Lynne Plambeck Will Receive National Sierra Club Award
Lynne Plambeck is 2007 recipient of Special Service Award from National Sierra Club

This award honors individuals, committees, or groups for strong and consistent commitment to conservation or the Club over an extended period of time. Lynne was awarded this honor for her many years of work to preserve the Santa Clara River.

Governor Schwarzenegger Appoints Mary Nichols Chair of California Air Resources Board
Statement of Bill Magavern, Sierra Club California Senior Representative

By quickly appointing a new chair with the stature and experience of Mary Nichols, Governor Schwarzenegger has taken a strong first step toward rebuilding confidence in his administration's global warming and air quality efforts. Now he and his staff need to give the Air Board members the support they need to protect public health and the environment. Interference from the governor's staff, often working too closely with industry lobbyists, has threatened CARB's ability to fulfill its mission and to carry out the governor's own ambitious agenda.

Law and Order on Public Lands
July 2, 2007

Off-road vehicle enthusiasts pressing for more and deeper access to public lands often couch their cause in the language of freedom.

Barry Goldwater, an Air Force reserve general who knew a thing or two about defending freedom, once wrote favorably about throwing all ORVs off public lands.

The machines are “doing more damage to our forests and deserts than anything man has ever created,” Goldwater wrote in a letter to the Forest Service. Just to make sure his point was clear—never a problem for the plainspoken Arizonan—he called ORVs Japan’s way of getting even for World War II.

Strong language. But the grand old man of the modern conservative movement had it basically right. Unfortunately, the ORV problems that Goldwater spotlighted three decades ago have worsened. Since then, the machines have become more popular and powerful.

Former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth called unmanaged recreation one of the four leading threats to national forests. Bosworth largely was talking about motorized recreation. Since 1972, the same year that President Richard Nixon signed an executive order to minimize the impacts of ORV use on public lands, ORV users have grown by a factor of 10. Law enforcement rangers are spread too thin and have too few resources to police off-roading adequately.

Along with heavy use has come erosion, air and water pollution, damage to wildlife habitat, invasive weeds, and noise. Adjacent private property owners have seen fences, fields, and watercourses damaged by motorized trespassers. In places, rowdy off-roaders have created an unwholesome atmosphere for families seeking a peaceful venue for togetherness.

The ORV lobby likes to say that the problems are caused by a few bad apples. Maybe. But if they’re few in number, those bad apples create quite a stench.

Now, a group of retired forest, park, wildlife refuge, and BLM rangers has said enough’s enough. They held a press conference a few days ago calling for stronger enforcement and tougher penalties, including confiscation of ORVs if necessary. Retired Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish said that visitors to public lands expect rigorous enforcement that “protects natural resources, ensures visitor safety, and reclaims a family-friendly atmosphere.”

As the conservative Goldwater understood, when irresponsible individuals cause harm, the law must hold them accountable. Freedom and responsibility are inseparably coupled.

The New Economy of the West: A New Sierra Club Report::
by Vicky Hoover
August 1, 2007

A new report released by the Sierra Club today shows that the economics of the West have shifted dramatically over the past few decades. Mining, timber, and oil—the industries that shaped the old West—no longer drive the region’s economy. Today, the report finds, recreational activities like camping, fishing, hunting, skiing, climbing, and boating support more sustainable jobs and economic growth than extractive industries.

The report, The New Economy of the West: From Clearcutting to Camping, shows that increasingly, western communities depend on public lands for jobs, economic growth, and vitality.

Some key findings in the report:

1. One in twenty Americans rely in some manner on outdoor recreation to make a living
2. In 2006, outdoor recreation in the West generated $61 billion and 617,186 new jobs
3. Communities that are closest to federally-protected public lands show the strongest economic growth

Despite their importance to the regional and national economy, today, western public lands face threats from many fronts. Oil and gas drilling, runaway logging, and global warming all jeopardize the future of recreation in the West, and the long-term economic benefits that accompany it.

Oil drilling, for example, fragments wildlife habitat and destroys hunting opportunities. By and large, the report shows, the oil industry imports highly-skilled workers from other parts of the country, employing few local workers. Oil companies also turn to counties to fund services like road repairs and waste disposal, while doing little to boost jobs and income locally. Meanwhile, recreation and tourism provide a long-term, locally-based source of jobs and income. In Colorado’s Roan Plateau, hunting alone generates nearly $4 million a year.

"Our public lands are one of our nation’s most valuable economic assets," said Sierra Club Conservation Organizer Keren Murphy, who authored the report. "The economy of the West has changed, and so should the way we manage it."

"Public lands drive the tourist-based economies in our western states. If we protect special places like Colorado’s Roan Plateau and New Mexico’s Valle Vidal, they’ll provide a source of income and enjoyment for generations to come," Murphy said.

"The heart of America’s wild legacy lies in the forests, mountains and deserts of the West. Unchecked logging, oil drilling and mining no longer have a place on our last remaining wild lands. We have a choice to make, between treating our public lands as a giveaway to special interests, or as a gift to our children and grandchildren."

The Return of the Red Queen
by Carl Pope
June 27, 2007

New York NY—Former EPA Administrator Christy Todd Whitman returned to the crime scene of 9-11 at a Congressional hearing Monday. Once again, Whitman insisted that EPA had done the right thing by telling the public that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe even when the agency's own scientists believed that it was not. Congressman Jerry Nadler showed clips of Whitman saying, "Well, if there's any good news out of all this, it's that everything we've tested for, which includes asbestos, lead and VOCs [volatile organic chemicals], have been below any level of concern for the general public health." To boos and hisses, Whitman responded: "I am disappointed by the misinformation, innuendo and outright falsehoods that have characterized the public discussion about EPA in the aftermath of the terrorists' attacks." Whitman argued that the agency's statements were accurate because it was only referring to air samples it had taken outside the area where it was dangerous. "Dust and air are two different things," Whitman said. "On the pile [of debris], it is different." So the air was safe to breathe—but the dust in the air was not? Alice's Red Queen would have been proud. Think of the Bush administration as Matrix III, screenplay by Lewis Carroll.

