Tax the Guy Behind the Tree

Arlington, VA -- I was the second witness yesterday morning as the EPA opened its hearing process on Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse pollutants. The first was from the American Petroleum Institute (API). He made one point over and over: the EPA shouldn't use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants; it should wait for Congress to act. Of course, just across the Potomac River, on Capitol Hill, API lobbyists were fanning out even as he spoke, telling senators just why it would be a really terrible idea to enact the Kerry-Boxer climate bill, which would do precisely what the API is telling the EPA it favors.

This all reminds me of the old adage, "don't tax me, don't tax thee, tax the guy behind the tree." Big Carbon is fighting for its life and seems determined to do as much damage as it can before it faces the inevitable. The world will move on to a clean-energy, post- coal-and-oil economy. But these last-ditch efforts are hugely damaging, because although the EPA is moving to regulate climate pollution, the API has made it clear that those regulations will be challenged in court, resisted in Congress, and contested in next year's mid-term elections.

My own message to the EPA was much simpler: It's good that the agency is keeping a major presidential campaign promise to use the Clean Air Act to regulate big power plants, refineries, and other emitters of carbon pollution -- even if the President who made that promise is no longer in office. (Yes, it was George Bush who, back in 2000, ran on a platform of cleaning up carbon pollution using EPA regulatory authority. Undoing that promise was the first of Dick Cheney's unacknowledged coups during the Bush years.)

I also pointed out that, for those who want certainty for business, the Clean Air Act has a lot of advantages: the operators of a power plant know what emission standard they must meet, what equipment or technology or fuel will enable them to meet it, and by when they must comply. And citizens benefit by knowing that, if government fails to enforce the rules, health and environmental organizations can act on their own. All in all, it's a very powerful cleanup tool.

Which may be why the American Petroleum Institute is so afraid of it.

The First Green Veterans Day

San Francisco -- Veterans Day had always been a day-off from environmentalism for me, but this year Veterans week was different. The Sierra Club was really, for the first time, a full participant -- a story that has been building slowly

Several years ago, the Sierra Club published a book by Jonathan Trouern-Trend, an Iraq war veteran about his experiences bird-watching while on active duty -- Birding in Babylon. (It just came out in German!) Then, as an extension of our long-standing effort to get every American child an outdoor experience, the Club began to help support the National Military Family Organization's Operation Purple Camp. We discovered that, after an active-duty  tour, military families were eager to reunite in the wilderness, and we partnered with the Armed Services YMCA. We also linked up with Outward Bound to help support their work with Veterans Expeditions.

We thought we had a fairly robust suite of activities in our Military Families Outdoors portfolio,  when we heard about Homes for our Troops, a wonderful organization helping build housing for disabled veterans. The Sierra Club agreed to provide the necessary additional funding for these homes to be built using the latest green technology,  so this week Sierra Club Foundation President Bob McKinney and Executive Director Peter Martin had the opportunity be present when Marine Corporal Visnu Gonzalez, a paralyzed veteran, received the keys to his new LEED-platinum home in Hillsdale, New Jersey.

And on Veterans Day itself, Sierra Club President Allison Chin and Military Families Outdoor direct Martin Le Blanc joined First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden for ServiceNation's Mission Serve initiative kickoff in Washington, D.C. The purpose of Mission Serve: Forging a Continuum of Service is to unite the worlds of military and civilian service, tapping the energy, wisdom and experience of the millions of citizens --in uniform and out -- who are dedicated to strengthening America.

Our next challenge?  We're looking at how we can make sure veterans have a fair shot at getting green jobs!

People are often very surprised when I explain to them that the Sierra Club now proudly counts among its friends and partners a whole host of veterans organizations -- as well as military families themselves. And certainly the Club had -- and still has -- a lot to learn from these new relationships. But is this really such a new thing? We too often forget that the first protectors of our national parks were soldiers. To remind us, the Club has just published Gloryland, a novel based on the story of the African-American "Buffalo Soldiers" who were the first rangers at Yosemite -- written by Shelton Johnson, the inspirational ranger many of us just watched on Ken Burns's series, The National Parks, America's Best Idea. As John Muir told us, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is hitched to everything in the universe."

The Election You Didn't Read About

Seattle -- Media coverage of last week's off-year elections has focused on Republican victories in two gubernatorial races, an upstate New York Congressional special election, and Mayor Bloomberg's reelection in New York City. Those races had in common that they were big-money contests, had very low voter turnout, and were dominated by well-established political figures.

But another kind of election was happening at the local level, where new candidates were emerging, running, and winning with grassroots campaigns, and where the promise of change and hope was still bright. Here in the Pacific Northwest, for example, it turns out that the pathway to political success lies through the Sierra Club. Former Cascade Chapter Chair Mike O'Brien won a City Council seat with 57 percent of the vote after a campaign in which he was outspent three to one and targeted by the developers'  Forward Seattle, which unleashed mailers that painted O'Brien as an anti-car zealot. "We have see in the past that negative attack ads -- even complete lies -- seem to work," O'Brien said during the campaign. "I am hopeful that Seattle voters see through those strategies." They did.

But even more startling was the victory of another former Cascade Chapter Chair, Mike McGinn. McGinn and his opponent, Joe Mallahan, teamed up in the primary to oust the incumbent mayor, Greg Nickels, himself a strong environmentalist. The Washington state establishment -- the newspapers, the governor, business, and labor -- all supported Mallahan because they found McGinn's strong neighborhood, pro-transit approach too threatening.

McGinn, too, was overwhelmingly outspent, but the voters liked what they saw. "A lot of people thought somebody that ran an all-volunteer campaign couldn't win, but conventional wisdom is often conventional," McGinn said when he pulled ahead. And Mallahan's campaign consultant, Charla Neuman, said Mallahan was sucked into the same anti-establishment sentiment that took down Nickels in the primary. Mallahan's big-name endorsements did not sway undecided voters seeking change, she said. "People really wanted an activist." The final margin was narrow, but the McGinn era in Seattle began this week.

Clear across the country, more "change we can believe in" happened in North Carolina. The city of Charlotte hadn't elected a Democratic mayor in two decades -- not, in fact, since Harvey Gantt, the city's first African-American mayor, stepped down. This year the Sierra Club went all out for Anthony Foxx, who pledged to make Charlotte a "Cool City" by pledging to reduce its greenhouse emissions (a step that the incumbent, Pat McCrory, had refused to take. Foxx also campaigned as a strong advocate of transit (Tuesday's election results, by the way, were very good for transit nationally). Foxx won another narrow race, as did the entire slate of city council candidates endorsed by the Sierra Club.

So where fresh candidates emerged with a message of change and hope, they did well -- even in the face of the gloomy national mood. Grassroots politics outweighed establishment endorsements. Volunteer organizing trumped big budgets. And David beat Goliath. The story of this election was both more complicated and more encouraging than what we saw in the media.