Bruce is a great guy, a lawyer.  Writing a check and going to court does not make a movement.

Congrats, Bruce!  Gristwash has so much integrity, you must be proud.  Why is the Illinois Sierra Club indifferent to clean coal?  Is that in keeping with your "movement?"  

Just read the link above to the "Sierra Club National Coal Campaign"- the big fight over mercury is a win!  Take all of the externalities of big coal and take it to the streets over mercury.  That about says it all for gristwash and the SC.

Oh, and the second link, it looks like none of the "still going on" has anything to do with the SC.

No one has been more effective at shutting down conventional coal plants in the Midwest than Bruce Nilles. No one. Persist in the delusion if you will that people with cardboard signs are more effective than lawyers, and he will just keep plugging away.

Okay, so he missed one, Big Stone II. A big one. A really big ugly one that will take us decades to shut down again. But there are so many successes that we can (almost) forgive him for that, right?

And he's an eco-hottie. I just made that term up.

IDS,

You haven't explained your position very thoroughly.  I dint get it.

It's quite easy, as turanga alludes to, a movement is not a lawyer going to court supported by carbon addicts writing checks from their couch.  It implies multiple disciplines converging, multitudes of people moving if you will (maybe with signs on any given street), beyond mere check writing.  The SC is a prime example, for instance, as shown in the great book Bowling Alone, which is a club that is a poor example of social capital, & nothing that represents a movement.  I am not commenting on the effectiveness of Bruce's efforts, just the fact that it is not a movement, as gristwash characterizes.  Further, the SC's efforts often reach for the lowest denominator possible, anything to say "we won" even when in the scheme of things, it's a loss, and big coal is crying all the way to the bank, as in the cheap mercury victory.  Really, its hard to say whether Bruce is a lawyer or fundraiser when you think about the whole of the SC.

My point about the Illinois Sierra Club should speak for itself.  Giving Blago their first every gubernatorial endorsement, who just had permited Peabody Energy their first ever coal burning plant, the biggest new source of GHG in 20 years, as Bruce like to point out, & another new coal burning plant in Springfield, they are a sham.  Now, when it comes to an Ill state nearing a financial ruin, with hospitals closing becuase the state is not paying them what they are due, and the SC indifferent to another state subsidy for "clean coal," well, I hope you can figure it out.  If that's part of the movement, I don't have to tell you where you and Bruce can "move" to (hell, there i'll tell you). . .

I hope that helps.

Christophers,

BTW, it should go without saying the ill SC does as much for corn ethanol as clean coal- the damage they cause in inestimable.

I see your point is that the Sierra Club may be too easily led to compromise.  That may be true, and then I would be a critic as well.

But then you then said:
"  I am not commenting on the effectiveness of Bruce's efforts, just the fact that it is not a movement"

In this case, we're talking about both CO2 displacement and traditional pollution displacement.  There is nothing more important than "effectiveness".  Who cares if it doesn't look like the costume you want it to come in?

If frickin Wal-Mart had the answer to CO2 emissions would you turn them down because they are Wal-Mart?

I am not saying Bruce is effective.  Effective press releases upon a gullible ill-informed public, no doubt.  He won this survey, he can bank on that.  A more effective way of saying what I mean is that I am not commenting on the relative effectiveness of any anti-coal movement someone may currently perceive vis a vis the lawyering in the courts currently taking place.  Now, add them together and rate the combined effectiveness for reducing GHG, and they pale in comparison to the economic downturn.  

Maybe, quite possible, if Bruce spent less time being part of a "movement" for the SC and spent more of his talents and time on his case, he might have won and stopped Big Stone II.  It's quite possible on the whole the SC dumbs people down.

As far as Wal-Mart goes, that corp influences a lot more in life than CO2.  I can see accepting a portion of their plan that solves CO2 without embracing every other piece of their destructive policies, if that answers your question.

that some of you are not tacticians that are a part of any movement, or that you know little about social movement theory, or about what kinds of pressures are effective in what specific instances. There's the wedge model, which is what the Sierra Club operates under, which uses mass support as the weight that gets thrown behind a single team of professionals, or a single individual. When I made my first comment I should have brought more nuance into it. The lawyer alone would get laughed at in the boardroom without the grassroots support in the streets or on phones or in the newspaper creating a PR nightmare for the company. The people with signs making general comments would never get into a boardroom to sign the papers. They wouldn't know which papers to sign. There's also the grasstops/peer influence model, which involves using peer pressure, science, and other rhetorical devices to pressure leaders and decision makers to act in the public interest instead of in their own self-interest, or convincing them that the public interest IS in their self-interest. There are other models as well. But there isn't a single model that works well in every instance, and a good tactician knows in which instance to apply which model. A good coalition, moreover, has many partners with many different models, so they know which member of the coalition to bring to the fight in the appropriate circumstance.

What constitutes a milestone, what constitutes a victory? It's important to know these things, as important as it is to not be dismissive of milestones. They lead up to a victory.