Kathryn Phillips Versus the Sierra Club
When it comes to fighting CO2 emissions, doing something meaningful to stop climate change, and reduce air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, it’s hard to find a better ally than the Sierra Club. Right now some of their most high profile work is involved in stopping fossil fuel supply. They’re leaders in the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, hoping to keep Alberta tar sands oil in the ground. They’re leaders in the fight against building new coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest in order to keep coal in the ground in Montana and Wyoming.
The Sierra Club also understands that it is equally important to reduce fossil fuel demand. For several years now the Sierra Club has been conducting a “Beyond Oil” campaign which is aimed at helping reduce demand for oil through steps that include new passenger rail lines. This includes high speed rail, which has been part of the Sierra Club’s national transportation policy for twenty years.
At the national, state, and local levels the Sierra Club has worked to implement that agenda. High speed rail is part of the Club’s Beyond Oil volunteer network plan. The Sierra Club was a leader in the effort to save Wisconsin’s high speed rail project in 2010 and 2011 when Scott Walker tried, and succeeded, in killing it.
Sierra Club California has also stood for high speed rail. In 2008 they endorsed Prop 1A to build the high speed rail project in part because of its role in reducing CO2 emissions:
Sierra Club supports Proposition 1A, which would provide $9.95 billion dollars to catalyze the development of the 800 mile High-Speed Rail (HSR) system, and to make improvements to existing rail networks. Building HSR in California will reinforce our cities as the hubs of our economies, promote sustainable land use, significantly reduce global warming pollution, and get commuters off congested roads and out of crowded airports. While it is an extremely expensive project, adding the same capacity by expanding highways and airports would cost at least twice as much.
Given the above background, it seems that Kathryn Phillips, Director of Sierra Club California, is out of step with her organization’s policies and goals. Her position, that HSR should not receive cap-and-trade funds because long-term CO2 emission reduction should not be a priority, flies in the face of the national Sierra Club’s positions and goals. It flies in the face of Sierra Club California’s previous support for the project. And it flies in the face of political reality.
If she succeeds in blocking the use of cap-and-trade funds for California HSR, she will hand the Tea Party a major victory and deal a huge blow to efforts to get beyond oil and reduce carbon emissions. It will become much more difficult to fund high speed rail in Congress and in California, shackling the state and the nation to more CO2 emissions and more fossil fuel burning to move cars and planes across the hundreds of miles that separate major metropolitan areas.
Phillips, locked in an austerity mindset that holds we only have so much money to go around, will not find that without HSR all those billions magically go to one of her other priorities. That money goes away, especially the federal stimulus money. Prop 1A bonds go away too. There’s no repurposing those for any other needs. That’s at least $13 billion that is flushed down the drain, billions that could have gone instead to CO2 reduction and moving California beyond oil.
Sierra Club members understand these things. And some of them aren’t happy about Phillips’ comments. After her public comments questioning Governor Jerry Brown’s use of cap-and-trade funds for HSR, I heard from several Sierra Club members, from across the state of California, expressing concern and in one case anger at what Phillips said. None of them wished to be quoted, and I understand that, though I hope they are sharing their concerns with their fellow Club members and not just with me. In fact, it was pointed out to me that Phillips was speaking only for herself, and that Sierra Club California had not taken any formal position on the governor’s proposal. The formal position of Sierra Club California on high speed rail remains one of support, for the reasons they gave in 2008 when endorsing Prop 1A.
It is my hope that the national Sierra Club, as well as others active in the organization and in California, take the opportunity to bring Phillips back into the fold of fighting oil consumption and fighting climate change, rather than watching as she uses the club’s good name to make common cause with the Tea Party.