How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Gas Industry—and Why They Stopped
Mainstream environmental groups have struggled to find the right line on shale natural gas and the hydraulic fracturing or fracking process. Gas has a much smaller carbon footprint than coal—according to most scientists—and produces far fewer air pollutants. That was enough for many major green groups to give support to gas as a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner energy future—the next best domestic alternative to coal as an electricity source while alternatives like wind and solar scaled up. But for grassroots members of those groups—especially in parts of the country where fracking was already underway—the risk of local pollution wasn’t worth the national and global climate benefits of greater gas consumption, especially as media and scientific attention on the potential threats to water supplies grew. It was a major challenge for environmental leaders: how to balance local concerns about traditional pollution with planet-sized worries over climate change, and how to work with corporate America without being seen as selling out.
Now the biggest and oldest environmental group in the U.S. finds itself caught on the horns of that dilemma. TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past. It’s also sure to anger ordinary members who’ve been uneasy about the Club’s relationship with corporations. “The chapter groups and volunteers depend on the Club to have their back as they fight pollution from any industry, and we need to be unrestrained in our advocacy,” Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director since 2010, told me. “The first rule of advocacy of is that you shouldn’t take money from industries and companies you’re trying to change.”
The news of the gas industry donation—which had been kept anonymous until now, as many of Club’s gifts from individuals and corporations are—is particularly worrisome for the Sierra Club because its former executive director Carl Pope had been vocal in supporting natural gas as an alternative to coal. Pope—a lifelong Sierra Club staffer who served as executive director and then chairman before stepping down late last year—accompanied Chesapeake’s McClendon in 2009 on trips promoting the benefits of natural gas over coal, even as millions of dollars of McClendon’s money was flowing to Sierra Club anonymously. (Pope didn’t respond to email requests for comment.) In early 2008 Pope told the industry publication Oil & Gas Investor:
Use renewables as much as we can. Natural gas is the next-cleanest fuel, then we have oil and then we have coal… We’re trying to make sure that we innovatively and creatively use whatever fuel we burn (and) that we rely primarily on the fuels that are the cleanest… And, among the fossil fuels, natural gas is at the top.
Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/#ixzz1lM2jhDrt
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