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Tar Sands Pipeline Protest at the White House: A Huge Success and an Historic Turning Point

2011-11-07T15:48:26Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

I just had one of the most energizing days of my life. I spent Sunday standing with as many as 15,000 people in an enormous circle around the White House. All of us came to tell President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline for dirty tar sands oil.

This remarkable assembly of Nebraska ranchers, Midwestern union members, First Nations leaders, and environmentalists from across the country was so large our ring around the White House was ten people deep at points.

I have been an environmental advocate for more than four decades, and this was the largest environmental demonstration I’ve ever witnessed. Earth Day events may be bigger, but those are celebrations. This was a protest against a polluting and dangerous project.

The coming together of people across North America to fight the Keystone XL pipeline is an amazing reawakening. Our environmental movement is coming alive again under the leadership of Bill McKibben and NRDC and so many other organizations and communities who have brought us to where we were on Sunday afternoon: gathered at the People’s House saying no to dangerous fossil fuels and yes to sustainable solutions.

Reverend Jim Wallis told the crowd, “Whenever you have an addiction, you've got to have an intervention. This rally is an intervention.” He also observed, “I'm a preacher, and this feels like a revival for the clean energy future.”

Roger Toussaint, the president of Transit Workers Union said this clean energy future will deliver jobs. “We need to stand against the lies and deception that this pipeline will create jobs,” he told the crowd. “President Obama, we want jobs, but not jobs as gravediggers for the planet.”

Several people who live on along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route spoke about the threat this project poses to their communities and their precious water source, the Ogallala Aquifer. First Nations leaders who've lived with tar sands destruction confirmed their fears. Gerald Amos of the Haisla Nation in British Columbia said, “I live 6 kilometers from a pipeline. I am convinced the remnants of my culture will not survive an oil spill.”

I was especially moved by the young people in the crowd, some of whom came all the way from Florida. These kids know their generation will be on the frontlines of the climate crisis if we don’t act now.

But the leader of the day was Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and TarSandsAction. Not only was he was an eloquent and charismatic master of ceremonies, he also helped set the stage for Sunday’s event.

Ever since Congress failed to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation , many environmentalists felt dispirited. But in August, Bill organized a dignified protest against Keystone XL outside the White House during which 1,200 people were arrested, including farmers, ranchers, religious leaders, law professors, and environmentalists.

The arrests got the Obama Administration’s attention. They also galvanized voters, gave them a reason to get back out there and demand President Obama deliver on his clean energy promises. The demonstration on Sunday added thousands of voices to the effort, and there was no way the president failed to hear our call.

I am so proud of NRDC’s role in this fight. Our scientific and economic research has formed the foundation for battle against Keystone XL, and on Sunday, more than 100 NRDC staffers, members, and donors took their place in the ring around the White House.

I believe Sunday’s Keystone XL pipeline protest will mark a turning point in environmental history. Our movement has wrapped its arms around dirty fuels, and we won’t let go until we break their hold on our nation. Energy companies are chasing oil to the ends of the Earth. They’ve already taken the easy stuff. Now they are going after the places we live in, the places we love. And they are doing it with the most destructive practices imaginable: deepwater drilling, mountaintop removal mining, fracking, tar sands strip mining.

I believe change happen in waves, and I think the tide is turning against dirty fuels. The flood of protests over the Keystone XL pipeline should persuade President Obama to reject this dangerous venture. But even if it doesn’t, a rejuvenated environmental movement will join with all those Americans who know our future will be built on clean innovation, not dirty destruction.

Photo credits: Suzanne Struglinski

Why I Am Joining the November 6 Action against the Keystone XL Pipeline

2011-10-20T15:19:51Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

On November 6, I will be leading a group of NRDC members and experts to the White House. The last time I visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I had the honor of receiving the Medal of Freedom in recognition of what NRDC and the environmental movement have achieved in the last 40 years. On this visit, I want to focus on the future, not the past.

