By the Numbers

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3,000+: The number of youth environmental organizers trained by the Sierra Student Coalition's "Sprog." 

Grassroots pressure has forced Southern California air-quality managers to regulate emissions from warehouses, rail yards, and shipping facilities. Potential benefits: $2.7 billion in health-care savings, 300 deaths prevented, 5,800 asthma attacks averted.

Petrochemical storage tanks in West Virginia have been tightly regulated ever since a chemical spill in 2014 left 300,000 households without drinking water for days. This year, the oil and gas industry convinced the House of Delegates to roll the standards back. Twenty thousand phone calls and emails organized by the Sierra Club killed the effort in the state senate.

US coal-fired power plants shut down or with a hard retirement date: 345. Yet to go: 185.

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Alerts

"100 Percent B.S."

The plastic-bottle industry has been lying to consumers for years, telling them that their bottles are "100 percent recyclable." In fact, the US recycling system can handle only a quarter of the more than 100 billion bottles the industry produces each year. The Sierra Club and a group of California consumers are taking the bottlers to court to stop the lies.

» Read more: sc.org/bottle-bs

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Keep It in the Ground

The Biden administration said that it would pause new oil and gas leases on public lands, but leasing is still underway. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Representative Jared Huffman of California introduced a bill to ban them permanently.

» Take action: sc.org/in-the-ground

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Black Wall Street National Monument?

Sierra Club federal policy associate John Dunmore wrote a powerful piece advocating that Tulsa, Oklahoma's Greenwood District, a.k.a. Black Wall Street, be made a national monument—to "safeguard the historic place from further damage while formalizing its recognition in our history books so this kind of atrocity is never repeated."

» Read it: sc.org/bws

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Victories

Coal Towers

Among the latest coal-fired plants set to close: the Indian River power plant in Dagsboro, Delaware; the Will County Generating Station in Romeoville, Illinois; two units at Plant Daniel in Mississippi; three GenOn plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland; and the Rockport "super-polluter" plant in Indiana.

Millennium's End

The Supreme Court rejected a last-gasp effort by the coal industry to revive the proposed Millennium Bulk Terminals coal-export terminal in Washington State, signaling a decisive end to the project after 10 years of litigation by the Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program (ELP) and Earthjustice.

Blow to Alton Coal

After another decade-long legal struggle, the ELP and others have stopped Alton Coal's attempt to mine 30 million tons of coal on public lands 10 miles from Bryce Canyon National Park. Now, says Nathaniel Shoaff, senior attorney with the ELP, "the Biden administration has an opportunity to supersede past federal administrations' disregard for our public lands."

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Get Plugged In

Sierra Club members get free access to Sierra's digital edition. Just log in to My Account at sc.org/login. To receive action alerts about Sierra Club priority campaigns, visit sierraclub.org/take-action.

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Check It Out

Watch Family, a beautiful three-minute film about the deep cultural connection between wolves and Indigenous people—with an appeal to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to restore wolf protections under the Endangered Species Act: bit.ly/family-wolves.

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Chapter Corner 

DETROIT KIDS LEARN HOW TO CAMP

Did you know there's a campground in the middle of Detroit? It's a 17-acre natural area in Rouge Park called Scout Hollow, and thanks to a partnership between Detroit Parks and Recreation, the Sierra Club's Michigan Chapter and ICO program, and the Metro Detroit YMCA, local kids and families are learning how to camp there. The Detroit Outdoors program provides training and lends the necessary gear, greets and orients the families at Scout Hollow, and kicks off what may be the first of many camping experiences.

» Take action: sc.org/detroit-outdoors

STOPPING LINE 3 

In June, the Stop Line 3 Team from Minnesota's North Star Chapter organized Sierra Solidarity, a support effort to gather volunteers for the Treaty People Gathering. In what was the largest direct action against Line 3 to date, more than 2,000 people from all over the country stood together to put a halt to Enbridge's dirty oil pipeline. Construction activity was stopped for at least 30 hours while people blocked roads, locked themselves to machinery at a pump station, and camped overnight in sweltering heat at the spot where Line 3 would cross the Mississippi River. Indigenous water protectors and allies stood in the path of construction for eight days.

» Take action: sc.org/stop-line-3

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Campaign Updates

Happy 30th!

Hard to believe, but the Sierra Student Coalition turns 30 this year. The SSC is a network of young people, ages 14 to 35, organizing for climate, racial, and economic justice—with a special emphasis on training up a new generation of leaders. Originally it offered support to youths trying to shut down coal plants and promote renewable energy, often through the training program known as Sprog ("a cross between a boot camp for grassroots organizers and a coed slumber party"). More recently, the SSC has shifted to centering equity and justice, supporting BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) leadership, and tackling the intersection of climate change and systems of oppression.

You can watch a 15-minute video on the history of the SSC at sc.org/ssc-video. If you're an SSC alum, you can share your memories through the SSC's storytelling project, at sc.org/ssc-project.

» Read more: sc.org/ssc-30 

The Dirty Truth

The summer's wildfires, deluges, and heat waves remind us that the next decade is critical in the effort to decarbonize the US electricity sector and limit worse effects of climate chaos. Many US utilities are talking a good game about transitioning to clean energy—but are they doing it? The Dirty Truth, a new Sierra Club report, analyzes utilities' performances by three crucial metrics: retiring coal plants, stopping the construction of new gas plants, and building out clean energy facilities. Teaser: All those companies that have pledged "net zero" emissions? Their average score is only 20 out of 100. The average for companies that don't engage in greenwashing is 14, so you can see how much a utility's pledge is worth.

» Read more: sc.org/climate-pledges

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The Lookout is funded by the Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program (sc.org/law).