to market a new line of non-chlorinated cleaning products called 'Green Works.' In return, Clorox Company will pay Sierra Club an undisclosed fee, based partly on product sales," reported Peter Montague. Sierra Club's director of Licensing & Cause-Related Marketing, Johanna O'Kelley, has said "the amount of money involved is 'substantial.'" Sierra executive director at the time, Carl Pope, wrote that "our focus was on consumers who otherwise would not migrate to a safer product because they wouldn't be sure it wasn't green scamming."[6]

The tension within the Sierra Club came to a head in late March 2008, when, in an unprecedented move, the "Sierra Club's national board voted March 25 to remove the leaders of the Club's 35,000-member Florida chapter, and to suspend the Chapter for four years." The Florida chapter was reportedly "highly critical" of the Clorox deal. [6] The Sierra Club told chapter leaders not to "seek public media coverage of this internal board decision," according to the Palm Beach Post. Some chapter leaders said "they fear punishment from the national organization" if they speak out.[7]

CAFOs or "animal factories"

The Sierra club reports on the environmental hazards and corporate and government corruption surrounding "giant animal factories" or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO)s. [8]

"Governments are spending millions of taxpayer dollars to bring a pollution nightmare into our neighborhoods," declared Ken Midkiff, coordinator of the Sierra Club's Clean Water Committee. "In state after state, while factory farms rake in the financial benefits, Americans are paying the environmental, health and social costs.""That giant sucking sound is the factory-farm industry taking a hold of the government teat," said Kathryn Hohmann, Director of Sierra Club's Environmental Quality Program. [9]

According to the Sierra Club, factory farms are breeding grounds for disease and pollution effecting air and water quality. According to an Iowa study cited by the group, nearby residents of factory farms complain of respiratory problems, headaches and other illnesses, similar to those of employees. [10] Scientific and medical researchers have conducted a handful of comprehensive studies that examine the public health impacts of animal factories. They conclude that residents living near animal factories show symptoms of respiratory, physical and emotional illness significantly higher than control groups. [11]

See also meat & dairy industry, sections 4 & 5.

"Ten Least Wanted" list

In 2002, Cargill, Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods made the Sierra Club's "Ten Least Wanted" list.

Just weeks after the second-largest beef recall in history, the Sierra Club released a report on hundreds of criminal and civil violations of America's largest corporate factory farms. The Rap sheet documented convictions for animal cruelty, bribery, records destruction, fraud, worker endangerment and pollution.

"Despite repeated violations of environmental and public health laws, many of the companies highlighted in the Rap Sheets continue to receive millions of dollars every year from the School Lunch Program and other federal food assistance programs." [12]

Coal issues

Targeted coal plant proposals

Active

Cancelled

Targeted Institution Plants

University Circle coal steam plant hearing 8/10/10

The Medical Center Company (MCC), a non-profit district heating operation formed in 1932 to provide aggregated utility services to University Circle institutions in eastern Cleveland, OH, burns 40,000 tons of coal/year to heat the city's leading institutions. After operating its plant without a permit for 6 years, the Ohio EPA set a renewal process for their Title V air permit in Spring 2010. The Sierra Club urged MCC to stop burning coal, particularly since it is right next to a hospital, and asked for a public hearing on the permit renewal. Sierra Club then mobilized people in East Cleveland on the hearing, raising issues of environmental justice (see video). In August 2010, MCC chairman Bob Brown, who is also chairman of the corporation's board of directors, said that the company "was moving beyond coal" and is committed to replacing the plant, perhaps with a facility that burns natural gas and generates electrical power as well as steam heat.[13]

Campus Coal Plants

Campuses Beyond Coal is a joint effort between the Sierra Student Coalition and the Sierra Club to move U.S. universities beyond coal to clean energy solutions, and aims to shut down or replace campus-based coal plants and coal-generated electricity.[14]

Internal debates

In 2003/2004, there was an attempt to vote in a number of anti-immigration board members to form an anti-immigration platform. The argument in favor was that "the greater the population, the bigger threat to the environment." Groundswell Sierra charged that anti-immigration leaders were working with directors Ben Zuckerman, Doug LaFollette and Paul Watson. Both Zuckerman, (an astronomy professor at the Univerisity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)) and LaFollette are proponents of curbing immigration. However, while Sierra is a proponent of population control in general, it has remained officially neutral on immigration issues. (see Sierrans for U.S. Population Stablization)

Captain Paul Watson is the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine environmental group. Watson and other animal rights supporters aligned themselves with anti-immigration advocates in hopes of forming a block to officially discourage hunting, fishing and raising animals for food. While Sierra is an opponent of CAFOs or factory farms, it still maintains a neutral policy on hunting, fishing and animal consumption in general. [15]

Political views

The Big Book of Bush.

Politics & Issues.

Funding

Sierra Club is funded in part by members of the Democracy Alliance.

Governance

Officers

Board of directors

(Director, Role (if any), Term Expires)

Former Board members

(Director, Role (if any), Term Expired (if known))

Former Executive Directors: 1952 to 2010

See also Sierra Club: Officers.

Contact

Sierra Club National Headquarters

85 Second Street, 2nd Floor

San Francisco, CA 94105

Phone: 415-977-5500

Fax: 415-977-5799

Sierra Club Legislative Office

50 F Street, NW, Eighth Floor

Washington, DC 20001

Phone: 202-547-1141

Fax: 202-547-6009

Web address: http://www.sierraclub.org

Articles & sources

Sourcewatch resources

External articles

External resources

Books & publications

References

  1. ↑ Welcome page, Sierra Club, accessed January 2008.
  2. ↑ Jeffrey St. Clair, The Post-Modern Protest Blues, Designer Protests and Vanity Arrests in DC, CounterPunch, April 12, 2013.
  3. ↑ Inside the Sierra Club, Sierra Club, accessed February 2008.
  4. ↑ Michael Brune, The Sierra Club and Natural Gas, Coming Clean (the blog of Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune), February 2, 2012.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Bob King, Sierra Club Faces Gas-Cash Fallout, Politico, February 7, 2012.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Peter Montague, "Sierra Club Removes Leadership of its Florida Chapter," Rachel's Democracy & Health News, March 27, 2008.
  7. ↑ Robert P. King, "Sierra Club Fla. chapter leaders dumped," Palm Beach Post (Florida), March 26, 2008.
  8. ↑ The CAFO Papers: Animal Factories Using Closed-Door Meetings with Bush Administration to Evade Environmental Laws, Sierra Club Press Room, pg 1-2, May - October 2003
  9. ↑ Megan Fowler, Ed Hopkins Sierra Club Feeding Frenzy At Taxpayer Trough; Sierra Club Report Reveals Factory Farms Receive Millions of Tax Dollars to Pollute, Common Dreams Newswire, Sierra Club Press Release, Sept 1999
  10. ↑ Kendall Thu, et. al, "A Control Study of the Physical and Mental Health of Residents Living Near a Large-Scale Swine Operation," Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health, 3(l):13-26 (1997), p. 1-11
  11. ↑ Clean Water: That Stinks, Sierra Club, accessed September 2009
  12. ↑ Report and Online Database Document Animal Cruelty, Pollution Spills, Indiana Sierra, Fall 2002
  13. ↑ John Funk, "Case Western Reserve University steam plant may wait months for decision about permit renewal" Cleveland.com, August 11, 2010.
  14. ↑ "Campuses Beyond Coal" Sierra Club, accessed August 2010.
  15. ↑ Bill Berkowitz "Sierra Club Shenanigans", Alternet, February 2004
  16. ↑ Board of Directors, Sierra Club, accessed September 1, 2007.

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