The Sun Is Rising in the West

When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced a few weeks ago that his city would be off coal power entirely by 2025, it was both exciting and, as Al Gore put it, "a really big deal."

It was also only part of the story.

The other part -- also a really big deal -- is that Southern California is rapidly locking in new sources of energy to replace dirty fossil fuels. One of them -- the Antelope Valley Solar Projects that officially broke ground on Friday -- represents large-scale renewable energy technology at its best and its brightest. When completed in 2015, these solar projects will provide 579 megawatts of clean energy (enough to power about 400,000 homes). Every one of those megawatts will displace energy that might otherwise come from dirty fossil fuels like natural gas. In the process, they'll eliminate more than 775,000 tons of carbon pollution per year (not to mention quite a lot of air and water pollution).

Fantastic as those stats are, though, they wouldn't mean as much if this project did not succeed in a couple of other important ways.

Here in the United States, we're lucky to have abundant renewable energy resources -- wind, sun, and hydro. In theory, it's enough to power our entire country several times over. But we need to be smart about where and how we access that energy. The rim of the Grand Canyon, for instance, would never be anyone's first choice for a wind farm.

In the case of Antelope Valley, the project has been a model of smart planning. In fact, Sierra Club volunteers worked closely with the developers almost from the beginning to improve the project. The project site was private land that had no threatened or endangered species. It's located near existing transmission lines. It will require a lot less water than the previous use for the land -- growing alfalfa.

Another way the Antelope Valley Solar Projects succeed is economically. Here's the proof: Early this year, the original developer of the project, SunPower, was acquired by MidAmerican Renewables, a subsidiary of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, which is controlled by Berkshire Hathaway. The primary shareholder, chairman, and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, of course, is Warren Buffett, who is considered the most successful investor of the 20th century. MidAmerican has a portfolio of more than 1,830 megawatts of renewable energy assets, including wind, geothermal, solar, and hydro assets.

The next time someone tries to tell you that renewable energy isn't a good investment, point out that it's good enough for Warren Buffett. (Before you send the Oracle of Omaha a clean-energy mash note, though, be sure to read the just-published Sierra magazine article about a more problematic part of his portfolio. Mr. Buffett should take care to avoid the carbon bubble and move out of dirty fuels entirely.)

The Antelope Valley Solar Projects are part of a remarkable surge in solar solutions. Last month, all of the new power-generation capacity added in the U.S. came from solar power. In the first three months of 2013, we added twice as much new solar capacity to the U.S. grid as in all of 2012. Projects like the ones in Antelope Valley are great for the environment and for our clean-energy future. If they show dirty fuel investors how they can profit from clean energy instead, that's good, too.

A Big One for L.A.

We are going to get the United States off dirty fuels and onto clean energy. Of course, it won't happen overnight nor everywhere at once. Our success will come from winning hundreds, if not thousands, of victories -- big and small.

This is about one of the big ones.

Tomorrow, I'll be in Los Angeles to watch as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa officially announces that, within 12 years, the City of Angels will be entirely coal-free. Currently, L.A. gets almost 40 percent of its power from two old and notoriously dirty out-of-state coal plants -- the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

It's impossible to overstate the significance of this announcement from the second-largest city in the U.S. But getting rid of coal is only part of the story. Los Angeles is also leading on clean energy.

Two years ago, L.A. was the first city in California to hit 20 percent clean energy. The city's new CLEAN LA Solar program (which allows local businesses, residents, and organizations to install renewable energy projects and sell the power they generate back to the utility) is the largest program of its kind in the nation. It's also expected to create 4,500 jobs and nearly $500 million in economic development for the city.

More jobs will be created as the city ramps up its already impressive energy-efficiency efforts. When the EPA released its annual ranking of cities with the most Energy Star certified buildings last week, Los Angeles topped the list -- as it has for the past five years.

Certainly, much of the credit goes to Mayor Villaraigosa. When he took office eight years ago, Los Angeles was getting almost half of its power from coal and only three percent from clean energy. When you fly  into LAX and see hundreds of square miles of rooftops soaking up the Southern California sun, it seems obvious that rooftop solar is a huge opportunity for L.A. But it took a mayor with vision and determination to make it happen.

