KarenLOrr’s Recent Comments

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  Sierra Club Contact Information

  Mr. Schneider,

  Perhaps you can find out whether the Sierra Club works abroad by contacting them directly.

  You might receive anwers to your questions from the  National Sierra Club Board of Directors or staff
  http://www.sierraclub.org/contact/Default.aspxOn Carl Pope stepping down from helm of the Sierra Club posted 10 months ago 24 Responses

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  For Love of Money

  The following is excerpted from 'For Love of Money.'

  Kenneth Weiss, author of the LA Times article who broke the Gelbaum-Sierra Club story, quoted what David Gelbaum said to Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope:

  "I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me."

  In 1996 and again in 1998, the Club's leaders proved their loyalty to Gelbaum's position on immigration, first by enacting a policy of neutrality on immigration and then by aggressively opposing a referendum to overturn that policy. In 2000 and 2001, Gelbaum rewarded the Club with total donations to the Sierra Club Foundation exceeding $100 million. In 2004 and 2005, the Club's top leaders and management showed their gratitude for the donations by stifling dissent and vehemently opposing member efforts to enact an immigration reduction policy.

  Mr. Gelbaum is entitled to restrict how his donations to the Sierra Club Foundation are spent. But he should NOT be permitted to influence how other members' dues or donations are spent or to dictate policy choices via the threat of withholding contributions. That is completely inappropriate.

  Even worse, Sierra Club leaders accepted Gelbaum's conditions in secret and forced a modification of the Club's policy to conform to his wishes. Furthermore, Club leaders certainly shouldn't have misrepresented immigration reductionists as anti-immigrant or racist in order to guarantee Gelbaum's donations; there is nothing inherently racist or anti-immigrant about sustainable levels of immigration.

  Worst of all, the U.S. population continues to grow by about 3 million people per year, of which nearly half are immigrants, and two-thirds of the growth is a result of immigration, if the children of immigrants are included. Our forests continue to be clearcut to provide construction materials, our groundwater is depleted to provide water for our growing population, we grow more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil, and we are unable to reduce our output of greenhouse gases, all thanks to our burgeoning population.

  We don't like it when the oil, timber, coal, and nuclear power industries oppose environmental reform, yet we understand why they do it: for the love of money. Is it any better when the Sierra Club opposes environmental reform for the love of money?

  For more from SUSPS, click below
   http://www.susps.org/

  Also see

  U.S. Immigration: The Great Sierra Divide
  http://www.capsweb.org/newsroom/media_coverage/oberlink_U ...On Carl Pope stepping down from helm of the Sierra Club posted 10 months ago 24 Responses

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  The Sierra Club is paid for positions they take

  Since 1996, leaders of the Sierra Club have refused to admit that immigration driven, rapid U.S. population growth causes massive environmental problems. And they have refused to acknowledge the need to reduce U.S. immigration levels in order to stabilize the U.S. population and protect our natural resources. Their refusal to do what common sense says is best for the environment was a mystery for nearly a decade.

  Then, on Oct. 27, 2004, the Los Angeles Times revealed the answer: David Gelbaum, an extremely rich donor, had demanded this position from the Sierra Club in return for huge donations. Kenneth Weiss, author of the LA Times article who broke the story, quoted what David Gelbaum said to Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope:

  See "For Love of Money" http://www.susps.org/

  Also see ~

  "Sierra Club Partners With Clorox: The Next Stage of Greenwashing"
  http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_11150.cf ...

  Guardian article on the Sierra-Clorox partnership:
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/07/usa

  Sierra Club-Clorox deal sparks principled walkout in Michigan

  International Herald-Tribune
  http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/16/america/Green-C ...

  Traverse City Record-Eagle
  http://www.record-eagle.com/opinion/local_story_204094543 ...

  "Greenwashing and Purges at Sierra Club"
  http://www.precaution.org/lib/08/prn_slippery_slope.08032 ...

  "The Clorox Coup"
  http://www.counterpunch.org/orr03312008.html

  "Lost in the Fumes: Sierra Club Sells Out to Clorox"
  http://www.counterpunch.org/strickler04092008.html

  It will be interesting to see who the Sierra Club picks as director and what corporate "partnerships" they come up with next.On Carl Pope stepping down from helm of the Sierra Club posted 10 months ago 24 Responses

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  Cellulosic ethanol is the worst

   Stanford engineer Mark Z. Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative evaluation of the major energy solutions, assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options.]