Judging from her performance, Whitman was unfazed by a recent federal court ruling in which Judge Deborah Batts of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York called her assurances of safety "conscience shocking," given that an estimated one million tons of asbestos, lead, concrete and dust were released into lower Manhattan. Nor did she seem concerned that her own agency's inspector general had ruled that the agency issued misleading press releases about the risks, and subsequently failed to properly test and clean indoor areas contaminated by World Trade Center toxins.

Also at Congressman Nadler's hearing, Occupational Health and Safety Administrator John Henshaw hid behind technicalities. He pointed out that the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970 does not cover public employees, so he was not responsible for the safety of firefighters and other first responders on September 11. Shockingly, he admitted that cleanup standards at the Pentagon were more stringently enforced than at Ground Zero, but stubbornly insisted that, "I am not aware of any [people not wearing respirators] that we did not take immediate action to correct," a statement stunningly at odds with the record. In fact, Whitman earlier blamed the workers for refusing to wear the respirators that Henshaw insisted he made sure they wore!

Suzanne Mattei, the former Sierra Club New York Executive who researched 9-11 for the Club, testified that "the concern is not just that EPA lacked the test results to justify its early assurances of safety. It is worse than that. Our government issued those safety assurances even though EPA’s own vast body of knowledge, built up over three decades of research, indicated that the pollution would be harmful. Our federal government’s stonewalling continued as study after study documented health impacts not only among workers from the pile but also area clean-up workers and residents. Today, almost six years later, denial is still the order of the day."

Mattei also pointed out that the mishandling of 9-11, far from being a one-time lapse, however unforgivable, has now been elevated to national policy. The sloppiness that characterized the handling of Ground Zero, as opposed to the more cautious approach taken at the Pentagon, is now government doctrine. "Unfortunately, our federal government has not learned from its Ground Zero debacle. Under its National Response Plan, OSHA will not enforce worker health and safety standards in national disasters. Also, the Plan centralizes press statements, which makes it easier to politicize health warnings, as occurred after 9/11, without a strong precautionary policy to err on the side of protecting human health when full information is missing. Finally, the Department of Homeland Security’s new guidance document on cleanup after a dirty bomb or other terrorist nuclear attack encourages consideration of economic factors, even impacts on tourism, in managing the public health risks."

The Ministry of Truth Strikes Again and Again
by Carl Pope
June 29, 2007

Lake Tahoe CA—After Hurricane Andrew swept through Florida in 1992, the UN placed the Everglades on its list of World Heritage Sites in danger. The UN also cited the threat of urban development to the famed 'River of Grass.' But apparently Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne knows something about both hurricanes and sprawl, as well as global warming and water supply, that the rest of us have missed. Kempthorne has successfully lobbied the UN to remove the Everglades from the "sites in danger" list. In its announcement, UNESCO said the park, "had been threatened by urban growth and pollution, as well as by the damage caused to Florida Bay in 1992 by Hurricane Andrew."

Floridians were aghast. "It had been?" asked Jonathan Ullman, Everglades field representative for the Sierra Club. "Urban growth and pollution went away? I didn't get the news flash. The Everglades is more threatened than ever. I'd like to take the UN on a tour of the Everglades."

Since the 1992 designation, of course, most of us have learned that with global warming and related sea level rise, places like the Everglades—elevation three feet or less—are now in critical danger. Not to worry. Kempthorne's spokesperson told the media that, "We believe it was in recognition of the progress that has been made in addressing key issues that led to the listing of the park." No one in Florida, it appears, was even consulted before the de-listing occurred, during a UNESCO meeting in Australia.

Meanwhile, back at home, communities at South Lake Tahoe have been devastated by the Angora Wildland Fire which has scorched 2,500 acres and destroyed more than 200 buildings. The Tahoe basin's forests, overgrown from decades of well-intentioned fire suppression, need to be thinned of small trees and brush, particularly in the vicinity of homes in the urban-wildland interface. Climate change and beetle infestations have exacerbated the problem. While many good projects have gone forward, the problem is huge and much work remains to be done.

So, what has been the response of the timber industry's allies in Congress and in the media? Blame environmentalists. Senator Larry Craig announced that the problem was resistance in local communities to clearing out this brush. "We tried and weren't allowed to, and they lost their homes," Craig said. "I don't know if I want to smile, or I want to cry." The Lahontan Valley News claimed that the problem was the Sierra Club's opposition to logging on the national forests—as if we had blocked timber sales in the back yards of Tahoe homeowners. Homeowners in one Tahoe subdivision claimed the problem was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

The reality is simple—and tragic. It costs money to clean brush, thin understory, remove downed wood and eliminate fire dangers around homes. Senator Craig has repeatedly rejected appeals by the Sierra Club to make such community protection zones the first priority for the Forest Service budget—and the overwhelming bulk of the Forest Service funding still goes to subsidizing timber activities in the back country, far from homes, or fighting fires when it is too late. Very little goes to community protection, and the Forest Services continues to battle to cut down the remaining, fire-resistant, old-growth forests. As long as that continues to be true, there will be a fire next time. If we want to end these tragedies, we need to invest more in stopping them than we do in encouraging them. It's that simple, but the Ministry of Truth would like to tell us that spending our money miles from communities is the way to protect them.

Getting Trade Right
by Carl Pope
July 2, 2007

Washington DC—There are few issues on which mainstream US media coverage is less adequate than trade. The standard framing for reporting on trade is that US environmental and labor organizations are trying to impose US standards on third-world countries (which don't feel they can afford them), and that the US public faces a hard choice—retreat into protectionism, which denies these countries a chance to develop, or lower our own standards.