My colleagues and I will join thousands of concerned citizens and together we will peacefully encircle the White House in one large ring. We want to send a message to President Obama: We oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and we stand behind the president’s effort create a clean, 21st-century energy system for America.

This will be a new experience for me. In the four decades since I helped found NRDC, I believed the best way for me to defend the environment was as a lawyer, using the legal and scientific strengths of the organization in courtrooms and government buildings.

Yet with gridlock in Washington and climate denial on the campaign trail, I believe a different kind of action is needed—one that gets feet on the ground. I want to be counted as a citizen. I want our elected officials to know that I am one of millions of Americans who believe the future of our nation lies in clean energy, green innovation, and sustainable growth.

Tar sands oil and the Keystone XL pipeline have no place in that future.

Tar sands strip mines are destroying a wonderful and vibrant part of Canada’s Boreal Forest. This ancient forest was once teeming with caribou, wolves, and millions of songbirds. Now tar sands operations have been devouring these wildlands; full development of tar sands could eventually affect an area the size of Florida.

The destruction doesn’t end there. Turning tar sands into crude oil generates three times the global warming pollution of conventional crude. Burning it in our cars and trucks releases even more.

Building the Keystone XL pipeline—which would haul up to 900,000 barrels of this filthy fuel a day—would cement the devastation of the boreal forest and escalation of climate change.

Massive infrastructure projects like this last for decades. If President Obama approves it, this tar sands spigot won’t be turned off until after my grandchildren are grown. We cannot afford another 50 years of dirty fuels and unchecked carbon. If we want to shield future generations from the pain of climate change, America must stop sinking money into dirty energy infrastructure. Now.

When I started working to stop climate change more than two decades ago, I knew it would take time to build political will for change. What I did not anticipate was the eleventh-hour push to prolong our oil addiction in every conceivable way.

Companies are going to the ends of the Earth. They are drilling miles under the Gulf of Mexico, they are clamoring to get into the Arctic Ocean, and they are injecting untested fracking chemicals into rock formations, groundwater reserves, and families’ backyards. The Keystone XL pipeline is just one more nail in the coffin.

We don’t need to drain the Earth of every fossil fuel. We have plenty of cleaner ways to power our economy. This summer, President Obama proposed new clean car standards that will cut automobile carbon emissions in half. By 2025, new cars and light trucks in this country will go about twice as far, on average, on a gallon of gas. This will save Americans $1.7 trillion in fuel costs and reduce our oil dependency 12 billion barrels of oil by 2030.

This is the kind of innovation America should be investing in right now, not a tar sands pipeline that will lock us into decades of pollution.

It’s time to do what President Obama has urged: “end the tyranny of oil.” I believe our era will be remembered for what we did to address global warming. The President’s decision on the Keystone XL will be a key bellwether: did we prioritize the cleaner path or did we endorse the fuel that would sink us deeper into the climate crisis?

On November 6, I will be one of many citizens urging President Obama to make the right choice. Our plan for encircling the White House has never been done before, but it will be a completely legal and peaceful event. I hope you will support this effort. You can sign up to join us here, or you can send a message to the President at www.StopTar.org.

Don't Water Down the Clean Water Act

2011-06-23T14:59:32Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

Here's an idea. Let's let the governor of West Virginia decide how much coal waste gets dumped into rivers flowing into North Carolina. How about the folks in Kentucky do the same for their neighbors in Tennessee. While we're at it, let's just make it clear right now that anyone anywhere is free to send their pollution flooding across state lines, where somebody else downstream pays the price—and drinks the water.

Absurd? Yes. Illegal? Well, for the time being. This could be what happens, though, under a pernicious bill passed Wednesday by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

This legislation has to be stopped, or it will gut the Clean Water Act, the foundation for safeguarding our rivers, wetlands, lakes and streams. Weakening those safeguards, in fact, is the intent of the bill, the single greatest assault on clean water protections in a generation.

