The Sierra Club's Big Disgrace

There has been a lot of talk about the Sierra Club's opposition to Proposition 7. No doubt, PG&E, Southern Cal Edison, and Sempra were positively giddy when a Sierra Club member agreed to star in a commercial for them, hoping to signal the death knell on new clean and renewable energy requirements from Prop 7.

Of course, I and readers of this blog know that Sierra Club has certainly done its share of corporate greenwashing in the past. So it wasn’t too surprising to learn that the Sierra Club member who was willing to go on a Utility Funded no on prop 7 commercial, Liz Merry, works for the Big Utilities. All of them.

You see – the Big Utilities’ darling Sierra Club star is the sole proprietor of a solar consulting firm called Verve Solar. Her client list includes a utility industry association called the Solar Electric Power Association, whose members include all of the key utility energy players in California - PG&E, Edison, SDG&E, LADWP, SMUD, and many of the municipally owned utilities. It also contains Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, two nationwide Big Utility lobbying groups, and major supporters of "clean coal" and nuclear.

Sometimes I wonder how these people – the Ralph Cavanaghs, V. John Whites, and Liz Merrys of the ‘environmental world’ can sleep at night, willingly putting their green stamps on the Big Utilities dirty energy agenda.

No wonder this has been said about the Sierra Club:

“When Muhammad Ali stated, “Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision”, he obviously wasn’t referring to the green beltway boys. Sierra Club visionaries like John Muir and David Brower must be in heaven looking down sadly as nature is dismantled, aided and abetted by its own proclaimed stewards.”