Occasionally, however, a different underlying dynamic pops through the surface as it did this week. China announced a major revision of its labor laws, a change that, if enforced, would eliminate many of the worst workplace abuses in the Chinese system. Among other changes, it would require employers to provide written contracts for their workers, restrict the use of temporary laborers, and make it harder to lay off employees.

There are some serious questions about enforcement here—but passage of this law leaves no doubt that the government of China favors better conditions and wages for its workers. And one would think this would be a cause for common celebration, especially among those who have sadly told us that we simply cannot impose our standards on the world, and that if we want to compete with China, we will need to lower our expectations.

But what is surprising is that the advocates of free trade, far from welcoming this Chinese effort to "harmonize" American and Chinese standards, have been viciously lobbying China not to enact these laws and saying that, if China raises its standards, they will move their factories elsewhere. Companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and AT&T, acting through the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the US-China Business Council, have been working for months to block this new law.

So the very voices that in the US say, "we can't have high labor and environmental standards because we must compete with China's lower rules" are also working to prevent the Chinese from raising their own standards. If there is any doubt that the real story is that these companies want to use trade as tool to lower environmental standards and worker protections, this incident should put that doubt to rest. It is not the reality of globalization that is forcing environmental and labor standards down—globalization is simply the pretext for the race to the bottom.

And that dynamic, in turn, explains why the Democrats in Congress announced this week that they would oppose pending trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea,and delay votes on parallel agreements with Peru and Panama, in spite of having extracted substantial concessions on labor and the environment from the US Trade Representative with regard to the latter deals.

The reality is that neither the major multinational corporations involved in trade nor the US Trade Representative has accepted that if we are to move forward into a stable era of expanded trade and growth, we must do so on the basis of ground rules designed to raise all boats, not framed as a race to the bottom. The European Union has demonstrated that trade agreements can reduce disparities of income and raise the standards of the poor. That neither NAFTA nor the World Trade Organization can point to similar successes is not an accident, nor is it the result of bad luck. NAFTA and the WTO were designed to benefit the fortunate and to afflict the desperate—and that is still the course that U.S. trade policy is following. The issue is not trade (free or fair) or no trade—it is what kind of world we are trying to build. And when the Chinese decide it is time to provide their workers with more rights, and affluent American companies oppose this tiny step forward, we should all recognize that what we are seeing is nothing more or less than a desperate effort to keep trade from benefiting either the poor or the environment.

Great News! Court Dismisses RS 2477 Suit
Federal Ruling Reaffirms Protection for Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument
July 5, 2007

On June 29, in a ruling with broad implications for federal public lands, US District Court Judge Bruce Jenkins threw out a lawsuit by two southern Utah counties claiming managers of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument disregarded so-called RS 2477 highway rights-of-way. Southern Utah Wilderness Association (SUWA) and The Wilderness Society intervened in the case, and joined federal attorneys in asking the court to dismiss the suit.

The suit sought to stop implementation of the Monument’s 1999 management plan, which protects the fragile natural resources of the area by carefully limiting travel to a 1,000 mile network of roads. ORV use on these routes was banned. The plaintiffs, Kane and Garfield Counties, say right-of-way claims under a now-repealed statute known as RS 2477 defines dirt trails, dry stream beds and faint tracks as highways .

Judge Jenkins ruled that the counties could not require the BLM to base its management plan on RS 2477 claims until the counties establish the validity of those claims in federal court. Because the counties have failed so far to do so, the judge reasoned that the suit was premature. Judge Jenkins also ruled that the counties could not require the BLM to decide whether their RS 2477 claims were valid before the BLM completes its management plans.

SUWA's Heidi McIntosh summarizes it this way: “The court’s ruling reaffirms that counties may not undermine the protection of unique and scenic public lands like national monuments by simply uttering the magical phrase ‘RS 2477.’ And it should put some steel in the spine of the BLM, which has too often allowed the counties who do so to get away with it.”

This ruling also has promising implications for other landscapes worthy of protection. The court’s ruling should apply to lands managed by the BLM across the west, and affirms that counties have to prove valid rights-of-way first, before bulldozing or staking road signs. This will bolster efforts to protect areas proposed for wilderness designation, as well as National Parks and Wildlife Refuges from trumped-up RS 2477 road claims.

The Nuclear Chimera
by Carl Pope
July 6, 2007

San Francisco—The idea that nuclear energy is going to be a big part of the solution to global warming is getting less and less plausible. First there's the obstacle of the remaining safety, waste storage, and proliferation problems to somehow be solved. And the core fact that the whole idea flies in the face of common sense: Nuclear power, as Amory Lovins famously said years ago, takes some of the world's most dangerous and toxic elements, combines them in a highly unstable working system, and uses them to boil water, something that can be done by a child with a magnifying glass on a hot day. The whole idea just flies in the face of common sense.

Recent supporting evidence abounds. For example, Europe is often cited as a place which shows that nuclear energy makes economic sense and is reliable, because the French generate so much power from it. Of course, the electricity sector in France is highly state controlled and subsidized, so the French experience says nothing about market economics—but this summer we discovered that it's not reliable, either.

Now it turns out that two thirds of Europe's nuclear plants can't function during hot spells, because the cooling water they need is either in short supply or too hot. As Europe faces the threat of the hottest summer ever, the French are worrying that what happened during a 2003 heat wav—in which 17 of France's 58 reactors had to shut down -- could be multiplied. Since water shortages are widely predicted to be one of the most common problems associated with an unstable, warming climate, this is not a good sign for nuclear reliability.

One of the major problems with nuclear power has always been the nuclear industry. Again, in spite of promise after promise to reform and to put safety first, the industry just can't get it right. The New York Times just revealed that the industry and government kept entirely secret a nuclear accident in Erwin, Tennessee, that was so severe that the plant was closed for seven months. After the cleanup, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed improvements in safety procedures and, as required by law, gave the public 20 days to request a hearing. But no one made the request—because the Commission stamped the entire incident "Secret" so no one in Erwin knew about the on-going threat to them or about the changes in safety procedures proposed by the Commission.

