The nation’s oldest established environmental group gets upwards of $60 million in annual donations from various interest groups and individuals. But they aren’t on easy street.
On the one hand, the Sierra Club, founded by legendary California naturalist John Muir in 1892, has for years endured the wrath of former supporters and way-left detractors who have pilloried the group for its establishment posturing and for some money it has accepted, which includes donations tied to the fracking industry.
On the other hand are relentless efforts from climate-change hoax proponents to assail the Sierra Club at every turn, who see nothing but self-interest and eco-hypocrisy at play whenever a Sierra Club member boards a jet, in the manner of Al Gore, to go ramble on somewhere about all those polar bears floating around on ice cubes in the distant waters of Antarctica.
You say global warming and the deniers say, “Hey, here’s a snowball from the streets of Washington, D.C.—what are you talking about?” Readers may recall that choice bit of hoax-posturing from Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe in 2015 when he famously threw a snowball in the direction of climate-change sanity. Fast forward to 2017, and the United States Geologic Survey just warned Oklahomans to take a page from California and prepare for even more catastrophic and unusual earthquakes. The quakes have been prompted by an unapologetic embrace of fracking in that state, whose scant pile of electoral votes will likely accrue to climate-denier Donald Trump this November.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama was talking with New York Times reporters two weeks ago and said that when his science guy brings the latest graphs and charts into the Oval Office depicting climate change impacts, it’s downright “terrifying” to behold.
With these dynamics in mind, what can North Bay residents expect from a visit from the Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune, who gives a talk on Friday, Sept. 16, at the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa at 7pm?
Brune says the purpose of his visit is to highlight the organization’s efforts to beat back climate-change effects with the acknowledgement that it’s getting kind of hot out there, even if it’s kind of cool in Santa Rosa this week.
Sonoma County is a national leader in an emergent shift toward renewable power sources being funneled into the grid, via its community choice effort that saw the rise of the local utility Sonoma Clean Power. Brune says that “while we are making great strides in transferring to clean power here and around the country, the pace of climate change is also accelerating. It’s worse than we thought, and it’s happening more quickly than we thought. Everything is falling apart even as it is coming together.”
Well, that’s exactly the rub of the matter, says Ann Hancock, director of the Santa Rosa–based Center for Climate Protection. “Are we doomed already? That’s the question. Is there reason for hope, scientifically? Scientists say there is, and we affirm that. Solutions do exist,” she says, “and the science is terrifying.”
Brune took over as executive director of the Sierra Club in 2010, in the aftermath of a rolling scandal at the organization centered on the fact that Sierra Club had accepted donations totalling more than $26 million from the gas-and-oil industry. The organization had by then also been in a green-washing deal with Clorox for several years, which got the Sierra Club seal of approval for its emergent eco-friendly product line in exchange for $1.3 million.
Brune came aboard and did not renew the Clorox contract, and the Sierra Club later declined
$30 million in pledged donations from the oil-and-gas industry.
Woody Hastings is also with the Center for Climate Protection and specializes in “community choice aggregates,” local power companies that have sprung up all over the nation in recent years. Like Hancock, he is a longtime member of the Sierra Club, and proudly so, and says its dalliance with fracking money “is old news and that is really a former and long gone set of policy priorities” at the organization. He’s been a member since the 1980s and says that of course he doesn’t agree with everything the organization has done over that time, but it has been critical and pivotal to statewide efforts to enact community choice aggregates.
Hastings’ colleague Geoffrey Smith chimes in that the Sierra Club has a membership base of around 1 million, and that “for better or for worse” it’s a democratically run organization. He describes it as an organization that is “constantly in transition but with a solid foundation at the grassroots level.”
Six years after Brune took over the Sierra Club, he now says the organization is far more likely to join forces with Silicon Valley tech giants in the fight against climate change than with the oil-and-gas industry that was at the gate under his predecessor, Carl Pope.
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It’s ironic that the Sierra Club has worked with the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook given that the Sierra Club was driven out of its longstanding San Francisco headquarters precisely because of the tech-driven acceleration of rents in that town. “After 124 years, we moved to Oakland,” Brune says, after the organization saw its rent jacked by $1.5 million earlier this year.
