The head of the Sierra Club is gearing up to fight the incoming Trump Administration’s anti-climate policies, while also building off support for clean energy jobs on the ground.
During the last Trump administration, the Sierra Club filed some 300 hundreds of lawsuits intended to fight back against efforts to gut environmental protections. It expects to file even more during the next.
“Our short-term strategy is to run our playbook from 2016,” executive director Ben Jealous told Forbes. Along with lawsuits, the nation’s oldest and largest environmental group plans to submit scores of Freedom of Information requests to find ties to fossil fuels and potential corruption among Trump’s incoming Cabinet members.
“We are gearing up aggressively to get ready to defend the United States against the corrupt individuals he will undoubtedly attempt to appoint as his Cabinet,” said Jealous, who was previously president of the NAACP and took charge of the Sierra Club in November 2022.
“That’s how we took out his EPA chief last time,” he said, pointing to how the group’s Freedom Of Information act requests helped expose former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s conflicts of interest. Among other things, he had enlisted aides to obtain special favors for him and his family. Pruitt, who was behind Trump’s first-term effort to aggressively rewrite environmental regulations, resigned in July 2018.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to again roll back environmental regulations, push more drilling for fossil fuels and cut resources to the EPA, pledges he made during 2015. But in his first administration Trump only partially made good on them, and then, under Biden, Congress passed historic legislation to fund the transition to a clean economy. This time could be different, and Jealous said Sierra is preparing to fight for climate with the tools it has to hold the president elect and his cabinet to account.
On Monday, Trump announced that he would nominate Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-New York), a die-hard supporter who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election, as head of the EPA. Zeldin has a score of just 14% from the League of Conservation Voters on his votes on environmental issues in his 15 years in Congress.
This time, Jealous said the Sierra Club’s concerns extend far beyond Trump’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency, and include possible appointees to the Departments of Energy and Labor, as well as the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service. “When you look at our concerns, which are, yes, the environment, and also the democracy that allows us to protect the environment, it’s hard to find a nominee that’s not relevant to us,” he said.
Meanwhile, the environmental group’s litigation department is lining up its strategy for the lawsuits to come. “Our bread-and-butter will be enforcing environmental protection,” Jealous said. “When you have Donald Trump in office, you’d be surprised how many CEOs quickly conclude that the laws no longer apply to them, and they are further emboldened by a very conservative Supreme Court. Our task is to remind them the Supreme Court doesn’t decide most cases and the law is still the law.”
Among the litigation it brought during the first Trump Administration was a 2019 suit against Trump for diverting billions of dollars to build his border wall, harming communities living at the border and endangering wildlife. In 2020, Sierra filed suit, along with other climate groups, over the Trump Administration’s plan to expand drilling, fracking and mining on 1.7 million acres of public lands in Colorado. The border wall suit was paused in 2021 after President Biden halted further construction. The Colorado suit reached a settlement in 2022 in which the Bureau of Land Management would reconsider lands open to oil and gas leasing and perform a new environmental impact statement.
Jealous said that the Sierra Club would also continue to look for ways to make climate progress with bipartisan partnership. As an example of what’s possible, he pointed to the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, which set aside funds to protect and maintain America’s national parks, during the first Trump Administration.
The group will also push ahead on its partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies to retire all of the United States’ coal plants. “This time, we will not be as polite as last,” he said, noting that if an energy company CEO talks about burning more coal under Trump, “we will make sure that every community understands that when a CEO talks that way they don’t care if you die.”
“There are a lot of places where people don’t know why they are struggling to breathe,” he said. “The solution is not another inhaler for your kid. It’s clean air for your family.”
While Trump, who has falsely called climate change a hoax, is widely expected to gut many Biden-era climate rules and to pull out of the Paris Accord, Jealous sees some reasons for hope in the factories and jobs being created in green industry and clean energy, the majority of which are in red states. “We understand that the deep divisions and toxicity in our politics cannot be explained without accounting for the fact that America has shut down 65,000 factories in the last 35 years,” he said.
He pointed to a new Qcells solar panel factory in Cartersville, Georgia, in the heart of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district, that joins an existing plant in nearby Dalton. “There will be 5,000 workers between the two sites,” he said. “You could assume the floor skews Republican like the district does.” Yet on a recent visit there, workers were excited about the plant and its green jobs, and a wall was plastered with kids’ drawings for Earth Day that depicted their parents as heroes saving the world, he said.
“Our agenda is more popular than either party and even the President himself,” he said, noting the group’s support in communities across the country and the widespread popularity of green jobs like those in the Georgia solar plants. “That is a big source of strength for us. That is why we were able to make progress the last time he was in office and will continue to do so this time.”
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