I'm proud to stand by Mayor Villaraigosa as he announces a coal-free Los Angeles on Friday. You can join us -- the event will be live-streamed. In the meantime, let the sun shine!

What's That Smell?

You know what natural gas smells like. Or do you? Natural gas is actually odorless. That rotten-egg smell is added for safety reasons. Otherwise, you might not notice a potentially deadly gas leak.

If only we could add a similar smell to the natural gas industry. Too many people -- especially politicians -- aren't paying attention to the dangers of the current "boom" in natural gas development. Here are three big reasons why we should stop new gas drilling before it starts and replace fossil fuels at every opportunity with clean, renewable energy.

It starts with how we get gas out of the ground. Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is problem #1. Frackers inject a toxic chemical cocktail underground under high pressure to fracture the rock and release the gas. A lot of that fluid comes back up the well as waste and, when it does, it's even more toxic than it started out.

People who live in areas where fracking is happening are outraged. They should be. What guarantee do they have that their drinking water won't be affected by fracking? None. How do they know that toxic wastewater from fracking will be disposed of in a way that ensures it won't contaminate aquifers ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? They don't.

In fact, a ProPublica investigation has identified more than 1,000 cases of water contamination near drilling sites. The risks don't end when the drilling does, either. The question isn't whether abandoned wells and fracking-waste storage sites can leak, but how many will fail, and how soon it will happen. Yet, incredibly, fracking enjoys exemptions from parts of at least seven major national environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The rush to frack for natural gas has occurred with maximum greed and minimum oversight.

The next time someone tries to tell you that fracking is safe, ask them why, then, the industry spends so much money getting exemptions to our nation's environmental laws. Ask why the gas industry won't fully disclose exactly what's in the billions of gallons of water they are pumping into wells across the country. Ask why the gas industry fights so hard to enforce gag rules on local hospitals so that doctors can't talk about what chemicals are poisoning gas-drilling communities.

The Sierra Club believes no community should be forced to accept the risks of fracking. That's why we're working with local activists to support moratoriums on fracking in New York, Illinois, and eight other states, as well as the right of local communities, like Longmont and Fort Collins in Colorado, to declare fracking off-limits within their borders.

That work's paying off, too: The New York State Assembly just last week passed legislation that would extend the moratorium on high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the state until May 2015. That victory is a credit to the passionate advocacy of citizens throughout the state who refuse to accept the premise that New York's countryside must be sacrificed for the sake of dirty-fuel profits. Together, we've also won the first round of a legal challenge to Pennsylvania's ACT 13 legislation, which similarly gives communities control over their own fate.

Moratoriums are important because, as currently practiced, fracking simply can't be considered safe. Take what's happening in Illinois. The Sierra Club and many other grassroots groups are fighting hard to get a moratorium in place because the frackers have not proven the safety of their process. But because of massive gas-industry lobbying, we do not yet have sufficient political support. With no regulations in place, and the frackers lining up, our local chapter joined an effort to develop rules that would prevent the worst abuses of the gas industry. And at one level they were successful -- the proposed Illinois rules tighten some of the loopholes found in other states. But here's the thing: Even these improvements do not fully protect the health and safety of the good people of Illinois. In fact, no proposed legislation in any state currently does.

Although problem #1 is how we get gas out of the ground, problem #2 happens far above ground -- in our atmosphere. Natural gas boosters like to claim that it is a climate-friendly energy source, supposedly because it's not as dirty as other fossil fuels. That's like saying it's safer to be attacked with a knife than a gun. If you end up dead, it's a moot point.

It's true that gas doesn't directly create as much carbon pollution as coal when it's burned, but that reality hides a larger story. Natural gas is mostly methane, and methane is an extremely powerful climate-disrupting gas all on its own (more than twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide).

We know that during the drilling and transportation of natural gas, methane leaks, but nobody knows exactly how much, because no comprehensive studies have yet been conducted. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that leakage rates are around 2.4 percent. However, a range of studies in recent years have called that figure into question. One of the most recent, from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research group, measured methane leakage from a Utah gas field (not even shale gas!) up to an astonishing 9 percent, and that didn't even include leakage from distribution and transmission. Any leakage rate much greater than the EPA’s 2.4 percent would be enough to make gas worse than coal as a climate disruptor.

