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Why We Withdrew Sponsorship from the Sierra Club’s Rally in Hartford, CT: Comfort Letter, Censorship, and Compromise!

A Statement by Capitalism vs. the Climate, April 21, 2016

We reluctantly withdrew our sponsorship from an April 20th rally against fracked-gas infrastructure in Connecticut, organized mainly by the Sierra Club. While we found actions by the national Sierra Club leading up to the rally to be inexcusable, this statement should not be seen as a criticism of the Connecticut state chapter or its volunteer members. We have reached out to the national Sierra Club and chapter staff and attempted to discuss our concerns regarding the rallies mentioned below in Bridgeport and Hartford, but we have only received evasive responses and claims that our concerns are misled.

The Sierra Club’s call for an April 20th rally against fracked-gas infrastructure in Connecticut said:

“…methane gas is worse at causing climate change than burning oil or coal, because methane produces more global warming than carbon dioxide does. We MUST convert to 100% renewable energy immediately”.[1]

But… the Sierra Club does NOT speak out against PSEG’s proposed fracked-gas plant in Bridgeport, CT.

The Sierra Club campaigned for several years against a coal plant in Bridgeport operated by PSEG. When PSEG offered to switch from burning coal to burning fracked gas, the Sierra Club decided to tacitly accept this awful compromise and not speak out loudly against construction of the gas plant, abandoning local residents and grassroots campaigners who wanted to keep fighting fracked gas. Of the Bridgeport residents who testified on the issue at city hall on February 1st, all but one of them strongly opposed the gas plant.[2]

The Sierra Club admits that they sent a “comfort letter” to PSEG in January that promised they will not take legal action against PSEG’s proposed gas plant.[3] To this day, the Sierra Club refuses to share a copy of the letter with local residents affected by the compromise.

The Sierra Club has also been censoring its own members who try to protest PSEG. According to an email we received from an executive committee member, the Connecticut chapter has been “muzzled” and “can only very quietly and not publicly fight the B-port gas plant.”[4]

  • Earlier this month, likely because of pressure from the national Sierra Club, the Connecticut chapter would not endorse an environmental justice rally organized by residents of Bridgeport. When the chapter did circulate an invitation to the event, they edited out the mention of “PSEG’s proposed fracked-gas plant” from the original event description.[5] Connecticut chapter members say the national Sierra Club pressured them to make such redactions.
  • Our press release on the February 1st public hearing (correctly) stated that “members of…the Connecticut Sierra Club also showed up to support Bridgeport residents fighting PSEG’s coal and gas power plants.”[6] Shortly afterwards, another member of the chapter’s executive committee emailed us and said that due to pressure they receive from the national Sierra Club, the chapter should not be publicly named as protesting the gas plant.[7]

We do not claim to speak for Connecticut Sierra Club members, and they have not asked us to make this statement. Nonetheless, looking in from the outside, we see the national organization interfering with local members who want to support Bridgeport residents fighting against environmental injustice. We see similarities to troubling instances in the past when the national Sierra Club has tried to silence principled chapters who dared to speak out against the Iraq War and against the greenwashing of Clorox.[8]

When it comes to Bridgeport, the Sierra Club’s silence and censorship reveals an ugly double standard. While the Sierra Club devotes resources to supporting campaigns against fracked-gas infrastructure in Connecticut’s wealthy and white communities, they will not vocally oppose fracked gas in the predominantly low-income, black and brown city of Bridgeport. Even if the Sierra Club’s legal agreement with PSEG was not motivated by racist intentions, we are concerned that the Sierra Club’s double standard, on where they will and will not protest fracked gas, could deepen Connecticut’s racial and class disparities in pollution. Since the Sierra Club would not endorse anti-gas testimonies and protest in Bridgeport, we could no longer in good conscience support the Sierra Club’s own anti-gas rally.

That’s not all… the Sierra Club kicked Beyond Extreme Energy out of the rally.

Beyond Extreme Energy (BXE) has been taking admirable direct action to stop fracking and plans to protest outside the homes of FERC’s pipeline rubber-stampers. BXE was originally one of the co-sponsors of the rally in Hartford. Against the wishes of the CT Sierra Club members, the national Sierra Club gave an ultimatum: either kick out BXE or the Sierra Club would withdraw their sponsorship (effectively canceling the rally). The Sierra Club believes (as stated in a conference call[9]) that BXE’s non-violent tactics are too confrontational… in fighting the biggest existential threat to our planet.

While non-violent home demonstrations are controversial, various campaigns have found the tactic very effective in the past (for example, in confronting animal cruelty and the logging of old growth forests[10]). The protests do not physically harm anyone, whereas the same cannot be said about high-level FERC officials who approve flammable fracked-gas pipelines in human and nonhuman communities and even adjacent to the Indian Point nuclear power plant, despite severe social, ecological, and climate risks.

