The Scoop
The head of the largest US environmental activist group has no intention of recalibrating the group’s embrace of social justice issues, while insisting it had not lost focus in its efforts to battle climate policy rollbacks by the Trump administration, she told Semafor.
The Sierra Club was among a dozen environmental and public health groups that sued the Environmental Protection Agency last week over its move to scrap the government’s legal basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The new suit represents one of the Club’s biggest swings against US President Donald Trump during his second term, with the long-term future of US climate regulation hanging in the balance.
The legal offensive comes at a moment of turmoil for the Club, which has been rocked in the past few years by layoffs and falling membership and revenue; internal divisions about how closely to be affiliated with groups focused on labor, LGBTQ rights, racial equity, and other progressive issues; and the contentious firing of the group’s first Black executive director over allegations of sexual harassment and mismanagement.
Loren Blackford, who took over as executive director in September after serving for two decades on the Club’s board, said in an interview that she “adamantly disagrees” that the group has become distracted, and said that membership was on the rise again.
“We’re definitely doing a lot of soul-searching, because this is such an incredibly important and difficult moment on so many different fronts,” she admitted. But “caring about equity and caring about justice are essential, not just to our values, but also to how we get our work done. That’s a big part of our secret sauce, and while it’s challenging and it can look messy, that’s why we’re strong.”
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Tim’s view
Working under a president who views climate change as a hoax and has launched a fusillade against just about every pillar of US environmental policy should make for a great time to be a climate activist, and many green groups did indeed see a surge in donations during Trump’s first term. But the second time around has proven more challenging, and groups like the Sierra Club have had to work harder to prove their relevance and effectiveness in the face of mounting concerns about energy affordability, and a pivot by companies, universities, and other institutions away from DEI issues.
Many environmental groups have reported financial problems in the past year, driven by a combination of evaporating small-dollar donations, federal funding cuts, shifting priorities from once-major donors like Bill Gates, and costly legal fights with Big Oil, including a ruling on Wednesday by a North Dakota judge that Greenpeace will have to pay $345 million to the pipeline company Energy Transfer.
In addition to these headwinds, the Sierra Club faces others of its own making; as The New York Times recently documented, the group has in recent years often focused more on policing its members’ word choices, and getting pulled into debates over issues such as Middle East politics and police brutality than zeroing in on core environmental objectives like forcing the closure of coal-fired power plants. Some Club insiders felt the group risked alienating members and muddying its message at a time of some of the gravest threats to US environmental policy in modern history.
Those accusations, Blackford said, “are very misguided in terms of what the core work is and has always been and will always continue to be.” One of the Club’s strongest legal assets, she said, was its nationwide base of local chapters, which allowed it to establish standing in practically any courtroom in the country. In order to have meaningful support in so many jurisdictions, she said, it was essential to maintain productive relationships across a wide range of socio-economic and political groups.
“Any stance we take, we’re going to gain some [supporters] and we’re going to lose some, because we do have people on all sides of these issues,” she said. “But if you look at where most of the polluting industries are, where most of the coal plants are, they’re predominantly in communities of color, in low-income communities. And nature still really resonates across the political spectrum. So I think we’re more relevant than ever, [and] have a lot of tools to keep this fight going.”
Room for Disagreement
It’s not all bad news at the Sierra Club these days. This week a judge in Texas tossed a major defamation suit that ExxonMobil had brought against the Club and other groups. And Michael Bloomberg, who was the main underwriter of the Club’s high-profile campaign against coal plants, has continued to pour cash into climate issues; according to a recent Financial Times analysis his total contributions to climate issues topped $3 billion over the last decade. As the Trump administration intervenes to slow the rate of coal plant closures, that effort remains a top priority for the Club, Blackford said: “It’s going to be a fight, plant by plant, until the last one is closed.”
Notable
- Rumors of the death of the energy transition have been greatly exaggerated, David Wallace-Wells writes in the New York Times: “There is more green stuff being installed than ever, and judged simply as a global infrastructure project the volume is pretty staggering.”