But even if drillers could magically eliminate all methane leakage, natural gas would still threaten our climate simply because there's so much of it. If we allow the industry to extract and burn all (or even most) of it, then we're looking at irreversible climate disruption. The International Energy Agency estimates that to have a shot at keeping global warming under 3.6°F (which is a risky target considering the damage we've already incurred with a little more than 1°F of warming), we need to keep two-thirds of our known oil, gas, and coal reserves in the ground. That's all the reason we need to go "all-in" on clean energy.

And that points to one of the biggest secrets the gas industry is trying to keep -- we don’t actually need all this fracked gas. Despite the industry's well-funded misinformation campaigns, the fact is that clean energy is already cheaper than dirty fuels in many places. At the retail level, installing solar on your home is cheaper than traditional utility power for many homes in 14 states. At the wholesale level, solar panel prices have dropped 80 percent in the past five years, and new solar projects are beating out new gas and coal in places like California and New Mexico. We installed more solar and wind energy last year in the U.S. than new gas, coal, and nukes combined. Although clean energy is not yet cheaper than dirty fuels in every part of the country, solar and wind have a nice little side benefit: They don't destabilize our climate. Plus, the cost of clean power continues to drop, while the cost of fossil fuels goes up. We need to build on this progress, not undermine it.

That's going to be even tougher if we don't address problem #3 -- the burning desire of the industry to export U.S. natural gas to foreign markets in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG). That would actually make both of the other two problems worse. Opening up more foreign markets to U.S. natural gas would lock us into long-term contracts that will require us to keep on fracking, regardless of how quickly we move to clean energy at home. And owing to the cooling and pressurizing that are required to make LNG, it would also compound the carbon pollution from natural gas.

Although LNG exports would boost the profits of natural gas producers, they would also mean higher energy prices for American consumers and industries and serious problems for our climate. That's why the Sierra Club Beyond Gas campaign is aggressively challenging permits for new LNG export facilities. Like coal-export terminals, these projects are long-term carbon-pollution disasters waiting to happen.

Fracking, climate, and LNG exports are three reasons why we want to keep natural gas in the ground as much as possible, but it's important to note that the Sierra Club is as committed to developing long-term clean-energy solutions as it is to opposing dirty-fuel problems. Instead of replacing one dirty fossil fuel with another, we can move to clean, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal. Together with upgrading our energy efficiency, that's what can free us from fossil fuels. We've already seen tremendous progress in the past four years, thanks to renewable energy standards, falling prices for solar and wind, innovative financing, and (early in its first term) critical clean energy support from the Obama administration.

We need to maintain this clean-energy momentum. It's the only way we'll ever achieve "escape velocity" from the fossil fuel planet we've been stuck on for two hundred years. But the "get richer quicker" mentality behind the natural gas boom is trying to slow us down and drag us back to a world that runs almost entirely on dirty fuels.

What's that smell? It's not natural gas -- it's greed.

No Time to Cool Off

Unless you happened to be on a monastic retreat last weekend, you probably know that the Sierra Club, 350.org, the Hip Hop Caucus, and other allies held the largest climate-action rally in U.S. history. More than 50,000 people came out to tell President Obama that we want him to lead on climate, starting with a rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.

It was an incredible day. If you were there with us in Washington, D.C., or any of the simultaneous rallies held around the country, you know what I mean. Thank you for being part of it!

Decades from now, we may well look at 2013 as a turning point in climate action. The groundswell of grassroots activism that we’re seeing will keep gathering momentum until it sweeps our nation into a clean energy future.  

You could not see the tens of thousands of people gathered at the National Mall last Sunday without remembering the other great social movements that have found powerful expression there. We've all heard the stirring conclusion of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s extraordinary "I Have a Dream" speech: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" But Dr. King also had words that day for those who agreed that segregation was wrong but worried that change was coming too fast. "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism," he said. "Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."

I hear a similar kind of "gradualism" when well-meaning people say that renewable energy is a worthwhile goal, but we're just not ready to start cutting our ties to fossil fuels. For some folks, change is scary no matter how exciting it might be.

Well, we aren't about to cool off, because the clean-energy future is already happening. Here are just three examples I've learned this week alone:

• The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that all of the new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. was renewable. Every single megawatt. Now January was a rather extraordinary month, but did you know that more than half of the total electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. during 2012 was renewable?