Entitled the "Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act," and designated H.R. 2018, the bill would allow states eager to attract or appease big polluters to effectively veto improvements in the water quality standards we've worked for decades to put into place.

It would enable governors to give a green light to local polluters and influential donors that want to dump dangerous levels of coal waste, industrial chemicals, municipal sewage and agricultural runoff into waters we share as a nation.

We know how this would work out because, sadly, we've tried it already.

Until the Clean Water Act was strengthened in 1972, we had a shaggy quilt work of state-by-state water quality regulations. The result: our waterways were so polluted that some, like Ohio's great Cuyahoga River, caught fire. We dumped so much nitrogen and phosphorous into the Mississippi that it created massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Drinking water in Alabama contained chemicals from coal mines across Appalachia. And the federal courts were jammed with lawsuits pitting one state against the next in a national water feud.

The Clean Water Act addressed those ills, by ensuring that every American everywhere has access to water that meets a common minimal standard for cleanliness and quality. States have every right to hold polluters to a higher standard if they choose. But the Clean Water Act makes clear that no state, no corporation, nobody anywhere has the right to pollute someone else's water.

That fundamental principle was rejected Wednesday by the majority of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by its chairman, John Mica, R-Fla., and Nick Rahall, D-WVa. Both men are peeved that the Environmental Protection Agency would deign to enforce federal law.

The EPA has blocked some big coal companies from blowing the tops off of mountains in ways that have put entire Appalachian watersheds at risk. And it has put in place new safeguards to protect our waters from the kinds of chemical pollutants that are choking Florida's lakes and streams with green algae slime.

Mica and Rahall, co-sponsors of H.R. 2018, have responded with legislation aimed at taking the teeth out of the Clean Water Act and stripping the EPA of its enforcement authority. Their bill would allow state agencies to override EPA decisions on pollution permits for riverside factories, the treatment of sewage waste, the handling of dredging materials and an array of other critical activities.

The timing is critical. Advances in science and water quality monitoring, as well as changes in industrial technologies and practices, mean the EPA needs to modernize standards to keep up with emerging pressures on the waters we all depend upon - for our health, recreation and jobs.

This is no time to water down the Clean Water Act.

H.R. 2018 would mark an abrupt U-turn in the long journey we've taken to protect our waters and health. It would throw us back to a time when state fought state over the fate of this essential resource. It spits in the eye of the very concept of states united, acting together, for the good of us all, one nation, under God. And it deserves swift and decisive defeat on the floor of the people's House.

In Bryson, Obama Has Nominated a Leader of Uncommon Substance and Character

2011-06-08T16:14:48Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

President Obama recently nominated John Bryson for the position of Secretary of Commerce. I have known Bryson for more than 40 years, and I have watched with admiration as he excelled as a both a business leader and a public servant.

Yet as impressive as his accomplishments are—the list includes becoming the youngest chair of the California Public Utilities Commission in history, acting as chairman and CEO of Edison International, and serving on the board of Boeing and Walt Disney Company—they are not what set him apart.

What makes Bryson exceptional is his character. He is a gentleman who puts people at ease with his warmth and thoughtful attention. He radiates calm, even in the thorniest negotiations. And he is a devoted family man. Even after a brief conversation with Bryson, you soon realize that he is terribly proud of his four daughters and delights in their triumphs and joys.

Yet as personally charming as Bryson is, he is also a man of substance. His keen intelligence and sense of duty draw him to engage in meaningful work. As an earlier generation might have put it, Bryson wants to make a contribution.

Bryson grew up in Portland, Oregon. His family had a farm along the Klamath River and a cabin on the slopes of Mt Hood. Bryson cherished his boyhood summers spent at the cabin, living without running water or electricity, hiking in the forest, and fishing in mountain streams. He was an active member of the Boy Scouts, but it wasn’t until graduate school that he began to connect his love of the natural world with his professional pursuits.