Another issue is the industry's addiction to subsidies. The latest word from Wall Street is that the future of the industry is entirely dependent on how the Department of Energy handles the loan guarantees provided by Congress in 2005. In comments to the Department of Energy (DOE), the banks complained that DOE—by limiting the loan guarantees to any given project and by requiring that the taxpayers get paid back from any revenues—may have made the program financially "unworkable."

"We believe many new nuclear construction projects will have difficulty accessing the capital markets during construction and initial operation without the support of a federal government loan guarantee," said Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley.

So apparently even 80 percent loan guarantees (plus $200 million in up-front cash per plant from the taxpayers) are not enough to compensate for the underlying economics of nuclear power—which evidently stinks even more than I had suspected.

Confirmation of the illusory and dangerous quality of the "nuclear solution" comes from a report by the Oxford Research Group, which just published a report called "Too Hot to Handle." "A world-wide renaissance is beyond the capacity of the nuclear industry to deliver and would stretch to breaking point the capacity of the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor and safeguard civil nuclear energy." The Oxford Group said that to make a meaningful contribution, the world would need to build four nuclear plants a month, every month, for the next 70 years. Under this scenario, by 2075, 4,000 tons of plutonium, which is twenty times the world's entire military stockpile today, would need to be reprocessed into reactor fuel each year.

As a comparison, even President Bush in his most bullish nuclear moment foresees only three new plants a year in the US—so it's clear that nuclear is meaningless as a solution to the global warming problem, especially if it can be safely deployed only in the US, Europe, and Japan. Just how many nuclear reactors do we want to build in Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan?

Live Earth's Critics
by Carl Pope
July 9, 2007

Cleveland—The big criticism of Saturday's incredible series of concerts to stop global warming, Live Earth, was that, well, they were concerts. The idea was to listen to music and have a good time. And people burn fossil fuels getting to concerts, and performers sometimes travel very long distances to get there. But I'm pretty sure that the billions who watched from home would probably have burned more fossil fuel on shopping trips they didn't take Saturday than all the performers put together used getting to their venues.

As the Boston Globe said, to complain about the performers' shortcomings as environmentalists was to miss the point. The performers weren't enlisted as role models. They were there to deliver an audience—two billion strong if estimates are accurate, via television, satellite radio, and the Internet. And odds are good that most of them were roughly as eco-enlightened as NBC news anchor Ann Curry, who confessed to a small group of reporters that she had bought her first compact fluorescent light bulb earlier that day.

But Live Earth was a concert, and its function was to create public energy to support solutions to restore the climate—by itself it's not a solution. So it's exciting that in Cleveland this morning thousands of solar energy advocates have gathered for SOLAR 2007. The conference is a very important one. A year ago, at SOLAR 2006, the American Solar Energy Society, which sponsors the conference, hosted a series of nine panels by prominent government scientists working in the renewable and efficiency field. From those panels, ASES and the Sierra Club released a road map we call "America Leads," a scenario that demonstrated how using renewable and efficiency alone we could reduce our emissions of greenhouse gasses by 80 percent by 2050—two percent a year, year after year.

Having laid out the road map last year, ASES this year is focusing on economic opportunities and barriers. Sharing my panel this morning are leaders from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) in Los Angeles, who are working to make sure that, as solar technology develops, America has enough trained solar installers. The data they share is exciting. Right now California is on track to meet its ten year goal—3,000 megawatts of photovoltaic— in eight or maybe fewer years. And later this week, ASES will release a report documenting the full potential jobs impact of the energy innovation revolution that's beginning to sweep America.

Bottom line: We need both concerts and training programs for solar installers—a new energy economy is going to need both glitz and grit. And both are being put in place. Because, after all, if IBEW trains tens of thousands of installers, and the next generation of young people couldn't care less about global warming—we'll just have a bunch of unemployed solar installers, and we'll keep frying the climate.

Letter to Legislators from Carl Zichella
July 16, 2007

Dear Representative,

We urge you to support comprehensive federal legislation to help America’s fish and wildlife, public lands, and oceans adapt to and survive global warming. For this reason we strongly support the Energy Independence Initiative, multi-committee legislation expected to be considered shortly by the full House. The Natural Resources Committee title of the Initiative, formerly HR 2337, includes the Global Wildlife Survival Act and related provisions that collectively represent a critical first measure to mitigate global warming’s impacts on fish and wildlife. We also appreciate that the Initiative takes important steps toward restoring sound stewardship to the management of our public lands, ensuring responsible and accountable energy development, development of alternative energy sources, and planning and action to address climate change and acidification impacts on our oceans and coasts.

Wildlife is a fundamental part of America’s landscape, and wildlife conservation is a core value shared by all Americans. Unfortunately, global warming poses the single greatest threat wildlife faces. To address the root cause of global warming, we must adopt significant reductions in greenhouse gases. We must also act to increase wildlife’s resiliency in the face of the complex threats global warming poses, so wildlife will survive until the benefits of reductions in emissions take effect.

The Global Warming Wildlife Survival Act and other provisions in the Natural Resource Committee’s title of the Initiative create a comprehensive, national framework to help address the threats global warming poses for fish and wildlife and their habitat on federal, state, tribal and private lands. The Act directs the Interior Secretary, in consultation with other federal agencies, states, and the public, to establish a national strategy for assisting wildlife populations impacted by global warming, including consideration and integration of adaptation strategies in the planning and management of federal lands. Land management agencies receive the coordinated, federal scientific and management support they need to carry out their responsibilities for the nation’s wildlife populations.

