Posts by Carl Pope

Carl Pope was appointed Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1992. A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Mr. Pope has been with the Sierra Club for nearly thirty years.

The $4 Moment
Posted by Carl Pope, Huffington Post on June 9, 2008 at 3:27 PM.

San Francisco -- National gasoline prices hit $4/gallon last week.  And the last of the auto industry's chickens came home to roost. General Motors closed four more assembly plants that had been making trucks and SUVs and said it might dump its Hummer brand.

This brings the total (and avoidable) economic carnage from Detroit's unwillingness to modernize its fleet a decade ago to 35 assembly plants and 35 parts manufacturers in just three years. The industry now concedes that consumer preferences have changed "irrevocably."

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer lambasted the industry and the government, pointing out that by letting the oil market, instead of preventive taxes and regulation, end the SUV era, we committed economic suicide: "Unfortunately, instead of hiking the price ourselves by means of a gasoline tax that could be instantly refunded to the American people in the form of lower payroll taxes, we let the Saudis, Venezuelans, Russians and Iranians do the taxing for us -- and pocket the money that the tax would have recycled back to the American worker."

Krauthammer doesn't agree with us about the need for fuel-efficiency standards -- he thinks that gas taxes alone would have done the job. But his basic point is right. We're now transferring to petro-states hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we could have kept at home. We're also stuck with a whole decade's worth of gas-guzzling vehicles that no one can afford to drive and that will almost certainly remain a major drag on millions of household budgets for years to come.

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What's Right with Kansas
Posted by Carl Pope, Huffington Post on May 5, 2008 at 3:43 PM.

Topeka, KS -- Well, King Coal did its best. The insiders in the Kansas political world huffed and puffed. The Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives kept a vote open for two hours while the coal industry's allies tried desperately to bludgeon four more members into voting to override Governor Kathleen Sebelius's veto of a bill denying the state's chief health officer the right to block coal-fired power plants. And when the votes couldn't be found to override the veto, some legislators threatened to hire a private lawyer with public money to sue the health office for exceeding his authority. (The coal companies, of course, have ample resources to sue on their own -- and it's unlikely that funding for the mammoth Sunflower proposal would still be alive by the time any lawsuit ended.)

But none of it worked. Kansas citizens have spoken out.The Sierra Club chapter in the state organized day and night for weeks and, instead of getting closer to a veto override, the coal forces got further away.

The initial assault by the coal industry was an ad featuring pictures of Hugo Chavez, Iran's President Ahmadinejad, and Vladimir Putin, claiming that if Kansas couldn't build the Sunflower coal plant, it would be forced to import natural gas from these three despots. Since Kansas produces no coal, but a lot of natural gas (and actually exports gas to other states), these ads didn't go down very well. And the campaign got even more frenetic as it became clear that Sebelius was going to make her decision stick. Here's a sample quote from One newspaper story on why Kansas said no to coal:

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John McCain Should Be Ashamed of Himself
Posted by Carl Pope, Sierra Club on February 12, 2008 at 10:38 AM.

Washington, DC -- I have just listened to carefully coached staff members for Senator John McCain lie repeatedly about the Senator's failure to show up and vote on the first Senate economic-stimulus package, which included tax incentives for clean energy. I am in a state of shock not because of the Senator's vote, although that disappointed me, nor over his desire to avoid public accountability for that vote -- that's politics. But to carefully coach your Senate staff (I assume the Chief of Staff, not the Senator, was the author of this shameful performance) in how to mislead callers in such depth is appalling, and surprising, because it was almost certain to be found out.

Here's how it played out:

McCain lands at Dulles last wednesday. He has time to get to the Senate to vote on cloture on the expanded economic-stimulus package, which includes clean-energy incentives. But he doesn't show up, musing on the plane as it landed that  ''I haven't had a chance to talk about it at all, have not had the opportunity to, even ... We've just been too busy, focused on other stuff. I don't know if I'm doing that. We've got a couple of meetings scheduled.''  (For the record, fellow candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did find time to make up their minds).

McCain doesn't vote. The expanded stimulus package gets 59 votes, one short of what is needed for it to proceed to the Senate Floor. The next day a stripped-down version of the stimulus bill, minus clean energy, is brought to a vote. McCain votes for it; the bill passes.

The Sierra Club sends out an alert: "Where was John McCain on clean energy?" and asks people to call the Senator's office.

Immediately, people begin calling and emailing me, saying, "The Senator's office says he voted for clean energy, and that your alert is wrong." We check. He didn't. We call his office. Stunningly, his staff has been coached to mislead callers. "That's not true at all," they say, "he voted for the bill yesterday." Well, he voted, yesterday, but for a different bill. However we phrase the question, we get a lie. "No, if he had voted for the bill, it would not have passed. That was purely procedural." But McCain's staff knows that if cloture had been invoked, passage of the bill would then only require 51 votes, and the bill with clean energy would have passed.

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