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Environmental groups announced a major ad campaign targeting “key Senators” to support a climate and energy bill. But while the outcome is uncertain, the main bill on the table would likely either eliminate completely a carbon cap or substitute it with a utilities-only cap. And that has been deemed totally insufficient by the biggest environmental actor, the Sierra Club.
One of the leading environmental groups in the country offered its most forceful opposition yet to a leading compromise on climate change legislation, raising questions as to whether there is a broad enough coalition to get even a watered-down bill passed.
Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said on a conference call on Thursday that a cap on greenhouse gas emissions that only affects the utility sector would fall short of both the president’s goals and the definition of effective reform.
“A utility-only bill does not meet the standard that the president set in Copenhagen last year,” said Brune. “We feel it will not produce the emissions [standards] the planet needs to begin to address the threat of climate change. Moreover it misses an opportunity to address more clean energy jobs… The Sierra Club does not support a bill that is limited in scope to utilities.”
As recently as a couple days earlier, top officials at the Sierra Club urged caution. That caution has been thrown, as they say, to the wind.
So exactly what will that $11 million dollar ad campaign say? Sierra Club is one of the main groups funding it, along with The League of Conservation Voters, SEIU and VoteVets.org. It’s designed to go up when the Senate bill reaches the floor. Will the ads urge a No vote, if lawmakers decide on the utilities-only approach? Will they make the carbon cap as central to their critique of the bill as the public option was for health care? The ads will supposedly begin next week. With these debates about the carbon cap happening now, isn’t that too late?
UPDATE: So will the Sierra Club support with $11 million dollars a bill that has “broad bipartisan support,” which will necessarily never have an industry-wide carbon cap, if it has a carbon cap at all.
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I’ve just gotten my renewal notice for the Sierra Club. FDL, whose collective judgment I greatly respect, is pretty down on them. Is there some other environmental group more to FDL’s liking? Or, in light of the fact that there’s a leadership transition at the Sierra Club, should I re-up and give them a chance?
My question as well, but Bill McKibben, author of “Eaarth” was live blogging here at FDL about a month or so ago. There was a respectful discussion with Mr. McKebben about FDL’s perceived issues with the Sierra Club and how it’s gone into the veal pen.
To my recollection, McKibben suggested patience because he felt strongly that Micheal Brune was worth trusting. McKibben recommended writing to Brune with our concerns, which I did.
I am still on the fence about my membership in SC, which is not up yet this year. I plan to consider it very carefully though. I have asked here at FDL several times if there are other environmental organizations that come recommended (for my own self, I mostly donate to local nature conservancies because I can see with my own eyes what they are doing with the donated money. However, I prefer to also donate to a national group, who hopefully will work at that level on environmental issues, legislation, etc).
Thanks for the post and comment.
Thank you. OK, I’ll probably stick with them for now, but I’ll keep my eye on what’s being said in here. I almost feel like this place is my political party now.
This is basically good work by Brune to reject the utility-only cap, but it doesn’t match the pledge of $11M. At least not that I can see.
From what I’ve seen of Michael Brune, he seems OK. But Carl Pope is definitely not gone, he’s still the Sierra Club Chairman.
Must be nice to have so much of other people’s money you can throw it around so carelessly. It’s like they thought to themselves “Yeah, it’s too late, but it’ll look bad if we don’t have some commercials on the teevee about this. Whaddaya think, $11 million or so? My college girlfriend runs an ad agency…”
Heckuva job, bruneski.
The biggest problem we have in this country right now and is leading the country into decline is the corrupting influence of government by moneyed self interests. Both parties are infected and it is paralyzing the political process. Have you ever wondered why government never really solves anything anymore even when it passes legislation to do just that? It is because “the powers behind the throne” like the status quo. If things changed, they might get less and they can’t have that. We start wars. We don’t win them. We don’t even finish them. No one can honestly tell you why we are even there! Yet, they roll on out of sight. Meanwhile Halliburton, Blackwater, oil interests and defense contractors keep getting paid. The most immoral part of it is, we do all of this through “emergency funding.” That means we don’t even pay for it. We kill people on a credit card! Most people don’t know that at one time we had as many private contractors (Hessians) in Iraq as miltary personnel. About 150,000. If they all left at one time, our miltary would have had to follow them home. It could not of prevailed on its own. Rather than reinstitute the draft for an unpopular war, Bush/Cheney just hired out. That is the sad state we find ourselves today. How do we climb out of this mess?
Campaigns raised for both parties in Congress over a BILLION dollars in the last election cycle. Does anybody want something for a BILLION dollars? You tell me. Where does all of this money go? Primarily, to tv advertising. Think about it, the American people give giant corporations a BILLION dollars to help them get some bozos elected. Most people don’t know this, but the American people own the airwaves. We just lease them to big corporations. We could decide that all political advertising is a public service message and therefore free. One last thought. What do you think the big corporations do with the profits from all of that tv advertising? They spend a lot of it trying to influence government to srew you and me.
For anyone wanting to know more about what needs to be done, I refer you to Fair Elections Now Act (S. 752 and H.R. 1826) – matching public funding of federal elections.
That’s what I thought, so it gives me cause for concern about re-upping my membership in the SC this year.
You may excellent points, none of which are disputable. I believe that most who post here at FDL know all about the issues you raise, but I agree that the vast majority of citizens do not. They are being easily misled by a whole bunch of different tactics, from the rightwing fear mongers saying that Obama is like Hitler, to “reality” tv shows as distractions, to disingenousness in our so-called “legislative” bodies, where a majority means the vote has to be way more than 51%. And so on.
And yes, the giant amounts of money spent on all pol campaigns these days is stupifyingly egregious. In CA, we recently witnessed a primary campaign amongst super-billionaires running for CA Gov. Frankly, it was sickening to witness (and I rarely watch tv or listen to radio) their nasty diatribe ads where three candidates did their best to sink as low as possible and then out-do each other in being lying, venal scumbags.
Not surprisingly, there was low voter turn-out, and Meg Whitman won the Republican primary after spending something disgusting like $68 million on a primary! The other 2 candidates both spent about the same amount, which comes out to something like $200million WASTED on a bunch of egotistical people who got rich mostly by illegal means running ad campaigns which amounted to dissing each other… as in: not saying much of anything of value other than to basically stand there giving each other the finger.
When pushed to state what, exactly, they would do to “fix” CA (as in: good luck with that), they all made completely vapid and ignorant statements that amounted to them saying: I’m a big old corporate hot-shot, who made tons of money illegally, so of course, I’ll just cut taxes for my obscenely wealthy pals here in CA, whilst cutting any and all social programs for the “small people” that I possibly can.
The small amount of Republicans that actually turned out to vote kept talking about how “great” these people were. I had to turn my head and look the other way in absolute disgust or I would have vomited.
What is wrong with people? Why do they put up with this shite? It never ceases to amaze me that *most* citizens seem endlessly satisfied with this passing parade of charlatans, clowns, idiots, and jerks.
It’s clear that our “government” has been hijacked by the MIC and other corporations, like BigOil. Yet these foolish citizens sit back and watch reality tv and cheer for corporate charlatans buying their way into office.
Ugh. Glad to rant here; no one’s gonna read this. But had to get off my chest.