Federal public lands are critical to the future of wildlife in America. The federal land management agencies are together responsible for the stewardship of more than 600 million acres, more than 25% of the landmass of the United States. Federal lands contain significant areas of high-value, contiguous wildlife habitat, help protect endangered and threatened species, help prevent species from declining to the point where Endangered Species Act listings are necessary, and help keep common species common, including species valued for hunting, fishing, and other recreational activities. These lands provide refuges for species impacted by the effects of global climate change and will play an important role in wildlife’s ability to adapt to those impacts. But the federal land systems and the federal agencies that manage them are in fiscal crisis. These agencies currently do not have the capacity or resources to address the complex impacts of global warming on the critically-important wildlife and land resources they are charged with protecting. The Natural Resources Committee title creates an Interagency Council on Climate Change, with important responsibilities to ensure that all federal land management agencies act expeditiously to address these issues.

Federally sponsored wildlife partnership programs provide significant federal resources for conservation activities of state, tribal, and private partners. They also serve as leverage to encourage funding for wildlife conservation at every level of the national landscape. Demands for these essential partnership programs far outstrip current funding and these programs, already extremely important, will become increasingly more so as global warming accelerates threats to wildlife and habitat. These include the endangered species program and federal migratory bird programs as well as many state-federal partnership programs, such as the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and the National Fish Habitat Action Plan, that benefit wildlife throughout the nation.

The states also play an essential role in the national effort to protect wildlife from global warming’s impacts. Though the state fish and wildlife agencies only actively manage habitat on a relatively small percentage of the national landscape, their traditional leadership role managing wildlife resources takes on even greater importance with the recent completion of state comprehensive wildlife conservation plans. These plans address wildlife populations at greatest need of conservation and provide a natural and accountable framework for coordinating conservation to protect wildlife, both game and non-game species, affected by global warming. The states currently receive federal funding to develop and implement these plans through the established State and Tribal Wildlife Grant program, which has a proven track record and provides a clear funding mechanism for tribal programs.

Under this legislation, federal funds are allocated in a balanced and equitable manner to wildlife conservation programs, at both the state and federal level, to support adaptation actions that will best increase the resiliency of fish and wildlife impacted by global warming. The US Fish and Wildlife Service receives the resources necessary to implement federal wildlife laws and programs as well as various federal-state cost-share programs that benefit wildlife throughout the nation. Significant funding is authorized directly for states to ensure that they can play an effective role in helping wildlife adapt to global warming using their comprehensive wildlife conservation plans. Also, the State and Tribal Wildlife Grants program that created those plans is permanently authorized.

The oceans and coasts are expected to be especially heavily impacted by climate change and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Increased ocean acidity, rising sea levels, and detrimental changes to the distribution and abundance of fish, wildlife, and habitats are among some of the expected effects. Provisions in this section of the Initiative recognize the importance of the oceans in climate change and promote increased research and multi-jurisdictional planning to avoid and mitigate impacts. These provisions call on the Secretary of Commerce to draft a national strategy to address global warming’s impacts on ocean and coastal ecosystems, and authorizes him to provide financial and technical assistance and training to coastal states so that they can implement plans to reduce such impacts. It also establishes a National Integrated Coastal Ocean Observation System to improve the ability to document and predict climate change’s effects on oceans.

We strongly support these provisions of the Initiative because they provide the support and framework necessary to sustain wildlife against the effects of global warming, helps set America on the path toward energy independence, increases accountability in the management of federal energy resources, and spurs alternative energy development. We urge you to support these provisions and to pass the Energy Independence Initiative when it comes before the full House.

Thank you for your consideration.

The Capital of Trivial Pursuits
by Carl Pope
July 19, 2007

Washington DC—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expects to bring her energy independence bill to the House floor next week. But it is still far from certain that a majority of the House will commit themselves to any meaningful action on global warming or a new energy future. The two biggest steps the House could make—improving vehicle efficiency (CAFE) standards,—and establishing a national market in every state for renewable electricity (RPS, or Renewable Portfolio Standards) are still being fiercely resisted by a reactionary coalition of American auto manufacturers, southeastern public utilities, and the coal industry.

It's going to come down to whether the American people—who overwhelmingly support these two steps—speak out loudly enough to drown out K Street in the next week.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the folly of continuing our present energy course just gets plainer and plainer. A new report, prepared for the Administration by a team headed by former Exxon-Mobil President Lee Raymond, says it will be very difficult to meet projected growth in energy demand, that we face "accumulating risks" if we don't act, and that there "is no quick fix." The report's FIRST recommendation: Improve fuel efficiency standards, and make our homes and buildings more energy efficient. The report also endorses an increasing emphasis on renewable energy—exactly the steps that Pelosi is struggling to find enough votes to pass through the House. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, accepting the report, said simply, "These are hard facts and hard facts require us to plan for hard choices, now and in the future." But Clay Sells, Bodman's Undersecretary, refused to commit the Administration to take any of the suggested measures.

Kansas City Power and Light, the heartland utility that broke ranks to enter into a pioneering legal settlement with the Sierra Club to shift its future load growth exclusively to efficiency and renewables, is getting rave reviews from stock analysts for "its openness to green technology."

Meanwhile, the American auto industry continues to head for the bankruptcy cliff, threatening to take the health care of retired auto workers with it. Faced with this reality, what does the Wall Street Journal say? It urges on the ostriches in Washington: "Detroit has made its share of mistakes, but refusing to compete with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars isn't one of them. GM tried and failed with its Saturn project. And one reason for that failure is that the main competitive reality facing Detroit for a generation has been the burden of its worker pension and health care costs."

The Journal has a point, but the solution to this problem would be for the US to join every other industrial nation and take health care and pension costs off the backs of employers. That way all workers enjoy the same basic benefits, regardless of whether their company is in a growing or shrinking sector of the economy. And those who earned a pension couldn't lose it— workers in no other industrial nation face that risk. But where was the Journal when proposals to provide single-payer national health care were being debated? I doubt I need to remind folks that the Journal led the charge to sink these proposals.

