Michael Brune

Very quietly, California utilities are threatening to undermine the dream of widespread clean energy in our state. If this happens, the state will lose jobs, our booming solar industry will suffer a major setback, and our progress at cutting emissions and displacing dirty energy will stop in its tracks.

In San Francisco we celebrated Bike to Work Day last week, but so many people are riding their bikes to work here that every day seems like Bike to Work Day. Bicycle ridership is up by 72 percent in the past six years. This has become a much more bicycle-friendly...

Odds are that you haven't heard of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. And even if you've heard of it, I'm willing to bet you don't know what might be in it. That's because, although this massive new trade agreement could have profound implications for our environment, our health, and the...

Two years ago, an explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform killed 11 workers and marked the beginning of a prolonged environmental disaster now acknowledged as the worst in American history. Before the Macondo well was finally capped, more than two hundred million gallons of crude oil had gushed into...

No one could accuse the most rabidly anti-environmental Congress in history of resting on its laurels. This week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a package of bills that would destroy the fundamental wildlife and public lands protections enacted nearly 50 years ago in the Wilderness Act. Here's how that...

Four years ago, Sierra Club members and people across the country knocked on doors, made phone calls, and talked with our friends and neighbors to help Barack Obama win the presidency. We worked hard because we knew that clean air and water and the health of our families were at...

As Americans, we all want to support the men and women of our military. By choosing to serve, they frequently must face stresses and hardships that most of us will never have to experience. How can we help them cope?

One way we can help is by recognizing that military...

It's not every day that you'll find me agreeing with an executive from BP, but Katrina Landis, the CEO of BP's Alternative Energy division, was exactly right when she said last month that it would be a mistake to allow the federal wind energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) to...

If you could be president of the United States for one day, what would you do? I'd probably want to sneak in some batting practice at Yankee Stadium, quickly, because even for the most powerful person in the world, a single day isn't a lot of time to -- as...

A couple of days ago, I took President Obama to task for relying too much on fossil fuels and his "all of the above" energy strategy. We need stronger leadership from the president on clean energy, and the Sierra Club will continue pushing him to provide it.

Barack Obama paid his first-ever presidential visit to Oklahoma this past week to make a speech announcing that his administration would "fast-track" a TransCanada pipeline from Cushing, OK, to the Gulf Coast. Although he said the purpose was to reduce an oil "glut" in the Midwest, it's no...

Royal Dutch Shell, the fifth-largest company in the world, is suing the Sierra Club along with a dozen other environmental organizations on the off chance that we might attempt to do our job. Shell is taking us to court preemptively because we might have the audacity to say that...

You can't always measure progress just by the numbers. Cutting the toxic mercury in emissions from coal-fired power plants, for instance, means that life expectancy will increase slightly over the next generation. Numerically, it's a modest increase, but it will be shared by millions -- making this mercury cleanup the...

If you spend enough time in the great outdoors, you probably have a deep catalog of tales to tell of amazing trips and close encounters with creatures big and small. Stop by the San Francisco headquarters of the Sierra Club sometime, and I'll tell you about a big bear that...

The United States is still the wealthiest nation in the world -- we're far from broke. What's broken, though, is the way we allocate our considerable national resources. Fixing that would put our economy back on track faster than any "supercommittee" rep could posture and bloviate on Fox News.

Have you ever had to turn away millions of dollars? It sounds crazy, but here's why the Sierra Club chose to do exactly that.

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...

Seven years ago this month, while I was at Rainforest Action Network, we were working with several hundred California residents who were fighting to prevent their electric cars from being seized, crushed, and sold for scrap. These vehicles were fully functioning, economical and, because they were electric, didn't use...

We haven't even made it out of January, but 2012 is already shaping up as a watershed year in the fight to end our addiction to oil.

The big news, of course, was President Obama's decision not to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. It was politically brave...

In November, President Obama listened to the nation's top climate scientist and to bipartisan voices along the route of the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, and declared that the project required further review. After all, the Keystone XL's...

Every great road trip has moments that are... a little less than great. But then something amazing happens.

So it was on a hot day in July 1985. I was stuffed in a small minivan with my two sisters, my brother, and my parents. We had been driving...