There is no shortage of worthy targets in the gulf cleanup effort that the Sierra Club could be aiming for right now: the Center for Biological Diversity exposed Ken Salazar for granting new drilling permits after he said there was a moratorium. Food & Water Watch filed suit against Salazar to force the shutdown BP's Atlantis, the second largest deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico, after a former BP employee warned that it was not fit for operation. Even the National Resources Defense Council joined Jerry Nadler and Jim Oberstar to demand OSHA stop acting as a front for BP and require appropriate protective gear for cleanup workers.
So where is the Sierra Club focusing its attention? Last Tuesday, the Obama administration said that they will proceed with offshore drilling after a temporary ban. The Sierra Club issued a press release saying "It's encouraging to see the Obama administration taking steps to improve safety regulations for offshore drilling." On that same day, they took out a full page ad in the Washington Post, thanking Obama for putting a hold on an Alaska drilling project (no press release).
How this furthers the interests of environmentalism I'm not sure, but it sure helps a White House nervous about Obama's poll numbers in the wake of the BP oil crisis.
Sierra Club loyalists were quick to defend the club, saying that the Sierra Club is a "grassroots organization" and that the article "insults those very volunteers and every Sierra Club member who has ever volunteered to help with an environmental cause."
There was absolutely no insult meant towards those that donate their time and money to the Sierra Club's efforts. Quite the opposite. I respect the work that committed grassroots environmentalists do, and believe it's important to ask if there are other organizations out there more deserving of their support. I do not believe that the Sierra Club, which has aligned itself so tightly with political and corporate interests, is providing leadership worthy of those efforts.
The Sierra Club's alliance with elite interests has turned it into the antithesis of a "grassroots" organization.
According to the Associated Press, in 2002 Sierra Club head Carl Pope threatened to dissolve the southern Utah chapter for "speaking out against the Bush administration's push toward war with Iraq." The Sierra Club's Board of Directors had passed a resolution "supporting efforts to strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction" (i.e., supporting the war), and at the same time warned that Sierra Club policy "does not authorize individual members, leaders or club entities to take public positions on military conflicts as they arise."
While I understand the need for the national organization to impose some kind of order on local chapters, it's quite something to demand that 700,000 environmentalists toe the line and support the Iraq war, especially after the Sierra Club board made the unilateral decision to pull down "all television, radio and print ads, shut down phone banks and removed internet material seen as critical of Bush."
In an email, Pope said "I would leave dissolving the group as a means of last resort if acting against individuals who won't adhere to club policy fails to resolve the situation." It was only after the email was published by the LA Times that the Sierra Club changed its position and opposed the war.
Then in 2007, the Sierra Club board took the unusual step of selling the club's brand name to a greenwashing campaign by Clorox:
This is the first time in Sierra Club's 116-year history that it has endorsed a product and even Club executive director Carl Pope, who's been a driving force in the partnership, admitted that the decision by a well-known environmental group to endorse a company known for its bleach, plastics, and chemical products is "controversial."
The Sierra Club Board of Directors overrode the Club's own Corporate Relations Committee to approve the Clorox deal.
Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation, said that the Chemical Industry of California "was using the Sierra Club/Clorox deal to try to deflect attention away from a new report [PDF] showing that the chemical industry sickens and kills thousands of Californians each year, costing the state an estimated $2.6 billion in medical expenses and lost wages."
On March 1 of this year, Clorox proudly announced that they have paid $1.1 million to the Sierra Club to date under the deal.
The Sierra Club should have expected that many of their members would have a problem with a deal to greenwash a company that US PIRG had named "one of America's most chemically dangerous companies" (PDF).
Instead, the Sierra Club Board of Directors voted to suspend the 35,000-member Florida chapter for four years and remove its leadership after they spoke out in opposition to the Clorox deal.
Michael Donnelly has been writing about the problem of the "Democratic/Green revolving door," and how organizations that add their support to corporate-friendly legislation are routinely rewarded with big foundation grants (and will somebody please do an expose of the role foundations play in laundering money to buy progressive validators for corporatist legislation?). It has led to the corruption of progressive groups across the board.
The Sierra Club is now fiercely advocating for the passage of Kerry-Lieberman. But as James Handley says:
In exchange for an energy-giveaway bill masquerading as a climate bill, they're in effect lobbying for dirty energy subsidies and for undercutting much of EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases -- an authority that these same groups once vigorously defended, and which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court.
Until progressive groups successfully address the challenge of funding themselves independent of the elite individuals and institutions that act as enforcers of a corporate agenda, they will not be able to successfully advocate for progressive causes. Any success they might have will mean that their funding dries up, and they will cease to exist.
The Sierra Club is a marquee name that has indeed gone for the green: cash. Environmental activists should carefully examine the way in which the organization is operating, and whether its agenda is worthy of continued support.
Follow Jane Hamsher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/janehamsher
And yes they get some money from corporations. But my thought is so what, if they still continue to do the correct thing why not. Clorox for example got to put the SC label on a product that helped bring the eco friendly cleaners to a local store. Maybe not the greenest but we can say a far greener product then was offered to us before this. But an item most of these people forget to talk about is the club has also fought with Clorox's and has got them to do some better practices. So if they have fought the company that gave them a little money and won if they helped change cleaners to a better product, then what was the problem?
