It's Not Easy Being Green: Are Some of the Biggest Enviro Groups Giant Sell-Outs?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/its-not-easy-being-green-are-some-biggest-enviro-groups-giant-sell-outs



About a year ago, on March 26, 2012, Sandra Steingraber, an environmental writer and activist against natural-gas fracking, wrote a public letter titled “Breaking Up with the Sierra Club.” Breakups are never easy, and the letter, published on the website of the nature magazine Orion, was brutal from the start: “I’m through with you,” Steingraber began.

The proximate cause of the split was the revelation that between 2007 and 2010 the nation’s oldest environmental organization had clandestinely accepted $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries associated with Chesapeake Energy, a major gas firm that has been at the forefront of the fracking boom. “The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison,” Steingraber wrote. “It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.”

In 2010, the club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, stopped taking Chesapeake Energy’s cash. Brune also made the decision to come clean with the revelation and express regret for his predecessor’s lack of better judgment. “We never should have taken this money,” Brune wrote in response to the breakup letter.

But to Steingraber and many others, the betrayal had been done.

[pscot]

1. Aubrey McLendon is evil incarnate

I guess that makes the Sierra Club his minion.

[hunter]

2. Yes, sadly, most of them.

Money changes everything.

It doesn't seem to take much money to change an idealist into a green-washer, or to shut the radicals out.

The "natural" gas industry seems to be particularly good at this. They've essentially bought public radio and television in the USA and are the primary supporters of alternative energy in popular media. (Example: GE sells both wind turbines and the natural gas turbines required to back them up. Win/win profits for GE, but an overall loss for the environment.)

Most of this isn't any kind of dark conspiracy, it's simply big business doing what big business does. It is amoral. A virus.

Unfortunately many large environmental organizations begin to follow the business model that is branded into our psyches as the children of big business, and these environmental organizations become amoral themselves, becoming more focused upon their growth as corporate entities, rather than the original goals of their founders.

[GliderGuider]

6. The problem is, you can't get the money to operate a large org without a business model

And the only kind that the people with spare money understand is the kind they already know - the kind that let them get that spare money in the first place. It's the way the whole game is built and played. And the instant a reformist organization accepts that fact, the jaws of the trap snap shut and the rest of the money players come in to feed. The bigger, fatter and stronger such an organization becomes, the more attractive a meal it becomes for the predators. The money guys are after one of two outcomes: co-opt or neutralize. You can join Lovins, Brand and Lynas in the spotlight, or you can expire with a whimper in the darkness of obscurity - it doesn't matter to them which you choose.

Nothing personal, you understand - it's just business...

[hunter]

7. That was my experience with the Sierra Club, various anti-nuclear groups, and Arco Solar.

Once you put the check in the bank you begin to lose your way.

Now I'm just a guy on the internet watching the world go by.

The truck in my driveway is broken and my kid is driving the car that's eight years older than he is to work.

There's a dog sleeping on the floor near my feet and just like her it's my good fortune this moment to simply be.

[bananas]

3. "the important split is...between people are who thinking in planetary terms and people who are not"

“I think the important split is actually between people are who thinking in planetary terms and people who are not,” Steffen, the futurist, told me.

And there are those of us, like Elon Musk, who are thinking in multi-planetary terms.

[Kolesar]

4. Steingraber's full of shit

The Sierra Club has accomplished a hell of a lot before and after Michael Brune took over, which contrasts with her teeny accomplishments.

[wtmusic]

5. "...utility-scale solar stations...that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness"

“I feel like the community has splintered,” says Chris Clarke, a writer in Joshua Tree, California, and a co-founder of the group Solar Done Right, which has battled the construction of utility-scale solar stations in the Mojave Desert that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness. “Some people are unwilling to call themselves ‘environmentalists’ because ‘environmentalist’ has now come to mean climate-change mitigation at any cost.”

People are noticing that renewables' footprint is not so renewable.