  The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

  Mark Jacobson recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic ethanol was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.

  Best to worst vehicle options according to Jacobson's calculations:

  1. Wind-BEVs (battery electric vehicles) 2. wind-HFCVs (hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) 3.CSP-BEVs 4. geothermal-BEVs 5. tidal-BEVs 6. solar PV-BEVs 7. Wave-BEVs 8.hydroelectric-BEVs 9. a tie between nuclear- BEVs and coal-CCS-BEVs 11. corn-E85 12.cellulosic-E85.

  See ~

  WIND, WATER, AND SUN BEATS OUT BIOFUEL, NUCLEAR, AND COAL
  http://www.precaution.org/lib/prn_solar_wind_beat_coal_nu ...On New energy chief's enthusiasm for cellulosic ethanol makes me uncomfortable posted 11 months, 1 week ago 61 Responses

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  Time to bury the 'clean coal' myth

  In the second of his Greenwash columns, Fred Pearce exposes how energy companies and governments are trying to rebrand coal as a clean fuel of the future despite the evidence
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/30/fossilf ...
  -------------------------------------------------
  Also see these two articles by Peter Montague

  ENERGY AT THE CROSSROADS

  Valcav Smil on carbon sequestration

  In sum, Smil believes that burying carbon dioxide in the ground is

  (1) A monumentally dumb idea because the first principle of good industrial design is to avoid production of undesirable outputs, rather than controlling them as an afterthought.

  (2) Fraught with uncertainties -- not the least of them being unknown costs that are surely larger than what is being forecast on the basis of almost no real-world experience;

  (3) Could not be accomplished in a single generation because capturing even 10% of human CO2 emissions would require creation of an industrial infrastructure as large as the present-day global petroleum industry, which took 100 years to build.

  (4) Unnecessary because merely eliminating the most obvious forms of waste from U.S. energy use -- making us as efficient as Europe -- would accomplish the same thing far more cheaply and far more rapidly (with considerable health benefits from reduced pollution, I might add).

  Excerpt from Peter Montague's ENERGY AT THE CROSSROADS
  Read the article in full here:
  http://www.precaution.org/lib/08/prn_smil.htm
  ---------------------------------

  SLOUCHING TOWARD GOLGOTHA

  To be cynically frank, the CCS plan has three big things going
  for it:

  * First, after the stuff is pumped underground, it will be out of
  sight and out of mind, no one will know for sure where it is, and
  there will be no way to get it back. Problem solved. If it starts to
  leak out a few miles away from the injection site and the leakage is
  somehow miraculously discovered, chances are that nothing can be done
  about it, so we might as well forget the whole thing. It's a done
  deal, so eat, drink, and be merry -- just as we've been doing for the
  past 30 years.

  * Second, with CCS as our "solution," no one important has to change
  anything they're now doing -- the coal, oil, automobile, railroad,
  mining and electric power corporations can continue on their present
  path undisturbed -- and no doubt they will reward Congress handsomely
  for being so "reasonable." Everyone knows that's how the system works.
  No one even bothers to deny it.

  ** Third, CCS cannot actually be tested; it will always require a leap
  of faith. Even though the goal is to keep CO2 buried in the ground
  forever, in human terms any test will have to end on some particular
  day in the not-too-distant future. On that day the test will be
  declared a "success" -- but leakage could start the following day. So,
  given the goal of long-term storage, no short-term test can ever prove
  conclusive. CCS will always rest on a foundation of faith; and, in the
  absence of conclusive tests, those with the greatest persuasive powers
  ($$) have the upper hand.

  Two weeks ago the Germans inaugurated the world's first coal-fired
  power plant designed to bury its CO2 in the ground as an experiment.
  As New Scientist magazine told us last March, "In Germany, only CCS
  can make sense of an energy policy that combines a large number of new
  coal-fired power stations with plans for a 40 per cent cut in CO2
  emissions by 2020." In other words, the Germans hitched their wagon to
  a CCS solution long before they designed the first experiment to see
  if it could work. With the future of the German economy dependent on
  the outcome, it seems unlikely that this first little experiment will
  be announced as a failure. Like us, the Germans are playing Russian
  roulette with the future of the planet.

  Excerpt from Peter Montague's SLOUCHING TOWARD GOLGOTHA
  Read it in it's entirety here:
  http://www.precaution.org/lib/08/its_time.080925.htmOn Straight-talk on coal from Brian Williams posted 12 months ago 5 Responses