Photo by Javier Sierra
After 12 remarkable years at the Sierra Club, I’m moving on to a new opportunity. On April 22, I’ll be going to work for Energy Innovation as Senior Director of Climate Imperative, a new project that aims to cut emissions at the speed and scale needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. It’s very bittersweet to leave the organization that has been my home for over a decade, and before I move on later this month, I want to reflect back on some of the incredible work I’ve been part of and look ahead to the opportunities on the horizon.
It’s been a profound honor of my life to help write one of the great chapters in the Sierra Club’s storied century-long campaigning history as the director of the organization’s Beyond Coal campaign. I came to the Sierra Club in 2008 from a grassroots organization called Appalachian Voices, where we had been fighting mountaintop removal coal mining and a new coal-fired power plant proposed in southwest Virginia. There were just a handful of staff working on coal at the Sierra Club when I started. I couldn’t have imagined what was in store.
Twelve years later, working with an incredible team of brilliant staff and over 300 partner organizations, we’ve changed the world. We stopped more than 200 new coal plants from being built across the US (we finally defeated the last new proposed coal plant in 2020). We secured retirement of two-thirds of the nation's existing coal plants, continuing a steady march of progress throughout the Trump years, and helped usher in the clean energy era. We saved lives: Retiring those coal plants meant we prevented almost 30,000 premature deaths, 480,000 asthma attacks, and 45,000 heart attacks, saving almost $14 billion in health care costs. We supported a robust economic transition for coal communities at the state and national level. We fought to hold the coal industry accountable for their air, water, and climate pollution.
Coal provided half of our nation’s electricity when I came to the Sierra Club a decade ago, and we were told it was always going to be that way. Well, we’re now getting less than 20 percent of our power from coal, and this year the US will get more electricity from renewable energy than from coal for the first time ever. That profound shift in how we make electricity accounts for three-quarters of all greenhouse gas reductions in the US over the past decade, which gives us a fighting chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.
It has been a tremendous honor to live at the center of this incredible campaign for a decade, and to have our story told by some of the greats. Our work was featured in two seasons of the Emmy-winning climate series Years of Living Dangerously and in the film From the Ashes. Our work was covered by great writers and journalists, including in this POLITICO piece by Michael Grunwald, and researchers and academics have confirmed that our advocacy played a decisive role in coal plant retirements.
What’s more, our work has inspired the launch of sister Beyond Coal campaigns around the world, in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Together, these grassroots-driven movements are working to meet the clear demand of climate science -- to phase out coal in developed countries by 2030 and the rest of the world soon after.
Of all that we’ve accomplished, what I’m most proud of is the people power that made it all possible. This work has been led by folks working in their communities to protect the health of their families and make the future brighter for their kids, and for all our kids. I’ve had the great honor of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with folks on the front lines at public hearings, rallies, press conferences, and community meetings, often in the shadow of belching smokestacks or in the contamination zone of a toxic, leaking coal ash pond.
The courage and tenacity of those folks is what got me out of bed every day, determined to help make a difference. Over and over, I’ve seen David beat Goliath, and that’s what gives me hope that we can beat back the climate crisis before it’s too late.
Whether you’ve read the latest scientific reports or just witnessed the orange skies and hurricanes of 2020, it’s clear that we’re in a race against time to move off fossil fuels entirely, or our kids will be at risk of growing up in a very dangerous future marked by an unstable climate. I’m ready to take all I’ve learned in the Beyond Coal campaign, which I shared in an essay in the wonderful anthology All We Can Save, and apply that to tackling the climate crisis on a global scale. I’m especially excited to rejoin Bruce Nilles, who was my partner in building and leading the Beyond Coal campaign, at Climate Imperative, where he serves as executive director.
I know the Sierra Club will continue to be an important leader and partner in the work ahead of us. Over the past year, I had the privilege of serving as the Sierra Club’s national director of campaigns, where I supported the excellent work of the next generation of amazing campaigners. I’m confident they’ll continue to move our electricity system beyond coal to 100 percent clean energy, stop schemes to export fracked gas, electrify our homes and buildings and cars and trucks and buses, protect our lands and wildlife, give everyone access to the outdoors, and to do that work rooted in a commitment to racial justice and grassroots power building.
If I could leave you with one thought, it’s this: We are the architects of our energy future -- not the fossil fuel industry. Earlier this year I wrote an article for Sierra magazine called “A Love Letter From the Clean Energy Future,” in which I painted a picture of the world that’s possible a decade from now if we seize the opportunity in front of us. I deeply believe that we have everything we need -- the smarts, technology, public support, vision, resources, momentum, and leadership -- to end this decade with clean air and water, abundant economic opportunity, and a safe climate.
When I started this work to move beyond coal, clean energy wasn’t affordable or readily available, and everyone thought we were foolish to try to move our nation’s power grid toward 100 percent clean energy. But we did that, against impossible odds. A decade later, renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, we have a powerful movement led by young people demanding action, and we have leadership in the White House who understands both the urgency of the crises we face and the great opportunity that comes from tackling them.
Every person reading this has a role to play in writing this next great chapter. For my Sierra Club family, I’ll be cheering you on and celebrating your continued success. For all my colleagues and friends across the movement, I’m excited to work with you in my new role, once again making the impossible possible. We are all so lucky to be alive this decade, with this sacred opportunity to make a world of difference before it’s too late.
Let’s go.