Does it matter who gives you this money? It should not as long as you do the correct thing. So the big question is has this group done the correct things? Did they call Clorox out, did they help change the cleaner market, are they fighting the coal and fossil fuel industry, are they advocating for decentralized wind and solar power? The answer is yes on all the above.
Um, this is FALSE. Please find for me exactly where SC is advocating for the passage of Kerry-Lieberman. They've issued qualified statements supporting progress, but always reference the need to retain EPA authority and often stating the problems with the nuke, oil and coal giveaways.
This is poor work, Jane.
I am a grassroots activist in the Sierra Club and share some of Jane's criticism especially of the Clorox deal. However, I think it would be a huge mistake to leave the Sierra Club over this because I don't think that there are other organizations more deserving of my support. The Sierra Club is the only national environmental organization that I've been associated with that provides a significant role for its membership. Most other organizations only want financial support from their "members" and are not structured so that those "members" have any say in the organization's policies. The Sierra Club is structured as a democratic institution which is a rare and special thing in and of itself. Unfortunately too many people join the organization and fail to take advantage of this. Most are accustomed to supporting organizations which operate according to the prevailing model and remain passive and uninvolved with shaping club policy.
The Sierra Club isn't perfect but neither are the other national environmental organizations, most of which are far more compromised than the Sierra Club which has the potential to mend its ways via democratic grassroots pressure from its own membership. Maybe Jane recognizes this same potential and that's why she singles out the Sierra Club for criticism.
Sierra Club has been willing to push to retain EPA authority, and has at least raised questions about cap/trade/offset as well as the dirty energy subsidies in the K-L bill. They've also been pretty effective at blocking new coal fired power plants. I would say that EDF has gone much further, advocating cap/trade/offset at almost any cost and they're not shy about throwing EPA rules overboard to get their magical caps. EDF leads the charge in the US Climate Action Partnership, which as you note, included BP and lots of other dirty energy companies.
- James Handley
Sierra Club has been willing to push to retain EPA authority, and has at least raised questions about cap/trade/offset as well as the dirty energy subsidies in the K-L bill. They've also been pretty effective at blocking new coal fired power plants. I would say that EDF has gone much further, advocating cap/trade/offset at almost any cost and they're not shy about throwing EPA rules overboard to get their magical caps. EDF leads the charge in the US Climate Action Partnership, which as you note, included BP and lots of other dirty energy companies.
Thanks for responding to critics of your original Sierra Club posting. You set a great example of media accountability.
I read through the entire comment thread referenced here and was dismayed by what I saw. Beyond the petty, silly ad hominem attacks on you, there were numerous Sierra Club members outraged by your post but not, ironically, by the actions of their own national organization.
You clearly struck a nerve, and it's good you responded with further documentation and analysis, both of which are always in ready supply in your writings.
Even though I think the member response was genuine, I found it troubling. Blind support for any person, organization, or ideology is never advisable. Unless we hold our leaders in all venues to high standards, we have no right to expect high-quality outcomes.
Should an ostensibly independent environmental group allow its funding apparatus to be entwined both with politicians and the industry whose actions they often oppose? Absolutely not. Should such relationships give rise to concern among the group's members? Absolutely.
One poster even went so far as to suggest that the Sierra Club should look the other way and take the money. Can it get more pernicious than this?
For me, such rationalizing brings to mind the writings of the 18th century British statesman, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism.
"All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing," he wrote.
Thanks for doing something, Jane.
guess I won't be renewing my membership,
so far, Sea Shepherd hasn't sold out to the Japanese whaling interests,
so I'll send them the Sierra money.
http://philanthropy.com/article/More-Than-4-Million-Donated/65884/
Man, I have been hollering about this for years, so it's great to see it on the other side of the "comment line..."
It's not just Sierra Club, it's Wilderness Society, NRDC, Nature Conservancy and others. Where we are seeing their huge hypocrisy is in their rabid support for massive ecosystem slaughter for Chevron, BP, Shell and Goldman Sachs profits. One greenwash is for Big Solar, which directly competes with local rooftop solar. These sellouts are pushing for millions of acres of permanent wilderness destruction for private monopolization of solar power, when it has been proven over and over that it's cheaper, faster, cleaner and way better for taxpayers, rate-payers, property owners and the environment to site solar within the built environment.
Monies are funneled through organizations like CEERT from Big Energy to Sierra Club and NRDC so they will help "educate the conservation community" about how great it is to permanently destroy the ecosystems they are pledged to save because it will save the planet. Or not. Turns out that the enormous emissions from manufacturing, construction, transmission and operation of these Big Wind and Big Solar plants will almost certainly result in a net INCREASE in GHGs when compared to the same amount of power derived from rooftop solar and natural gas.
It is hugely distressing to those of us REALLY trying to save the planet to be shouted down, shoved aside and blatantly lied to by Big Enviros.