The hypocrisy is also stunning. Eighteen months ago, on the Journal's own editorial pages, John Schnapp, citing what he called GM's "technological followership", pointed out that, "The internal culture at GM has reached a dead end. This vast company, once cited by Peter Drucker as the best-managed entity on the planet after the Roman Catholic Church, will not reverse course." Schnapp was right, then and now. But the Journal ran his piece at a time when Congress was in no danger of acting on his insight. Now that there is serious debate about stopping Detroit's murder-suicide pact with American vehicle manufacturing, the Journal conveniently forgets, finding instead that Detroit's past failures are proof of its sound strategy and the need for it to stay the course.

Would a Rupert Murdoch take-over here really be so bad—maybe the News Corporation could just buy the editorial page?

Is There Something in the Water of Puget Sound?
by Carl Pope
July 20, 2007

Seattle WA—For the past two years, the big change on global warming has been the speed with which cities, and more recently states, have taken leadership roles in committing themselves to deal with global warming by forging a new energy future. Now the counties are stepping up to the plate. In partnership with the Sierra Club, many major counties across the country announced the creation of the Cool Counties Climate Stabilization Declaration. As the Washington Post reported, "Participating counties pledge to reduce emissions in their areas by 80 percent by 2050. [The declaration], announced at the National Association of Counties convention in Richmond, also urges the federal government to adopt legislation requiring an 80 percent emissions reduction by 2050 and calls for fuel economy standards to be raised to 35 mpg within a decade."

Once again, leadership has come from the Puget Sound area; just as Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels two years ago launched the Mayor's Climate Declaration, (Cool Cities), it was King County Executive Rod Sims who led the way with Cool Counties, by signing up not only his own county, but also 12 other heavily populated counties across the country. In addition to King, the founding counties are Alameda (CA), Arlington (VA), Cook (IL), Dane (WI), Fairfax (VA), Hennepin (MN), Miami-Dade (FL), Montgomery (MD), Nassau (NY), Queen Anne's (MD), and Shelby (TN). Together these counties represent over 17 million citizens.

The American public is clamoring for action to tackle global warming and fix our badly broken energy policy. It’s encouraging that county leaders understand the seriousness of the problems we face and are taking the kind of bold, visionary action that will protect both our climate and their own citizens.

As Ron Sims observed at the news conference announcing the declaration, "We no longer have time to waste. We know what it takes to reduce CO2 emissions in our regions and we owe it to our children and grandchildren to make the tough decisions and right investments now."

Fox Attacks the Environment
July 10, 2007

The Sierra Club has teamed up with MoveOn, Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films, and others to draw attention to Fox News' Lies about Global Warming. Part of a "Fox Attacks" series by MoveOn, we're exposing how Fox Attacks the Environment.

Fox's reporting on global warming proves yet again that Fox is a right-wing mouthpiece masquerading as a neutral "fair and balanced" news source. The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees—global warming is real and human pollution is taking its toll on the planet.

Enough is enough. No responsible company that claims to support the environment should be advertising on a network that intentionally spreads misinformation about global warming.

Living to Fight Another Day?
by Carl Pope
July 11, 2007

Harrisburg PA—Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has gone further than any state executive to date in making a clean energy future his priority. As part of a budget showdown with the legislature, Rendell refused to approve a proposal from the state Senate that omitted crucial funding for renewable energy, even though the result was the temporary shut-down of non-essential state services. Republicans in the state Senate opposed Rendell's proposal to fund renewable energy and efficiency with a $5 per year surcharge on households and businesses. Polls showed that the proposal was popular with the public; the state's analysis showed it would make economic sense. But members of the state Senate, responding to a lobbying blitz by the utilities and state chamber of commerce, insisted it was a tax and refused to include it.

After a one-day shutdown, legislators gave in to Rendell on the other remaining items in dispute, including a major increase in funding for mass transit and a bill to boost solar energy. With the renewable/efficiency funding package in dispute, Rendell signed the budget and ended the shutdown, promising to bring the legislature back in September for a special session to consider renewable energy funding. Rumors in Harrisburg were that opponents of the surcharge had agreed to $60 million a year in funding, but not to a specific mechanism.

It's a little hard to know how to react to this news. Two years ago it would have been inconceivable that the governor of a big industrial state would go to the mat like this for clean energy; on the other hand, only a few weeks ago it looked like Rendell would prevail. So this may be a case of 'two steps forward, one step back,' revealing that even when common sense, political leadership, and public opinion want government to move us forward into a new energy future, the politics of minority obstruction can still gum up the works, or at least slow them down. The fall special legislation session in Pennsylvania provides an opportunity to focus on energy efficiency and renewables, without the distractions of all the other issues tied into budget discussions.

If the news is mixed in Pennsylvania, the picture in Florida is blessedly straightforward. My smile brightened when I learned that Governor Charles Crist will sign his state up as the latest leader in the fight against global warming. I'm flying to Miami tomorrow to Crist's Climate Summit; the Miami Herald has learned that on Friday—Day 2 of the Summit—Crist will sign an Executive Order adopting California's clean car standards for Florida, and committing the Sunshine State to an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. As Susie Caplowe of our Florida Chapter put it, "I'm ecstatic, he's really taking it seriously." As well Crist should; in the face of rising sea levels, Florida stands to lose more of its acreage than any other state. 

When Government Is the Problem
by Carl Pope
July 23, 2007

Washington DC—Ronald Reagan famously said, in his first inaugural address, that "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." This belief has been an article of faith for reactionaries ever since, and from 2000 to 2006 the entire federal government was gripped by cultish obeisance to this belief.

We have learned, of course, to our sorrow, that when government is run by people who subscribe to this cult, government does become the problem—look at the way the right has handled Katrina, Iraq, protecting communities from fire, and the aftermath of 9/11. For the same reason the College of Cardinals would not elect an atheist as Pope, we shouldn't trust those who don't believe in government to run it.