• The Electric Reliability Council of Texas set a new wind-power generation record on February 9: 9,481 megawatts -- nearly 28 percent of system load. As coal-fired power plants close in Texas, wind power is taking their place. Last year, wind supplied more than 9 percent of the power in Texas, and that number will go up this year.

• A new report from the Michigan Public Service Commission reviewed the effects of the renewable energy standard that the state adopted in 2008. Thanks to more than $1.78 billion in investments, more than 895 megawatts of new renewable energy projects came online in Michigan through 2012. The cost of new renewable energy there is now lower than new combined-cycle natural gas and new coal.

Across the nation, we're showing we can trade dirty fuels for clean energy. Change is happening, and it's up to us to keep that momentum going if we want to save our climate. We’re only getting started. Stay tuned for more!

Doing the Right Thing

My previous visit to the White House was definitely more fun -- I took my dad to the annual Christmas party. Today, I returned on a chilly D.C. morning to get arrested alongside friends and fellow environmental do-gooders like Bill McKibben, Andre Carothers, Adam Werbach, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Sierra Club President Allison Chin. We enviros didn't have to brave the cold alone, though. There were almost 50 of us: activists and actors, authors and ranchers, reverends and farmers, union leaders and scientists -- and legendary civil rights leader Julian Bond. The one thing we all shared was a conviction: President Obama must act to protect our climate -- and that means saying "no" to the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline.

I'm hopeful. If I weren't, I'd be in the wrong line of work. But the president has come a long way since 2011, when his State of the Union address didn't mention climate even once. Last night, the president stood before Congress to say this:

... if [you] won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

Strong words, and I believe the president when he says he will take action on climate, as well as push for clean-energy solutions and greater energy efficiency. What's at issue, though, is not whether President Obama is willing to do something, but whether he's ready to do the right things.

While preparing for today's protest, I read and thought a lot about the great leaders of the past who fought hard and courageously in the name of righteousness. Less than two months before he was felled by an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave this answer when asked why he persisted in taking an unpopular stand against the Vietnam War:

Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but a molder of consensus. On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.

We know that enabling the exploitation of Canada's carbon-intensive tar-sands oil would be a huge setback for progress on climate disruption. It could undo all the real progress on  carbon-pollution that the president rightly took credit for during his speech last night

A politician might ask whether stopping Keystone XL would be a politic or popular decision. A leader will only care whether it's the right one. My biggest hope? That this president is ready to lead.

The Day We Move Forward on Climate

On Sunday, February 17, I'll be joining tens of thousands of Americans in Washington, D.C., for Forward on Climate -- the largest climate rally in U.S. history. Our goal is to convince President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, but we also are asking him to make that decision the cornerstone of a positive, solutions-oriented climate legacy for his second term.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've spoken with thousands of Sierra Club members and supporters, all across the country, who are fired up about the rally because they know we're on the frontline of the movement to stop climate disruption. But this is more than a battle to stop something bad -- it's a fight for something better. That's because we're also on the cusp of a clean energy revolution that will transform our nation, slash carbon pollution, and turn this climate disaster around. We need President Obama to commit to that fight with all the ambition and determination he can bring.

The clean energy technologies we need to reverse climate disruption already exist. They are affordable, competitive, and ready for primetime. Already, we've doubled our wind power to 60 GW (enough to power nearly 15 million homes), and we generate five times more solar power than we did just a few years ago. That's explosive growth, but we're just getting started. Renewables can power America, and they can do it without climate-polluting gases or any other kind of pollution.

Here's how President Obama can make that happen:

First, he must follow through and build on one of the biggest accomplishments of his first term: Holding polluters accountable for the costs of their pollution to our health, to our economy, and to our climate. That means directing the EPA to finish the job it has already begun on cleaning up power plant pollution, including carbon and mercury pollution from new sources, coal ash, and cross-state air pollution.  

Second, President Obama needs to master the art of saying "no" -- and making it stick -- to bad ideas that would condemn future generations to the effects of runaway climate disruption. His final decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will be only the first big test of whether he he's truly serious about climate change. There's no excuse for blasting the mountains of Appalachia to scrape the last bits of coal, drilling in our Arctic wilderness, building export terminals to ship coal and natural gas overseas, or continuing to allow the proliferation of under-regulated fracking for oil and gas.

