Photo by iStock.com/pedrosala
These past four years were not easy. It was painful to watch the Trump administration sacrifice our wildlife and public lands to oil and gas interests, and work to exacerbate the climate crisis even as its consequences became more obvious and more severe. It was devastating, too, to witness it undermine our democracy and incite violence, and fail to prevent 400,000 American deaths from COVID-19.
But as we look back on the Trump years, it’s important to celebrate the victories that we won during those dark times. We need to remember that when we come together, we are powerful. We can change our communities, and our country, in ways that would have seemed inconceivable just a decade prior.
Just look at all we were able to accomplish, even under an administration deeply hostile to environmental protections. And then imagine all we can accomplish under a new president and vice-president who ran on the most ambitious climate and environmental justice platform of any major party nominees.
Transitioning to Clean Energy
When the Beyond Coal campaign was launched in 2010, there were over 500 coal-fired power plants in this country and only a tiny proportion of our energy came from clean, renewable sources. Since then, the Sierra Club and its partners have set more than 300 of these polluters on the path to retirement, which will prevent 8,470 premature deaths, 13,160 heart attacks, 139,665 asthma attacks, and $4 billion in healthcare costs every year.
Despite Donald Trump’s promises to bring back dirty coal, 79 of these planned retirements happened during his administration. And the clean energy economy keeps getting stronger: Before the pandemic hit, wind-turbine technicians and solar-panel installers were two of the fastest-growing jobs in the country.
And speaking of good news about clean energy: circa May 2020, 100 million people now live in communities that have pledged to transition to 100 percent clean energy. That’s almost one in three people in this country, representing 163 cities, 13 counties, eight states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. And it happened only because of sustained advocacy from Sierra Club members, supporters, and numerous allies in the labor, faith, and environmental justice spaces.
Stopping Pipelines & Dirty Fuels
Over the past four years, a powerful coalition of activists, Indigenous water protectors, and landowners has worked to shut down pipelines that threaten our clean water and our habitable climate, like the Line 5 pipeline. We’ve kept dirty tar sands pipelines like Keystone XL from being built, and we’ve thrown enough roadblocks in the way of Virginia’s Mountain Valley Pipeline that people are openly questioning whether it will be canceled like the other new pipeline slated for the state, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Though the Trump administration was determined to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, the Sierra Club worked with Indigenous partners to persuade banks and investors that drilling in the Arctic is bad business. Now, every single major US and Canadian bank -- and more across the world -- have pledged not to finance the destruction of the delicate coastal plain, which is sacred to the Gwich'in people.
The staunch opposition of Gwich’in leaders and their supporters in environmental organizations like the Sierra Club has created a climate in which almost no oil and gas companies are willing to risk drilling in the Arctic Refuge. When the Trump administration held its last-minute lease sale in early January, it flopped: Just half of leases received bids, and almost were all purchased as a backstop measure by the state of Alaska.
Democracy & Transparency
The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was the culmination of four years of lies, incitement of violence, racism, hatred, and attacks on democracy that spewed from the Trump administration and some Congressional Republicans. We’ve spent these years fighting to strengthen our democracy, and even with Donald Trump about to leave office, we won’t stop demanding accountability for his administration’s attempts to sabotage our democracy.
During the Trump administration, we shined a light on the blatant corruption carried out by Trump appointees like Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt -- which helped make sure they were booted out of office. Sierra Club attorneys successfully used the courts to pry tens of thousands of documents out of Trump administration agencies, exposing unprecedented abuses of office. With this administration’s abuses of power more obvious than ever, we continue to push for true, deep reform and accountability for an administration that betrayed the American people by subverting democracy.
We are not only seeking Trump’s removal from office and the expulsion of the Congressional Republicans who joined him in inciting mob activity. We are also building on our work from earlier in his term to strengthen our democracy at this critical juncture. In 2019, we worked to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in the House of Representatives, which would restore the foundational protections of the Voting Rights Act. Now, we are calling on the Senate and President-elect Biden to rapidly pass it and other much-needed democracy reforms.
Green New Deal and Climate Justice
The Sierra Club worked with youth-led organizations, grassroots environmental justice groups, unions, and many others to make the climate movement bigger, more inclusive, and more powerful over these past four years. In 2017, 200,000 people participated in the People’s Climate March. By 2019, an estimated 4 million people in 163 countries joined the September climate strikes in what was likely the largest climate protest in history.
