Sierra Club – Big Green At Its Worst

The Sierra Club is the oldest and most notorious environmental extremist group in the United States. It was founded in 1892 with the seemingly noble intention of preserving parkland in the United States, but over the years has warped into a force of intense environmental extremism. The organization has continually operated under an elaborate façade of feel-good conservationism, but behind the scenes, has increasingly adopted an underlying antihuman agenda while raking money in hand over fist. Following a steady annual increase, the group’s 2020 tax return showed contributions of over $140 million.

Shameful History

The Sierra Club’s history is littered with flagrant abuse of the law, collusion with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), shady financial dealings, stunning hypocrisy, and associating with animal liberationists, ecoterrorists, and eugenicists. Through their incessant litigation, the Sierra Club has been responsible for countless limitations and outright bans of allowed land usage. This has added a heavy and unnecessary burden on our nation’s food producers and consumers.

The Green New Deal Globalist Movement

The Sierra Club’s mission to “save” the environment mirrors the visions of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. At its core, this vision is nothing more than the dismantling of the foundations of modern mankind’s progress and prosperity.

Unsurprisingly, the Sierra Club proudly champions the Green New Deal. They even have an entire section on their website promoting the initiative. An article by the Competitive Enterprise Institute stated:
“…we can conclude that the Green New Deal is an unserious proposal that is at best negligent in its anticipation of transition costs and at worst is a politically motivated policy whose creativity is outweighed by its enormous potential for economic destruction.”

The Sierra Club advocates for the United States transitioning to using solely “green” energy, with campaigns such as “Beyond Coal,” “Beyond Natural Gas,” and “Beyond Oil,” referring to them as “dirty” energy. The problem is that green energy simply cannot meet the needs of our society.

Opposes True “Clean Energy”

The Sierra Club isn’t just out to end the use of fossil fuels. They also oppose nuclear power and large-scale hydropower which are some of the cleanest ways to produce electricity. Currently, the so-called green energy sources that the Sierra Club promotes contribute less than 13% of the total energy in the United States. The following graphic is from the University of Michigan and breaks down our current energy sources.

“They’re cheating themselves if they keep believing this fiction that all we need is renewable energy such as wind and solar,” stated James Hansen, a former NASA climate change scientist to the Associated Press.

Abuse of the Law

We have previously written about how the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) is abused by extremist groups. They often utilize “sue and settle” tactics to advance their agendas and pad their coffers with taxpayer funds. The EAJA allows groups to sue entities like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the United States Fish and Wildlife (USFW) for taking too long to issue a regulation, classify an animal, or for missing a legal requirement. One of the tactics used by these groups is to flood agencies with requests so that there is no ability to meet time requirements.

In those cases, the EPA or other government agencies can either go to court to defend themselves or come to a settlement. In many cases, consent agreements are issued to settle cases on the very same day that lawsuits are filed. Then, according to the Equal Access to Justice Act, attorney fees are paid by the federal government. The bottom line is that US taxpayers are paying for these nefarious lawsuits and the NGOs are cashing in.

Between 1995 and 2010, taxpayers reimbursed the Sierra Club over $960,000, according to a 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office.

Sierra Club Works to Limit Food Production

Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug is widely recognized as a founder of the green movement, but even he recognized how the actions of environmental extremist groups hinder the ability to feed the world’s population. Such actions have dire consequences.

Borlaug once stated in a speech:
“I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well-advanced in the research pipeline — to feed a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology. Extremists in the environmental movement from the rich nations seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks.”

The Sierra Club has historically worked to limit advances in food production technology, such as GMO/GEOs, that help feed the world’s growing population. Their website states:
“We call for a ban on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all GEOs into the environment, including those now approved, pending improved regulatory procedures and safety testing. Releases should be delayed until extensive, rigorous research is done which determines the long-term environmental and health impacts of each GEO and there is public debate to ascertain the need for the use of each GEO intended for release into the environment.”

Environmental extremists have fought to stop the development and use of golden rice, which was created to help eliminate a severe vitamin A deficiency in poverty-stricken regions of the world. Vitamin A deficiency is can cause blindness and is the main cause of preventable blindness in children.

In December 2021, an opinion piece published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA expressed that, “20 years after Golden Rice was first obtained by Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, the tragedy we face is that this brilliant scientific success is opaqued by regulatory delays that have only led to a perpetuation of immense grief and huge losses in terms of preventable deaths, with no reported apparent benefits to consumers or the environment brought about by the over-precautionary stance of the authorities involved in the decision-making process.”

Shady Offshore Financial Dealings

Historically, a great number of donations to the Sierra Club have come from other like-minded organizations, specifically the Sea Change Foundation, the Energy Foundation, and the Tides Foundation. Tens of millions of dollars of those funds have first been shuffled through offshore shell accounts.

A Bermudan company named Klein Ltd donated $23 million to the Sea Change Foundation over a period of several years; those funds were then distributed to groups like the Sierra Club which received a total of $5.45 million in 2012 alone. One of the areas of focus listed on Sea Change’s website is “Utility Transformation in the Interior West,” and the “rapid decarbonization” of the energy system.