Third, the president needs to permanently shift the debate about our public lands from "how can the mining and drilling industries best exploit them?" to "how can their true owners -- the American people -- most benefit from them?"  For more than a century, we've allowed oil, coal, and other extractive industries to treat our public lands as their personal piggy banks. That must stop for two reasons. First, and most obviously, because the toxic pollution that results is hurting us and destroying our climate. Second, because the climate change that we've already locked ourselves into is going to put intense pressure on all of our public lands and remaining wilderness habitats, which means we need to preserve as much as we can while we can.

Fourth, the president must do all he can to help preserve the hard-won momentum for renewable energy and energy efficiency of his first term. Start by promoting innovative financing and investment avenues that make it easier for individuals and businesses to install clean energy and adopt energy-efficiency measures.

Finally, we must recognize that the effects of climate disruption are already here in the form of droughts, deadly heat waves, wildfires, and powerful storms. We need to protect communities from these climate disasters and plan a robust and just response for those that do happen.

The president can take these important, specific actions right now to show the American people -- and the world -- that he's serious about the climate crisis. But they're not enough. The final thing we need is both the most crucial and the most intangible. We need Barack Obama at his absolute, formidable best.

We need the Barack Obama who was able to inspire millions to believe in the possibility of change and the power of hope. We need that leader to passionately and eloquently show the American people that solving the climate crisis is not a burden but an incredible opportunity. We need him to inspire a nationwide groundswell for clean energy, energy efficiency, and a 21st-century economy. And we need him to bring every iota of his considerable political skill to bear on forging bipartisan solutions to curbing carbon pollution, and to call out those who persist in trying to hold us back.  

When the president talks about the destructive power of a warming planet, no one has to wonder what that destruction looks like. We've seen it -- from the hurricane-ravaged Northeast to the drought-stricken Midwest to the fire-scarred West. It's all too real and scary. But it's hope and change -- not fear or doubt -- that will win the day. See you in Washington on the 17th.

It's Not Dark Yet, But…

I'm knee-deep in reading the draft version of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released last Friday. If last year's record number of wildfires, droughts, and extreme heat days, not to mention the devastation of superstorm Sandy, didn't convince you of the dangers of a destabilizing climate, then perhaps this several-hundred page report from 240 of the country's top climate scientists will.

To quote one of Barack Obama's favorite singer/songwriters: "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there." Fortunately, although the science of climate disruption is undeniably scary, there's still time to turn the corner and put this nation on a path to meet the emissions reductions we need to avoid catastrophe.

Here's the challenge. In his first term, President Obama did more than any other president to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and scale up clean energy. But his administration is far from realizing its potential for strong action. In fact, the president has considerable authority that he has not yet fully used to help our country build a clean energy economy.

That's why today the Sierra Club is launching the Obama Climate and Clean Energy Legacy Campaign -- a joint effort across our campaigns to demand that the president tackle climate disruption with all the authority, determination, and ambition he can muster. Between now and Earth Day, we'll focus on 100 Days of Action to set the tone for this term's critical first year. We and our allies will host events across the country calling on the president to lead in this fight. The biggest of these, in Washington, D.C., on February 17, is shaping up to be the largest climate rally in American history.

You've been a part of the Sierra Club's biggest successes. Find out more about how we're going to succeed.

At this point, there's no longer any question what President Obama should do. He should do everything he can. It is fair to ask, though, exactly what we think that is.

It's a lot. Here are five ways the president can lay the foundation today for a lasting legacy of climate action and clean energy:  

1. Hold fossil fuel polluters accountable for their pollution.
2. Reject proposals to import dirty fuels like tar sands and stop the rush of fossil fuel exports, including liquefied natural gas export facilities and new coal export terminals.
3. Double down on clean energy, with innovative financing and investment avenues for energy efficiency and renewable energy.
4. Protect communities from future climate disasters and plan a robust and just response for those that do happen.
5. Protect our lands, water, and wildlife from the impacts of fossil fuel development and climate disruption.