I first met Bryson in 1969 when he was a student at Yale Law School. He had spent much of his time at school feeling demoralized that few students were inspired to serve their communities. Then he met a group of young men—Gus Speth, Dick Ayres, Ed Strohbehn, and Tom Stoel—who were talking about protecting something Bryson loved: the natural world.

None of these guys called themselves “environmentalists.” That word didn’t exist then in the sense that it does today. Instead, they thought of themselves as “conservationists.” They had all grown up hunting, fishing, and hiking, and they were alarmed by the dirty air and water pollution that plagued so many cities.

Bryson and the rest of the Yale group decided they would establish a law firm to represent victims of pollution. During the same time, I was also developing a plan to open a public interest law firm to protect the environment. The Ford Foundation introduced us, and offered to fund us if we worked together, and so the Natural Resources Defense Council was born. Most people thought we were crazy to leave respectable jobs, but we launched this great experiment—with passion and determination but absolutely no guarantee it would work.

Indeed, those first few months were rocky. The IRS declared we could be tax exempt as long as we didn’t use our funds for litigation, but we were a law firm, so of course we planned to litigate. As we waited for the IRS to reconsider, we lived dollar to dollar; staff members were sleeping on the couch at my apartment in Greenwich Village. In the midst of this make-or-break situation, Bryson remained unflappable. He rolled up his sleeves and advocated on our behalf to Western Senators—always with a quiet confidence that our endeavor would succeed.

President Obama said when he nominated Bryson last week: “As a young man with a degree in hand from a prestigious law school, John didn’t follow his friends to a blue chip law firm. John took a chance on an idea he cared about, and co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, which grew into a powerful and important voice in protecting the safety of our air and water.”

Soon after NRDC opened our doors in New York and Washington, Bryson proposed creating a western office. As Wallace Stegner would say, Bryson was a son of the West. He knew firsthand of the threatened rivers, shrinking wildlands, and polluted cities that needed NRDC’s assistance. Bryson moved to California, set up the office, and hired top notch talent.

Bryson left NRDC in 1974 to become a state water regulator in Oregon. Soon after, he cast his lot with California, where he would become the chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, a trustee of Stanford University and an active member of several corporate boards.

Through it all, Bryson has demonstrated the strong connection between economic vitality and environmental safeguards. And he has done with his customary intelligence and good humor.

Long Before BP Spill, Leaders of Both Parties Knew We Can't Drill Our Way Out of Oil Addiction

2011-04-20T15:09:23Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

Skirting the banks of the Mississippi River in the last few miles before it gives itself over to the Gulf of Mexico, it’s easy to imagine you’re nearing some far end of the Earth.

High tide swamps the roadway. Great grey herons sail weightless across the silhouette of ancient cypress trees against the sky. Alligators bask free and unfettered, much as they have for millions of years, leathery scales wet and shimmering like plates of steel in the morning sun.

Over the past year, though, there’s been one thing more: thick crude oil, brown and black, making its way onto beaches, into wetlands, mangroves and mud flats, the leading edge of 170 million gallons of toxic crude oil the BP blowout gushed into some of the richest, most diverse waters anywhere in the world.

One year after the worst oil spill in our history, it’s time to ask why we put more and more of this kind of natural treasure at risk.

Fertile Gulf waters, home to blue whales and bottlenose dolphins, marlin, sea turtles and amberjack. Tidal estuaries, the foundation of life, cradle of shrimp, crabs, oysters and speckled trout. And the deltaic wetlands, nourished for tens of millions of years by the organic and mineral wealth running off from the broad middle of the country, vital feeding and nesting grounds for brown pelicans, egrets, terns and gulls.

Why do we push to the ends of the Earth – in the Gulf, in the Arctic, from the tropical forests of Ecuador to the boreal forests of Canada - rolling the dice with irreplaceable habitat and life, to feed our insatiable demand for oil? We need, instead, to create an energy future that is safer, cleaner and more sustainable,

We now use, in this country, 800 million gallons of oil each day – enough to fill the Empire State Building three times. We use 26 percent of all the oil produced everywhere in the world.