Last week, a Congressional hearing brought this into savage relief.

At the urging of the Sierra Club, Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee looked into the scandal that, in providing hundreds of thousands of trailers to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA ignored evidence that the trailers it was buying were killing their residents with astronomical levels of formaldehyde.

FEMA didn't check the trailers out itself, it turns out. But when Sierra Club volunteers on the Gulf Coast began hearing reports of nausea and headaches from the fumes, we set up a testing program. Thirty of the thirty-two trailers we tested had toxic levels of formaldehyde—levels above the point at which federal workers would be required to use respirators if exposed all day to fumes. Residents complained of headaches, burning eyes, running noses and asthma. The Club told FEMA. What did FEMA do? It covered up. FEMA decided not to test the trailers, because its lawyers advised it that if it tested, it might be expected to do something.

FEMA's Office of General Counsel "has advised that we do not do testing," because this "would imply FEMA's ownership of this issue," wrote a FEMA logistics specialist on June 16, 2006, three months after news reports surfaced about the possible effects of the invisible cancer-causing compound and one month after the agency was sued. Today, 60,000 families are still living in the toxic trailers. When Waxman's Committee began to look into the issue, FEMA attempted, in the words of Virginia Republican Congressman Tom Davis, to obstruct the hearing and, when it failed, "mischaracterized the scope and purpose" of its actions.

FEMA defended itself by saying it had acted responsibly. In perhaps the most positive mention of the Sierra Club ever by a Bush administration official, FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said that the Sierra Club report on formaldehyde in trailers had been "a wake-up call" for FEMA. Chairman Waxman, commenting on the long period of time it took for FEMA to do anything, replied, "Mr. Paulison, you're a heavy sleeper." He then summed up this whole sorry episode by saying, "They didn't want the moral and legal responsibility to do what they knew had to be done," and said, almost in an understatement, that it was "sickening."

The toxic trailers, of course, are only a small part of the mismanagement of the post-Katrina recovery effort—but time and time again it has been made clear that when we put in charge of government people who basically don't like or trust it, they don't do a good job. And when government doesn't do a good job, people die—as some of these toxic trailer residents almost certainly will. It is as simple as that.

The Bottled Water Lie
As Soft Drink Giant Admits Product is Tap Water, New Scrutiny Falls on the Economic and Environmental Costs of a Billion Dollar Industry

The soft drink giant Pepsi has been forced to make an embarrassing admission: its bestselling Aquafina bottled water is nothing more than tap water. Last week, Pepsi agreed to change the labels of Aquafina to indicate the water comes from a public water source. Pepsi agreed to change its label under pressure from the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, which has been leading an increasingly successful campaign against bottled water.

In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom recently banned city departments from using city money to buy any kind of bottled water. In New York, local residents are being urged to drink tap water. The US Conference of Mayors has passed a resolution that highlighted the importance of municipal water and called for more scrutiny of the impact of bottled water on city waste.

The environmental impact of the country's obsession with bottled water has been staggering. Each day an estimated sixty million plastic water bottles are thrown away. Most are not recycled. The Pacific Institute has estimated twenty million barrels of oil are used each year to make the plastic for water bottles.

Economically, it makes sense to stop buying bottled water, as well. The Arizona Daily Star recently examined the cost difference between bottled water and water from the city's municipal supply. A half-liter of Pepsi's Aquafina at a Tucson convenience store costs $1.39. The bottle contains purified water from the Tucson water supply. From the tap, you can pour over 6.4 gallons for a penny. That makes the bottled stuff about 7,000 times more expensive, even though Aquafina is using the same source of water.

Hoover Wilderness and Amargosa River Wild and Scenic
by Wynne Benti-Coons
July 25, 2007

This is a reminder that the support for wilderness in Inyo and Mono Counties will not come from these counties. Support must come from the people of California, especially Los Angeles, the Angeles Chapter. On August 7, the Mono County Board of Supervisors will be holding a meeting to discuss California Wild again.

The Mono Board of Supervisors is actually considering writing a letter to BOXER & FEINSTEIN in support of ORV designation in the Inyo National Forest. Richard Pombo is now supporting the AAPL (Advocates for Access to Public Lands), the leader being Dick Noles a Bishop resident who received this year's award from the Mule Days Memorial Celebration "Best Friend to Packers." About 50,000 people attend Mule Days and BIG Dick's pic and bio graced the pages of their program. BIG Dick will be bringing AAPL supporter Dave McCoy, founder of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Anyone from LA who skis the mountain needs to know this. Mammoth Lakes and Mammoth Mountain Ski Area exist because of the people of Los Angeles, Orange & San Diego Counties who make up most of the second home owners in Mono County, and are estimated to comprise 75% of the visitors to Mammoth Mountain Ski Area and 85% of the visitors to the Inyo National Forest.

A Tipping Point for Coal?
by Carl Pope
July 26, 2007

New York NY— There is an accelerating wave of news from the financial markets strongly suggesting that our efforts to slow down and stop the coal rush may be nearing a tipping point. The front page of today's Wall Street Journal carries the headline: "Coal's Doubters Block New Wave of Power Plants."

The story reports that in addition to the widely publicized cancellations of the TXU plants in Texas, "Recent reversals in Florida, North Carolina, Oregon and other states have shown coal's future prospects are dimming. Nearly two dozen coal projects have been canceled since early 2006, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh, a division of the Department of Energy." (The Sierra Club's "Stop the Coal Rush" campaign and chapters were involved in all of these victories, as well as others in Kansas, Kentucky and Illinois.) The article goes on to point out that, "It's hard to say how many proposed plants will never be built. Some projects suffer public deaths when permits are denied. Many more simply wither away, lost in the multiyear process of obtaining permits, fending off court challenges and garnering financing."

