CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT, PART 51: SIERRA CLUB VS. SIERRA CLUB

[Geee]

Powerline

In recent years the Sierra Club has been agitating to close down a large coal-fired power plant in Arizona that the Navajo Indians run on their land. But guess what? This coal plant was built way back in the 1960s at the behest of . . . the Sierra Club. So naturally the Clubbers are currently suffering from 50 shades of liberal guilt.
Bill Corcoran, western regional director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, fesses up in a recent issue of the Club’s magazine, in “The Sierra Club’s Shadowy History With the Navajo Generating Station.”
When, in 2009, the Sierra Club launched a campaign pressing for the closure of the Navajo Generating Station, a massive power plant in the Four Corners region, the move seemed in line with the organization’s new priorities in the age of climate change. The Club’s Beyond Coal campaign was beginning to hit its stride in halting or retiring coal-burning power plants nationwide, and the Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal plant west of the Mississippi River and the seventh-largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, was a natural target. . .
With the Navajo Generating Station now on the verge of closing, this is a good time to step back and review the Sierra Club’s long, twisted history with the coal mines and power plants located on and near the Navajo Nation. In doing so, we can see how the environmental movement has frequently excluded, erased, and marginalized indigenous peoples and their struggles as it has sought to keep landscapes free of industrial exploitation. . .
It seems the Sierra Club put its weight behind a plan to build coal plants instead of more (carbon-free) hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River.