Also in 2019, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Green New Deal resolution, the first Congressional resolution to address the climate crisis on the scale of the problem. While it has yet to be made into law, its focus on combating the climate crisis through creating millions of good jobs has become the new common sense among those concerned about the climate crisis.
At the tail end of Trump’s term, Congress passed a measure to phase out superwarming hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which have become the fastest-growing greenhouse gas in the US. This measure -- which the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have long fought for -- will help avert an estimated half a degree of warming and puts the US on track to meet its obligations under the Kigali Amendment, a global compact to reduce HFC emissions. Analysts at the Rhodium Group say it “may prove to be the single most effective emission reduction measure taken by Congress in over a decade.”
Clean Transportation
The Trump administration rolled back the clean car rules that protected our communities from harmful smog and kept greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. But states, cities, utilities, and industries kept investing in clean transportation -- spurred on by advocacy from Sierra Club activists and our labor, environmental justice, health, and community partners.
State and city leaders pushed to electrify transportation, cleaning up air in their communities and helping to stave off further climate change. They invested millions of dollars from the Volkswagen diesel emissions settlement into electric school buses, cleaning up the air that children breathe to and from school. Transit agencies in California, New York, and Minnesota pledged to make all public buses electric by 2030. California also passed a first-in-the-nation Clean Truck Rule, which requires all trucks on the road to be clean and electric by 2040. And utilities invested more than $1.3 billion in electric charging infrastructure over these past four years.
In the private sector, several major automakers were persuaded by Sierra Club activists to oppose Trump’s rollback of clean car standards. And even ride-sharing companies are working to clean up their act: Because of pressure from thousands of activists at the Sierra Club and elsewhere, Uber and Lyft have pledged that by 2030, every ride they connect their users to will take place in an electric vehicle.
Outdoors Protection & Equitable Access
This year, Congress passed one of the most important conservation bills in a generation: the Great American Outdoors Act. It permanently funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund, guaranteeing $900 million annually for the improvement of our national, state, and local parks, and provides funding to address the nearly $12 billion backlog of maintenance projects across national parks and public lands. This bill will help ensure that our national parks are available for everyone to enjoy for generations to come. The Sierra Club also protected children and families’ access to our public lands by leading a successful campaign to push the Department of the Interior to extend the Every Kid Outdoors pass for fifth graders.
Supporting Veterans
Thanks to the efforts of the Sierra Club’s Military Outdoors campaign and its allies, Congress passed the Accelerating Veterans Recovery Outdoors Act as part of a suite of bills addressing healthcare and suicide prevention for veterans. The bill aims to make it easier for veterans to access the healing powers of the outdoors as they recover from the physical and mental challenges of military service.
In the wake of the racial justice uprisings in spring 2020, our Military Outdoors campaign began organizing for the removal of Confederate imagery and monuments from military bases. They secured a major victory with the passage of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which they worked to have include a provision renaming military bases that were named after Confederates.
Lands & Wildlife
The Trump administration has carried out the biggest public lands grab in history. It spent four years eroding protections for endangered species, public lands, and lands culturally and historically invaluable to Native Nations. Sierra Club activists, working alongside Indigenous partners and other wildlife advocates, successfully overturned or prevented some of the Trump administration’s most egregious attacks. For example, we helped to get nearly a million acres of cultural and iconic landscapes and critical wildlife habitat withdrawn from oil and gas drilling.
In July, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that reinstated Endangered Species Act protections for Yellowstone grizzly bears, protecting them from planned trophy hunts. And in December, we supported the Moapa Band of Paiutes’ call to prevent 1.7 million acres of culturally and historically valuable land in the Desert National Wildlife Refuge and other public lands from being used for bomb testing. Because of our coalition’s outcry, Congress refused to include language granting the Department of Defense permission to bomb the range in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.
All of these victories were won by people like you who came together to make a change in their communities. None of them would have been possible without the tens of thousands of Sierra Club members and supporters who protested, wrote letters, registered voters, reached out to their elected representatives, submitted public comment, and rose up to protect the places they love.
Under this new administration, we won’t have to spend so much of our time playing defense. We’ll have the opportunity to work with the Biden administration to repair our democracy, grow the clean energy economy, ensure everyone has access to clean air and water, and build healthy communities. We can’t wait to see what we’ll do together over the next four years.