In the first months of his second term, President Obama will make many decisions that affect the climate future of this nation and the rest of the planet. We cannot afford to let him make the wrong ones. Join us in demanding that he take a stand and make tackling climate disruption a top priority of his second term.

 

Smarter Choices for Climate Solutions

Each year, $200 billion of our federal, state,and local tax dollars are spent on our transportation system. That money goes for everything from highways and bridges to public transit and bike lanes, and spending it wisely is one of our most powerful tools for fighting climate disruption.

Currently, our transportation system is heavily dependent on oil, which is our largest source of climate pollution -- roughly one-third of all U.S. carbon emissions. If we want to cut carbon pollution fast, moving beyond oil for transportation is an obvious strategy.

What's more, it's something Americans already support. More than 80 percent of us are in favor of improving bus and rail service, as well as more funding to make biking and walking safer. Actually, that's not so surprising when you consider that one in three Americans doesn't drive at all.  

Yet even though the number of vehicle miles traveled in America has gone down every year since 2004, the automobile still receives the lion's share of transportation funding. Bike commuting, meanwhile, grew 40 percent nationally between 2000 and 2010. In fact, biking and walking now account for 12 percent of all trips in the U.S., but they get only about 1.6 percent of federal transportation spending.

Transit ridership is up nationwide, too, but cash-strapped transit agencies are being forced to reduce service and raise fares. Meanwhile, low-income families without access to public transit can end up spending more than half of their budget on transportation.

By disproportionately spending our transportation dollars on roads and highways, we're creating hardship for people who can't or don't drive, while also subjecting those who do drive to unpredictable gas-price spikes and horrendous highway commutes. The simple solution is allocate our transportation dollars more sensibly. That means more funding for projects that improve and expand access to transit and alternative transportation -- and less for projects that will prolong our reliance on oil.

This week the Sierra Club released a report called "Smart Choices, Less Traffic: 50 Best and Worst Transportation Projects in the United States." It calls out both good and bad ways of spending our tax dollars. We've also put all 50 transportation projects on a Google map -- so you can see for yourself what's happening in your part of the country.

Examples of "smart" choices include:

• Expanding and electrifying light-rail systems across the county.
• Funding bicycle and pedestrian pathways.
• Repairing the tracks and improving the route of Amtrak in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Some "not so smart" choices:

• A 100-mile gravel road in pristine Northern Alaska that's being built to allow year-round access for oil and gas exploration.
• A highway in Virginia (the "Coalfields Expressway") that is essentially an excuse for a strip mine.
• A  two-mile long tunnel under downtown Seattle.

Bottom line: We already know how to build the kind of transportation infrastructure that will help America meet the challenges of the 21st century. Many communities -- highlighted in the "best" examples in this report -- are already doing exactly that.

But old habits die hard, and plenty of oil-intensive projects are still sucking up dollars that could be put to better use. Luckily, states now have more control over how federal transportation funds are spent. Write to your state's governor to demand a better transportation future that helps move us beyond oil.

Time to Stand Up for Families and the Environment

You've probably heard about the "fiscal showdown" in Washington, D.C., but you might not realize how it could affect the environment. The reality is that the entire environmental community has an enormous stake in the negotiations between Congress and President Obama.

If an agreement isn't reached in early 2013, then the so-called "sequester" or automatic budget cuts that would kick in would be a major setback for clean air and clean water. There would be an across-the-board 8.2 percent cut in virtually every national environmental program. Many of these programs and protections have already suffered deep cuts, but a sequester would mean even more budget woes for the agencies that keep our air, water, and land safe.

But even if a sequester doesn't happen, there is sure to be a lot of horse-trading on environmental issues that we hold near and dear. So we'll need to be on guard to defend against mostly Republican demands to cut environmental programs and domestic discretionary spending to serve their own agendas.

Another potential danger is that the massive bills that will be negotiated during the fiscal showdown could include anti-environmental amendments or "riders" -- pieces of legislation that have nothing to do with the task at hand. For example, one of our opponents in Congress could attach a rider to roll back mercury protections or to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing the Clean Air Act.

To make sure the environment has a voice at the table, the Sierra Club has joined with a broad coalition of more than 30 national progressive organizations, ranging from SEIU to the Center for Community Change and MoveOn.org to call on Congress and President Obama to put the interests of working American families ahead of those of fossil fuel corporations and the super-rich.

