Beyond Oil

Vision

1. Increase production and use of clean, highly efficient vehicles powered by sustainable, low carbon fuels and electricity, and better design communities to include access to convenient alternatives to driving.
2. Minimize the contribution of tar sands fuels to global warming pollution by helping to establish appropriate federal administrative policies, halting the industry's aggressive expansion plans, and creating a public movement away from dirty fuels and toward low-carbon fuels.
3. Permanently protect America's Arctic from additional threats posed by drilling and mining that could push wildlife over the brink.
4. In the Gulf Coast, monitor recovery efforts and restore public trust, ensuring independent, peer-reviewed science informs ecological restoration, and promote accountability of the oil industry through policy reform.

Campaign Achievements

• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Sierra Club to force the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases from new vehicles, under the Clean Air Act.
• The Sierra Club pushed for California's Pavley rules to be enacted by 13 additional states, representing 40 percent of the U.S. auto market. Pavley rules are much stronger than federal limits, reducing vehicular greenhouse gas emissions by 16.4 million metric tons. By 2020, phase two of the Pavley rules would reduce California greenhouse gas emissions by 31.7 million metric tons (69 percent more than the 18.8 million metric tons required under the federal rules in that year).
• In response to the Sierra Club and its allies' concerns about congestion, safety, and air quality in the Salt Lake City region, the Utah Transit Authority established a comprehensive transit plan, including a new light-rail system, to replace an earlier plan that would have allowed for a legacy highway.
• In opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline, our coalition partners secured an extra hearing in Washington, D.C., where we expected to be severely outnumbered by the pipeline supporters. However, the Sierra Club partnered with Friends of the Earth and together we turned out enough people from our community to counter the pro-pipeline testimony.
• We launched our Transportation Activists online network in September 2010, Sierra Club's front line of activists generating public demand for a 21st-century transportation system that moves beyond oil by reducing oil use, greenhouse gas emissions, and vehicle miles travelled.