Compass

The Sierra Club supports protecting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act from Kristen E on Vimeo.

Currently, the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is being challenged before the United States Supreme Court. The Voting Rights Act is critically important legislation that ensures  no federal, state, or local government may impede people from registering to vote or voting because of their race or ethnicity.  

On February 27, voices from around the country spoke out in support of keeping this vital piece of civil rights legislation intact in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The Sierra Club stands with these efforts, the NAACP, and other organizations working to protect the Voting Rights Act and to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to have their voices heard on the issues that matter to them -- whether it is keeping our air and water clean or securing a better future for our children.

 -- Kristen Elmore, Sierra Club Media Team

Three out of every four new mobile phone subscribers are now in the developing world. This monumental shift has created a unique population of hundreds of millions of off-grid mobile phone users who don't have access to basic necessities like energy or water, let alone essential services like banking. Thanks to mobile phones, however, they have access to a distributed infrastructure through machine to machine technology (M2M) that can enable access to these vital services. That's what new GSMA research is telling us, and the implications are too exciting to ignore. 

 

Let's start with the basics. The rural poor lack access to just about everything. From basics like energy and water to inclusion in the financial system, their lack of "connectedness" to the world inhibits their escape from poverty. Until now the solution to this problem was to invest large sums in centralized infrastructure to enable it to extend out to these communities. The problem is this approach is not only top down and ineffective it also is really expensive and contributes to problems of corruption, mismanagement, and environmental degradation. But mostly, it just hasn’t worked.

Mobile phones have famously bypassed traditional infrastructure efforts to enable connectivity to even far-flung communities through the creation of a distributed network of off-grid cell phone towers. This distributed infrastructure flies in the face of decades of traditional policymaking and its squandered investments. More importantly it offers opportunities to change course that entrepreneurs, NGOs, and policymakers must seize.

It's hard to catch a president whose travel schedule is always up in the air. But that didn't discourage Georgia activists from greeting President Obama during a recent last-minute stop in Atlanta.

Mere days after President Obama used strong words to address the climate crisis in his State of the Union address, organizers and activists mobilized quickly after Beyond Coal campaign leaders learned about the president's pit stop, turning out more than 30 people to a rapid-response text message.

Nearly half the responders -- "mostly first time action takers" according to Sierra Club Conservation Organizer Seth Gunning -- gathered to make signs, buttons, and banners beforehand. Then more than three dozen activists showed up to greet the president at his Decatur, Ga., visit.

The goal was to urge the president to make good on his promise to take immediate, strong action on climate disruption. During his State of the Union address, Obama said, "We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science, and act before it's too late."

While I loved every one of the thousands of faces I saw at Sunday's massive Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C., I was especially inspired by the huge number of young people who trekked in from across the nation, carrying signs and banners, chanting and cheering along with the speakers.

Amid the crowd close to 50,000, I even bumped into some students from my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, representing the student environmental group I co-founded there twenty years ago, Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville. SPEAK brought 30 students to the rally, and few of them snapped this photo with me and Quentin James, director of the Sierra Student Coalition (as well as my daughter Hazel, who was a frozen popsicle by that time and none too happy about it, as you can tell).


These UT students are among thousands of young leaders nationwide that have done incredibly impressive clean energy organizing on their campuses in recent years, winning campaigns that call upon administration officials to move beyond coal and showcase their universities as innovators and leaders.

Students have won campaigns to retire one-third of the remaining on-campus coal plants nationwide, through the Campuses Beyond Coal campaign. And now, on dozens of campuses from coast to coast, students have launched campaigns to divest their college endowments from coal and other fossil fuels, and re-invest in clean energy. 

This weekend, over 160 of those student leaders are coming together for the first ever national student divestment convergence to strategize, build their movement and learn from one another.

The massive Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C. last weekend bears a significant relationship to the ongoing negotiations for a trade agreement spanning the Pacific Rim, but pointedly excluding China.

The Obama administration is in the closing stages of negotiating an agreement with 10 other countries, with others hoping to join, that dwarfs any previous U.S. trade agreement since we joined the World Trade Organization. It’s bigger than NAFTA (the North America Free Trade Agreement) and it now includes both Mexico and Canada. Its environmental, social and political significance will probably be greater than the World Trade Organization, as the expansion of the scope of that organization has stalled.

The Sierra Club has chosen to make energy a key element in its deep concern about the emerging Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact. Click here for more. Currently, the U.S. enjoys a surplus of natural gas, which has driven down producer prices. Export of that surplus is seen by the industry as the solution, as they are in a “use it or lose it” bind. Currently, export of natural gas is tightly controlled by the federal Department of Energy, but if the TPP agreement goes through, its likely provisions would prevent the U.S. from such restrictive enforcement rules, much to the joy of the industry. Suddenly, any restrictions on petroleum exports could vanish, and many Pacific Rim countries would be more than happy to buy what we couldn’t refuse to sell. The same situation would apply to other hydro-carbons, some of which, such as coal, we have in abundance.

After a weekend during which tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and demand solutions to the climate crisis, the American Petroleum Institute (API) is touting a one-sided poll they claim shows Americans supporting the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

However, a closer look at their poll questions unveils a biased survey which failed to equip respondents with the basic facts of the project before asking them to form an opinion. Instead, API crafted a poll to ensure they got the types of answers they were looking for by totally ignoring the environmental and economic realities of the toxic pipeline from Canada.

How many messages do you need to leave before they get the hint?

One can only wonder what Big Coal is thinking after more than 124,000 comments poured onto the desks of decision-makers who will be overseeing an environmental impact statement concerning a massive coal exporting scheme that would alter Washington state's coastline and send countless coal trains through people's neighborhoods.

The issue surrounds Cherry Point, where SSA Marine wants to build an export terminal that would connect the coal mines of Powder River Basin with energy-hungry East Asia.

It's one part of a larger plan to open up the coastline to coal exports and completely reverse any progress on the climate crisis. It would send millions of tons of coal each year through Washington communities and farmland, clogging up rail lines and roads and leaving coal dust behind.

Despite President Obama's commitment to tackle climate change, the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Exim) President Fred Hochberg continues to underwrite some of the world's largest and most destructive fossil fuel ventures. He has personally overseen financing for massive coal projects coal projects in South Africa and India. But the Bank has run up against a determined international resistance to its most controversial project to date – a pair of coal mega mine and export terminals that would ship millions of ton