Carl Pope was appointed Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1992. A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Pope has been with the Sierra Club for more than thirty years.
Pope is co-author -- along with Paul Rauber -- of Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book."
Oil Execs Don't Offer Better Ideas The cold hard facts are that the world needs, desperately, to burn less, not more, oil. The initial postings from oil industry spokespeople on this blog don't look very promising for the idea of a compromise over energy and climate legislation -- at least with the oil industry. The cold hard facts are that the world needs, desperately, to burn less, not more, oil -- and that the US with only 3% of the world's oil reserves cannot expect, affordably, to continue to burn 25% of its annual production of oil. Nor can thise… Read more
Passing Both In Tandem Is Crucial We need both, we need them both quickly, but we need for them to work in harness. Any sensible plan to develop an innovative low-carbon, clean energy economy needs four elements: 1) An investment strategy to develop, scale and bring down the price of new clean energy technologies. 2) A set of market reforms designed to ensure that cost-effective clean energy solutions are not slowed down or denied market access by institutional barriers or the resistance of incumbent energy sector players with assets invested in the fossil fuel sector. 3) Incentives or mandates… Read more
20 Percent 'Alarmingly Unaggressive' It won't do as much as it should to jump-start the clean energy revolution we need for economic recovery. It's really quite amazing. The main response at Tuesday's opening hearing of the Senate Environment Committee on the Clean Energy Act was that its 2020 goal -- a 20% reduction in US emissions of greenhouse pollution -- was over-the-top ambitious. Senators both Republican and Democratic expressed grave concern that it would somehow tank the economy. In fact, its somewhat alarmingly unagressive, and won't do as much as it should to jump-start the clean energy revolution we… Read more
Scrutinizing Low-Level Waste Representative Barton ought to know – in the case of the nuclear revival, waste disposal is a big elephant in the living room. Let us,for the moment, ignore the problem of storing high level waste – the stuff we don’t know what to do with and thought we could just dump at Yucca Mountain. Let’s look at low level waste – which in theory we ought to be able to take care of. And let us decide if we can really entrust nuclear energy to the nuclear industry and its allies like Barton. Andrews County, Texas, down the… Read more
Sadly -- and in spite of the introduction of the Clean Energy Act in the Senate, which the Sierra Club strongly supports -- once again the US has slipped into the back of the Pack on energy and climate reform leadership. But happily we did so because countries like India, China and Japan leapfrogged us, taking big steps while we were inching our way forward with small ones. Japan announced a commitment to 25% cuts below 1990 levels in its already very efficient economy. India introduced legislation with government support that would place limits on its carbon emissions, and China… Read more
Related Link: http://www.sierraclub.org/carlpope