It is appalling that a powerful Big Green group tried to use the Hartford rally to pressure BXE’s courageous campaigners into watering down their tactics. This is especially true at a time when a rapidly warming planet reminds us how insufficient (at best) the Big Greens’ prevailing tactics of compromise and capitulation have been. We believe that environmental organizations with different strategies and tactics should find ways to work together rather than take deliberate actions to exclude and marginalize activists. We felt that withdrawing from the rally was necessary in order to not be complicit in the exclusion of BXE.

The Sierra Club’s kind of green…

As mentioned earlier, the Sierra Club itself admits that fracked gas is not an acceptable bridge fuel. Some scientists say that fracked gas cooks the climate significantly more than coal and oil do. Surveying water contamination, air pollution and ecosystem destruction, a recent report by Environment America found that “fracking poses grave threats to the environment and public health”.[11]

We are concerned, therefore, that the Sierra Club has put money before social justice and climate protection. From 2007 to 2010, the Sierra Club took $25 million from the fracked gas industry. Since 2011, the Sierra Club has taken $80 million from the pro-fracking billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s fortune is managed by Willet Advisors, which according to BusinessWeek, “invests in real assets focusing on oil and natural gas areas.”[12] Because of this funding, it is not surprising to us that the national Sierra Club has been very slow to protest consistently against fracked gas.

Real solutions will not come from alliances with the richest 1%, no matter how much money they contribute. There is no time to waste compromising core values as the planet burns and communities of color suffocate.

 

[1] Sierra Club, “Rally for Renewable Energy,” http://www.sierraclub.org/connecticut.

[2] Capitalism vs. the Climate, “‘Fracked Gas is Environmental Racism’ Balloon Banner Released at Bridgeport, CT City Hall,” Earth First! Newswire, 2 February 2016, http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2016/02/02/fracked-gas-is-environmental-racism-balloon-banner-released-at-bridgeport-ct-city-hall/.

An email on 2 February 2016 from Martha Klein to the “CT Fracked Gas Pipeline Group” reported, “After nearly 20 Bridgeport residents spoke unanimously against the coal plant and the proposed gas plant, and were cut off immediately after two minutes, the City Council allowed two people to speak at length in favor of PSEG’s plan. One was Pastor [McCluster] of Bridgeport, an open advocate for more fracked gas, and the other was Sharon Lewis of CCEJ”.

[3] Phone call between representatives of the Sierra Club, Healthy CT Alliance, and Capitalism vs. the Climate, 12 April 2016.

[4] Email on 27 March 2016. Although there appears to have been a vote at the chapter level, this member later explained that the national Sierra Club presented the arrangement as a “fait accompli”. Email on 17 April 2016.

[5] Post on facebook.com/groups/207011239513, 30 March 2016.

For an account of the rally, see Capitalism vs. the Climate, “70 People Rally for Environmental Justice in Bridgeport,” 4 April 2016, http://capitalismvsclimate.org/2016/04/70-people-rally-for-environmental-justice-in-bridgeport/.

[6] Capitalism vs. the Climate, “Fracked Gas is Environmental Racism.”

[7] Email on 2 February 2016.

[8] Jeffrey St. Clair, “Torquemadas in Birkenstocks: The War Club,” Dissident Voice, 12 December 2002, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/StClair_SierraClub-War.htm.

Peter Montague, “Sierra Club Cleans House–With Clorox!,” Counterpunch, 28 March 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/28/sierra-club-cleans-house-with-clorox/.
[9] Rally planning conference call, 15 April 2016.

[10] “Brick by Brick: An Interview with scott crow,” Earth First! Newswire, 26 June 2014, http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/06/26/beltane-2014-feature-brick-by-brick-an-interview-with-scott-crow/.

“The SHAC Model: A Critical Assessment,” Crimethinc, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/rollingthunder/shac.php.

[11] Robert Howarth, “A bridge to nowhere: methane emissions and the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas”, Energy Science &  Engineering, 22 April 2014, http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/publications/Howarth_2014_ESE_methane_emissions.pdf.

Elizabeth Ridlington, Kim Norman, and Rachel Richardson, “Fracking by the Numbers: The Damage to Our Water, Land and Climate from a Decade of Dirty Drilling,” Environment America, April 2016, http://www.environmentamerica.org/reports/ame/fracking-numbers.

[12] Russell Mokhiber, “The Sierra Club Took Millions from Fracking Industry,” Counterpunch, 3 February 2012, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/03/the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-fracking-industry/.

Katherine Bagley, “Bloomberg Pours $30 Million More Into Fighting Coal,” Inside Climate News, 8 April 2015, http://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042015/bloomberg-pours-30-million-more-fighting-coal.

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 216, 235.

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