A lot has changed in the renewables industry since Brune came aboard, and he highlights that solar and wind power have become more feasible alternatives from a cost perspective.
“We’re seeing solar and wind becoming cheaper than nuclear, oil, gas, and there are more available jobs, and that all gives regulators more authority to quicken the pace of change,” he says.
But the switch to renewables is also highly disruptive on public utilities and their shareholders, “so you see many utilities that are fighting further deployment of solar or are looking to slow it down or to burden taxpayers with fees and interconnection charges,” Brune says.
Another big change since 2010: a concerted effort by the Sierra Club and the Obama administration to shut down heavy-polluting coal plants; Brune says 240 have been taken offline or been scheduled for closure over that time. He says this as he notes that there are lots of jobs out there in the renewable-energy market, a refrain that has lately been taken up by Hillary Clinton. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the No. 1 job in demand in the first quarter of 2016 was for wind-power service technicians. Solar panel installers were also in the top 10, Brune notes.
Renewables have become more economically viable in short order, and the Sierra Club has abandoned its previous embrace of the American natural-gas industry as a “bridge energy” toward an all-renewables future. This has been the operating modality under Obama, who embraced an “all-of-the-above” strategy toward energy independence as a candidate and through his first term.
The Sierra Club was along for that ride before 2010, but under Brune, the organization has shifted to a leap-frog position when it comes to the confounded natural gas bridge. Given the terrifying contours of the global-warming moment, that can’t happen soon enough for the organization, or the planet.
“Coal and nuclear are dying out under the weight of their own failings,” Hastings says. “That’s all going away, anyway, and there has been double-digit growth in renewables, in wind and solar.” Hastings credits the community-choice movement for pushing utilities away from tried-and-true energy sources and for “putting pressure on the market to get the cleaner sources,” which also include hydropower and, especially in these parts, geothermal energy.
But still there are jobs and the economy to consider, and Obama is not the first Democratic president to encourage or otherwise unencumber an industry experiencing economic growth despite its cost to the environment or negative impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Obama launched his presidency with a commitment to all forms of energy that is mirrored in Gov. Jerry Brown’s embrace of fracking. Before Obama, dial back to the era of the first Clinton who stood by the side of the road during his presidency and watched the SUV-ization of American highways at the urging and insistence of an auto industry that saw big growth potential—if only domestic consumers could access those gas-guzzling, high-emissions vehicles.
For his part, Brown has pushed the state forward with nation-leading carbon-emissions standards, even as he has accepted millions in donations from the gas-and-oil industry and vigorously resisted calls and legislative efforts to ban fracking in California outright.
Brune says that the Sierra Club engages these high-tone political dynamics in distinct ways. When politicians refrain from getting in the way of a recovering economy despite the environmental consequences, the organization “will point out the risks of all-of-the-above or with a reliance on SUVs,” he says.
They’ve worked with the hand dealt by lawmakers, and when it came to the Obama all-of-the-above strategy, the Sierra Club put an emphasis on making sure that all-of-the-above meant that all energy producers were operating on a level playing field “where they would have to account for their pollution,” Brune says.
The relentless, and some would say ruthless, anti-coal posture, in tandem with new environmental standards from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, has made it virtually impossible for the coal industry to compete in the new energy economy, much to the chagrin of climate change deniers and defenders of the coal-blackened white workers of Virginia and elsewhere.
At the same time the Sierra Club engaged and enraged the polluters, it was also “pushing as hard as we possibly can to advance clean energy,” Brune says, which took all sorts of forms including direct negotiations with utilities and corporate polluters. “We want to help any company large or small become more environmentally responsible and move to 100 percent clean energy,” Brune says.
Depending on the company, the Sierra Club will either take a very confrontational approach (i.e., the coal industry) or will work in a more collaborative manner “to help those companies change their energy strategies.”
Despite the terrifying state of global-warming affairs described by Obama, Brune says not to expect any future president, or Gov. Brown, to back away from fracking or other job-creating enterprises of questionable environmental wisdom.
“It’s the same thing with Brown or with Clinton, should she become president,” he says. “Both will point to the jobs associated with fracking, and we will point to the environmental risks associated with fracking.”
