Today the Sierra Club welcomes the Antelope Valley Solar Projects in California, one of the largest planned solar projects in the U.S., as developer SunPower and owner MidAmerican Solar marked the start of major construction. The Sierra Club endorsed the project early on because it was planned and sited in a way that protected local plants and wildlife. The project location was chosen in strict accordance with conservation values, seeking to avoid harming wildlife or building new infrastructure. The projects are located on previously disturbed private land that did not have any threatened and endangered species. Although the project site is …

Can destroying a tropical rainforest be “sustainable”? Well, according to a decision taken yesterday by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the major industry-NGO body, this greatest of environmental crimes is now officially “green.” Palm oil plantations have driven the destruction of more than 30,000 square miles of tropical forest in Indonesia and Malaysia alone, pushing species like orangutans and Sumatran rhinoceroses and elephants to the edge of extinction. It’s the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Southeast Asia, and has propelled Indonesia to be the world’s third largest climate polluter behind only China and the United States. …

While the fight to end mountaintop removal coal mining is still far from over, we are celebrating today's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on a massive mountaintop removal project, the Spruce Mine. The court affirmed that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority under the Clean Water Act to veto mountaintop removal coal mining permits after they've been issued. This is a major milestone in the fight to end the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining. The Spruce Mine - the focus of this case - was the largest mountaintop removal permit ever proposed …

Earth Day highlights the need for a sustainable energy future, and experience suggests that there are only three meaningful choices for communities trying to increase local control of a greener energy future.  But the three policies – deregulation (“customer choice”), municipal aggregation (“city choice”), and municipal utilities (“city ownership”) – are not equal.  Two recent articles highlight the relative value of these policies quite clearly. The Citizens Utility Board (CUB) of Illinois, a nonprofit ratepayer advocacy organization, just released a report on the results of electricity deregulation and municipal aggregation. Deregulation or “Customer Choice” CUB didn’t think much of deregulation …

With Earth Day 2013 around the corner, it’s a good time to step back and see how we’ve been doing since the first Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million people took to the streets to protest rivers on fire, DDT-poisoned birds, sewage on beaches, and a devastating oil spill off the pristine Santa Barbara coast. Soon after, many of our basic national environmental laws were passed in direct response to this massive grassroots movement. Is there another wave of this activism coming? Since those early days, we have improved sewage treatment plants and banned DDT, but new threats to …

Every year the Goldman Environmental Prize committee selects an amazing group of winners from around the world to receive what is sometimes called the environmental Nobel prize - and I could not be more thrilled with their pick for North America this year: Kim Wasserman Nieto of Chicago, Illinois. Kim is a phenomenal environmental justice activist and mom from the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago. Her work with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) has been inspiring and ground-breaking. The Little Village community is primarily Latino, and is located next to one of the most notorious, polluting coal-fired power …

Just north of Delavan, Wisconsin, is Dan Osborne’s nursery farm. Where you once found a bean field now sit 80 solar panels on 100 tracking towers, generating renewable power for over 125 homes. It’s a small, but successful community-owned energy harvest.  The solar farm was developed by Convergence Energy of Lake Geneva, WI and has owners from all around the region. In an interview with John Farrell and Wade Underwood of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Steve Johnson of Convergence explained, “The genesis of the project from the beginning was to try and provide an offsite location for individuals interested …

Almost a decade ago, I was part of a group that lost a standby rate case with a Massachusetts utility, when the utility convinced the commission to approve a rate that would incentivize solar at the expense of combined heat and power (CHP). The package fractured the green coalition we’d assembled and the utility got to greenwash its terrible new rate. Yes, I’m still bitter. When the dust settled, I told friends on the solar side of our group that they shouldn’t celebrate too hard. The message wasn’t that utilities liked solar, but that they liked technologies that didn’t eat …

The 2012 Moapa Band of Paiutes "Walk from Coal to Clean Energy." Southern Nevada's Moapa Band of Paiutes are organizing a 16-mile "Walk from Coal to Clean Energy" on April 20, 2013 in concert with Earth Day. This walk will celebrate the tribe's efforts to retire the polluting Reid Gardner coal plant that adjoins their tribal lands, and also their success in developing the largest solar project on tribal lands in the nation, which will begin construction later this year. The walk will start at the coal plant and end at the solar site - a powerful symbol of change …

Hunger Striking for “An Extraordinary Climate Movement” By Ted Glick Brian Eister, 26, is a youthful veteran of 10 years of activism going back to his opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Since then he has worked with John Kerry’s presidential campaign, the League of Conservation Voters, the Green Party, Public Citizen, Occupy, and other groups. He is now on a hunger strike to urge immediate action to combat the disastrous effects of climate change. Camped out on the sidewalk in front of the American Petroleum Institute in Washington, D.C., he has not taken any food since before …