The core priorities of this coalition include many of the things we care most about: clean energy investment and job creation, investment in green transportation, and renewal of the Production Tax Credit for wind energy.

Both a healthy economy and a robust clean-energy economy begin with a strong middle class. But for the past three decades, the chips have been stacked against working families, while the super-rich got much, much richer. Everyone wants to see a prosperous economy, but working families and the middle class are the real engines of our economy. The economy moves forward when those folks have good jobs, can educate their kids, shop on Main Street, afford their health care, and retire in security.

We can make that vision a reality by building a clean-energy economy that works for everyone, but we have to get our nation's leaders to make the right decisions and resolve the fiscal showdown by investing in America. Instead of cutting critical environmental protections, public health services, and social safety net programs, we should be rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and developing a 21st-century electrical grid that will create jobs and save energy and money without polluting our air and water.

Rebuilding a strong middle class and creating a clean-energy economy won't happen by accident. It depends on making the right decisions as a nation. The problem, of course, is that those aren't the decisions that we've been making. Our leaders have kicked the big decisions further and further down the road while doling out more tax cuts to the super-rich and more tax loopholes for Big Oil and other corporate polluters. That's got to stop.

You can help. Let Congress know that now is the time to cut polluter subsidies -- not environmental programs.

Bicoastal Clean-Energy Leadership

Back in the dog days of 2010, when it became clear that Congress wouldn't be passing a climate bill, many people were frustrated and disappointed, including me. But as I wrote in Sierra magazine at the time, Congress's failure to act didn't mean we couldn't keep making progress on climate disruption. Lots of good things have been happening -- nationally, at the state level, and in our cities.

Last week, the mayors of our two largest cities showed exactly what I'm talking about.

I was honored to be invited to speak briefly at an event with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters and the Regional Plan Association in New York City to discuss the city's future after superstorm Sandy. Very few individuals are in Mayor Bloomberg's league when it comes to taking real, substantial action on climate disruption. Recall that during the last election it wasn't either of the candidates who brought climate to the forefront as an issue -- it was Mayor Bloomberg.

During last week's event, the mayor announced far-reaching plans for making New York City both better prepared for and more resilient to extreme weather events like Sandy. At the same time, he reiterated his strong support for moving beyond coal and promoting both clean energy and energy efficiency. It's been five years since the mayor announced PlaNYC -- a green-building initiative that is one of the most ambitious and successful climate action plans in the country. But New York is not the only city taking action. Mayor Bloomberg also currently serves as the chair for the C40, a group of more than 60 large cities across the globe that are working to reduce their carbon emissions. One out of every twelve people on the planet lives in a C40 city.

America's second largest city is also a member of the C40. Its mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, has set a goal of eliminating its use of coal power by 2020, while simultaneously increasing renewable energy to 40 percent . In keeping with that objective, yesterday the mayor announced that L.A. would commit to buying all of the energy produced by a major solar plant on the reservation of the Moapa Band of Paiutes in southern Nevada. The contracts are for enough energy to power 105,000 homes.

This is not only a big step forward for Los Angeles, which has been getting nearly 40 percent of its power from aging, out-of-state coal plants, but also good news for the Moapas, who have suffered far more than their share of the ill effects of coal power. Nevada's Reid-Gardner coal plant is practically in their backyard.

As Mary Anne Hitt, the directory of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, wrote:

This Moapa Solar project is one of two long-term solar purchasing agreements that, along with the CLEAN LA feed-in-tariff solar program, are designed to replace power from Arizona's Navajo Generating Station coal plant and put Los Angeles on a firm path to replace its use of coal with clean energy alternatives – energy efficiency, solar, wind, and geothermal.

In the long run -- and we're all in it for the long run -- no single "silver bullet" will solve the climate crisis. The good news, though, is that we have a clear objective to keep in our sights. All we need to do is keep moving away from dirty fuels and toward clean energy and sustainable transportation. How we do that is limited only by our imagination, our passion, and our resolve. All of those were on display in New York and Los Angeles last week.

You can see what's happening across the country on our Climate Comes Home "This Is What Change Looks Like" map. Check it out -- you can even add what's happening in your own city, neighborhood, school, business, or home.