According to Ron Arnold, author of Undue Influence:
“Wealthy Foundations, Grant-Driven Green Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future, a significant number of extremist groups have chosen to establish accounts and foundations in countries such as Bermuda, Panama, and Liechtenstein in order to hide the origin of contributions. This creates a way for more mainstream organizations to donate to radical causes without a money trail.”

“Bermuda boasts an entire building devoted to plagues of lawyers handling secret trusts that funnel personal wealth into foundations which fund non-profit operations in the United States.”

Considering the Sierra Club’s track record of litigation and the use of “sue and settle” tactics, it’s easy to see how illicit financial dealings are utilized to help shape policy around the green/globalist agenda.

Ecoterrorists & Eugenicists

Somehow, the Sierra Club has maintained a largely favorable perception in the public eye, but a deeper look into the group’s evolution over the years proves that it’s something much different than how it portrays itself. While many may disregard the idea that the green/globalist movement supports worldwide depopulation, the Sierra Club’s history shows us otherwise.

In the 1950s and 60s the Club began to veer severely from its basic founding principles, under the leadership of radical extremist, David Brower. Brower served as the first executive director of the Sierra Club and during his 17-year tenure membership numbers grew from 7,000 to 70,000. It’s highly troubling to note that Brower actively advocated for a type of eugenics, stating:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license… All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

Another statement from Brower illustrates just how environmental extremist groups are intertwined, demonstrating even further why “mainstream” groups like the Sierra Club cannot be trusted.

“The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable,” said Brower.

It should be reiterated that, by utilizing off-shore accounts, the Sierra Club can surreptitiously fund the network of more radical extremist groups such as Earth First!, while still appearing respectable in the public eye.

Animal Extremist Pirates

The Sierra Club descended deeper into extremism with the 2003 election of Paul Watson, a proponent of domestic terrorism, to the board of directors. In 1977, Watson founded the ultra-extremist group: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. This was after he was kicked out of Greenpeace for openly advocating violence for the sake of animals and the environment. His group was known for terrorizing the fishing industry and were declared “pirates” by the Chief Judge of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

Watson was quoted as saying, “There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write the history,” and “We should never feel like we’re going too far in breaking the law because whatever laws you break to liberate animals or to protect the environment are very insignificant.”

In the Dec 1982 volume of Access to Energy he said, “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.”

Further demonstrating the anti-human mentality, Watson was also quoted as saying that his personal number one commandment was, “Don’t bring any more humans into being. There are enough of us.”

Racism, Energy Access, and Sheer Irony

During the racial tensions of recent years, the Sierra Club has come under fire for the alleged racist views of its founder John Muir. Muir was associated with Henry Fairfield Osborn, the founder of the American Eugenics Society, which considered non-white people to be inferior. Other members and leaders in the club’s history were known racists and eugenicists, namely Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan.

To its credit, the Sierra Club has publicly denounced the actions and philosophies of these past members. They are claiming to work to address and resolve what is perceived by some to be a drastic racial imbalance in environmental activism. However, they have perhaps overcompensated by adopting “social justice” causes alongside “environmental justice.”

An article written by Hop Hopkins, the Sierra Club’s Director of Organizational Transformation, is shared on the Club’s website with the title reading, “Racism Is Killing the Planet: The ideology of white supremacy leads the way toward disposable people and a disposable natural world”.

One of the issues described in the article is that many poverty-stricken minority communities are “sacrifice zones” which are disproportionally affected by pollution, such as “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana. “When a kid in East Oakland gets asthma from car pollution because her neighborhood is surrounded by freeways, that is white supremacy,” the article claims. Further, “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can’t have disposable people without racism.”

Sierra Club’s Own Policies Would Devastate Minority Communities

The Sierra Club’s newly minted grandstanding surrounding minority communities and the environmental and health impacts turns out to be hypocrisy at its finest. Their fanatical opposition to traditional energy sources would drastically and disproportionately harm the residents of those very same “sacrifice zones” by denying them access to abundant, affordable energy.

Aside from the stress, physical discomfort, and sheer danger that the lack of energy causes communities, it has been estimated by energy research firm, Wood Mackenzie, that the cost of the U.S. power sector “going green” would be approximately $35,000 per household.

In addition to making energy unaffordable to low income families, the Sierra Club is simultaneously working toward the dissolution of modern agricultural systems. This is the eradication of an entire working culture of American food producers. It appears that farmers and ranchers are people that the Sierra Club wants in a “sacrifice zone.”

The watchdog group Activist Facts perhaps put it best:
“Once dedicated to conserving wilderness for future human enjoyment, the Sierra Club has become an anti-growth, anti-technology, anti-energy group that puts its utopian environmentalist vision before the well-being of humans.”

What Can You Do

Watching extremist organizations bring in hundreds of millions of dollars each year can be overwhelming when trying to fight back, but hope is not lost. Protect The Harvest is working to protect your rights by informing and responding to issues brought about by groups like the Sierra Club.

It is up to you to get involved and do your part to save our country. Learn more about how you can do your part and protect your rights on our website.

Links:

Read more about the extremist environmentalist’s war on energy and food security HERE

Read about the other activities of environmental extremist groups HERE

Information about how to protect our lifestyle and livelihood HERE