The Journal was merely reporting a reality that investors had already experienced. When Florida Power and Light's Glades plant was turned down by state regulators, FP&L's stock price slumped by 2.5 percent, for a loss in market capitalization of more than a half billion dollars. T. Boone Pickens reportedly unloaded most—but not all—of his coal stocks a few months ago. A week later, major Wall Street investment advisors moved coal stocks from "buy" to "hold", and as a result Peabody coal stock slumped by 2.2 percent. Then, on Tuesday, Peabody announced that its earnings in the second quarter were down, and that it was facing rough sledding in the future, and the stock tumbled another six percent.

So even an attentive and savvy investor like Pickens is having a hard time keeping ahead of the collapse in coal. The 500,000 shares of Peabody he kept a few months ago have lost eight percent of their value in a week, 16 percent over the last few months. That's a loss of $4 million.

We may just have launched a virtuous cycle in which, by blocking and slowing coal plants, we not only cancel the plants we fight, but dry up funding for the remainder, and free up investment capital for renewables, efficiency and gas—exactly what we set out to do this January when we decided that capital markets, not Congress, would be the Sierra Club's big 2007 target.

Odd Bedfellows Against Illegal Logging
by Carl Pope
July 30,2007

Washington DC—It's been clear to environmentalists for years that illegal logging was one of the major threats to the world's forests. While it happens, pathetically often, here in the US, it has become a central problem in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

We now understand that illegal logging is a big part of the global warming problem. Deforestation is responsible for 30 percent of total CO2 emissions every year. While some of it is the result of legal logging, most is caused by either illegal forest clearing to convert rainforest into livestock pasture, or for the illegal logging trade. Eighty-three percent of the mahogany logged from Peru is illegally cut.

US policy actively encourages this trade and foreign trade agreements facilitate illegal shipments. Since the US signed a free trade agreement with Singapore, illegal Indonesian timber shipments through Singapore have increased by 62 percent. Free trade agreements proposed by the Bush administration had no enforceable mechanisms to discourage illegal logging, and when Greenpeace exposed the trade, the US government tried to shut down Greenpeace, not the loggers.

And the damage is not just environmental. Proceeds from illegal logging propped up the regime of Liberian strong-man Charles Taylor until environmental activist and Goldman Prize-winner Silas Siakour risked his life, blew the whistle and got the UN to shut down the illegal logging trade. Legitimate governments also lose badly needed tax revenues to the illegal timber market. The leakage is an estimated $15 billion a year, TEN TIMES total US Foreign Aid for economic development! Illegal logging is often carried out through modern day slaver— 33,000 people are estimated to be subjected to forced labor producing illegal Peruvian mahogany.

Like most illegal businesses, the global market in stolen timber also hurts honest producers. Legitimate forest products producers in the US lose about $1 billion a year due to depressed prices and loss of export markets. This reality has produced a ray of hope in an otherwise fairly gloomy situation. An unprecedented coalition that includes the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network, the United Steelworkers, the Teamsters Union, the American Forests and Paper Association, and the Nature Conservancy has joined together to support legislation that would extend the protections of the Lacey Act, which prohibits the importation, exporting, transporting, sale and purchase of illegally captured and endangered species. The Lacey Act has been one of the most effective global environmental treaties, and extending its protections to flora could be the first step towards producing a global timber business that is honest, instead of an armed racket, which is what most of it is today.

This proposal builds on an earlier initiative by the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers to ask the International Trade Commission to investigate illegal Chinese logging; the Commission has agreed to do so.

The bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Ron Wyden (OR), while on the House side a bi-partisan trio of Representatives Blumenauer (D-OR), Weller (R-IL) and Wexler (D-FL) have taken the lead.

Consider the Source
by Carl Pope
July 31, 2007

Detroit, MI—For over a decade the Sierra Club has made the pilgrimage to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, to meet with the auto industry, the leadership of the UAW, and with Michigan political figures. And always with the same message: the American auto industry has real problems and it cannot solve them using the same old, outmoded and inefficient technology. It must compete. It needs help to compete, but only if it competes can it make money. A few years ago, I looked out the windows of Solidarity House, the UAW headquarters, with Steve Yokich, then the head of the UAW, as he noted to me how few SUV's were in the lot—because, as he put it, "the guys on the line are car guys, and they know what's good and what's not." I listened while William Clay Ford urged me to be "the barbarian at the gate" to help him move the culture of Ford. I had a vice-president at one of the Big Three tell me, sadly, on the phone, that her engineers were distraught that Detroit had all of the technology the Sierra Club had identified to make vehicles efficient, yet was not willing to use it—while Tokyo was. I've had the best and brightest in the industry and the union tell me they were leaving because "it's hopeless." I've worked with third-generation Big Three auto dealers, who stunned me by saying, "the best business move I ever made was to add a Korean dealership." And I've talked with members of Congress from Michigan who were excited to learn that the Sierra Club really thought it was important to save the domestic industry, only to call me back resignedly and say, "but they won't deal. They are still in denial. You can't help them."

But now it's official. The Big Three can makes lots of money by making more fuel efficient vehicles. The Transportation Research Institute of the University of Michigan found that passing the toughest fuel efficiency law being considered—the Markey-Platt bill—would increase Big Three profits by $14.4 billion by 2017. This is serious change. And it comes from an academic source so close to the auto industry that it might as well be the industry itself—in its non-delusional frame of mind. What led Michigan to this conclusion? Because the tougher the fuel efficiency standard, the more consumers will like what Detroit makes.

Take a look at the story—and weep. Because Detroit is doing everything it possibly can to keep that $14.4 billion in added profits at bay. It has a murder-suicide pact with its workers and communities. They just don't know it.

Environmental Resolutions Passed (July 22, 2007)

Change Name of Tejon Ranch Task Force
The Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club changes the name of the Tejon Ranch Task Force to Tejon-Tehachapi Park Task Force.