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One of the Sierra Club’s most powerful tools for protecting people and the planet is the rule of law. When the Trump administration or a corporate polluter comes after the air we breathe, the water we drink, our public lands, or our climate, we challenge them in court. In 2019, our Environmental Law Program worked harder than ever—and won significant victories in the fight to advance a clean energy future and stop dirty energy projects that threaten progress on climate change.
Here are just some of the legal team’s accomplishments from the past year. For more information and updates on current cases, visit the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program.
- The Sierra Club has successfully challenged several of the largest oil and gas pipelines proposed in the United States. The Atlantic Coast pipeline was stopped in its tracks when a federal court determined that the pipeline owners had no authority to build across the Appalachian Trail. Facing multiple successful legal challenges from the Sierra Club and others, Mountain Valley Pipeline halted construction along the entire 303-mile route of its fracked-gas pipeline project. And following the Trump administration’s effort to pull the permitting of the Keystone XL pipeline away from the State Department, we sued the Army Corps of Engineers for granting the pipeline stream-crossing permits when the environmental impact statement ignored the risks from oil spills.
- The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Sierra Club's challenge to weak and outdated rules governing how much toxic discharge coal-fired power plants were allowed to dump in waterways. This represents a big victory for our drinking water, because coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of toxic water pollution in the country.
- In Montana, a federal judge agreed with us that the Trump administration’s Interior Department had illegally lifted a moratorium placed on new coal-mining leases on public lands.
- We joined lawsuits to oppose continued oil and gas exploration and leasing in the Arctic. We teamed up with the Native village of Nuiqsut and conservation groups, represented by Earthjustice, to challenge the BLM’s decision to approve exploratory drilling program in the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska. We also helped stop seismic exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this winter.
- Together with the Gulf Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Earthjustice, we sued the federal government over its unlawful March oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, which would threaten habitat for a stunning variety of wildlife, including sea turtles and tens of thousands of birds.
- In a major victory for public health, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Sierra Club case that the EPA is illegally failing to control ozone pollution (smog) that travels across state lines.
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We won our lawsuit challenging the EPA's failure to enter into Endangered Species Act consultation with wildlife agencies when setting corn ethanol volumes in the national gasoline supply. The growth of corn for ethanol production has caused the eradication of native grasslands and has increased water pollution from pesticide runoff, which harms endangered and threatened species and their critical habitat.
- Meanwhile, we’re working closely with Southwestern communities to fight the border wall. In a big victory at the end of this year, a federal court ruled in a lawsuit, Sierra Club v. Trump, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition, that President Trump’s use of emergency powers to divert $3.6 billion in military construction funds wall construction is unlawful.
- We are also now fighting anti-democratic forces at the state level. Together with the ACLU, Dakota Rural Action, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Indigenous advocacy group the NDN Collective we filed a federal lawsuit challenging a South Dakota law aimed at discouraging any support for protest of the Keystone XL pipeline (a violation of the First Amendment).