Drill, baby, drill is not the answer. We have less than 2 percent of the world’s known oil. That’s not a political statement; it’s geology.

Besides, we’ve been drilling in this country for 150 years. No country in the world has been more aggressive. That’s why, today, nearly 60 percent of the world’s producing oil wells are in the United States.

Of the 914,000 working oil wells worldwide, more are in the United States - 526,00 – than in all other countries combined, according to the Oil & Gas Journal, the gold standard of industry data.

Rather than going to greater extremes – to the ends of the Earth – until we’ve drained the last drop of oil, we need to do what presidents going back to Richard Nixon have asked us to do, and reduce our reliance on this costly and dangerous fuel.

These leaders, from both political parties, have understood that we simply cannot afford to have our economy, our security and our very future forever held hostage to global oil price and supply spikes we cannot control. We have to find a better way.

This, I believe, is one of the great callings of our generation, to chart the course to a 21st-Century energy future that makes sense for us all.

We know we can create millions of American jobs, making our country more secure and create a healthier future for our children by investing, as a nation, in renewable power like solar and wind, sustainable communities that give us greater choices in how we live and the next generation of energy efficient cars, workplaces and homes.

President Obama has laid out a plan for doing just that, one that can cut our oil imports by one-third over just the coming decade. This plan needs and deserves our support.

It has taken us a century and a half to build an economy around oil. We won’t change that overnight. By investing in efficiency, renewables and sustainable communities, however, we can cut our oil consumption over time.

In the months since the BP blowout, the people of the Gulf of Mexico have paid a grievous price. Eleven men died. Their families will never be the same. Thousands of fishermen, hotel staff, cooks and others were thrown out of work. The livelihood and the way of life for much of the region were put at risk.

We must work, as a nation, to restore the Gulf and make its people whole. We must strengthen the safeguards we rely upon to keep our workers and waters safe. And we must make sure the people who enforce these protections have the tools they need to do the job.

We also, though, must do one thing more. We must break our dependence on oil. One year later, that’s the message we must take from this devastating national disaster all the way to the ends of the Earth.

Receiving the Medal of Freedom, Celebrating an NRDC Team Victory

2011-02-18T16:03:55Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

This week, I had the extraordinary honor of receiving the Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. I accepted this honor on behalf of the people who really made it possible: the staff and supporters of NRDC. I am just lucky these dedicated people helped me live out my dream of standing up for nature.

The highlight of the day was having my wife Patricia, my children, and my eldest grandchild in the audience at the White House. They are the reason I got into this work. I didn’t want them to have to breathe dirty air, drink toxins in their water, or miss the chance to walk through untrammeled landscapes. Sometimes environmental policy can seem abstract, but in reality, these issues are as close and vivid as our families.

It was also wonderful to see my grandchild dotted upon by First Lady Michelle Obama and former First Lady Barbara Bush. Everyone at the event was so welcoming, and it was a reward in itself to be in such remarkable company.

Congressman John Lewis, the great Civil Rights leader, also received the Medal of Freedom on Tuesday. Back when we started NRDC, we modeled our work on the Civil Rights Movement strategy of building a body of case law where no statutory law existed. But we never came under the kind of threat of harm Congressman Lewis and his allies did. He is truly a brave and fierce defender of justice.

But the recipients did not just include those focused on the law. As a life-long sports fan, it was a treat to meet basketball star Bill Russell and baseball star Stan Musial. Bill told me that the athletes he tends to stay in touch these days with are the ones involved in community building.

Stan, meanwhile, was one of the best hitters around and a real gentleman. He also happens to be a harmonica player. I was talking with him and Warren Buffet before the ceremony, and Buffet said, “Too bad I didn’t bring my ukulele. If you had your harmonica, and Yo Yo Ma brought his cello, we could be trio.” And with that, Stan pulled a harmonica out of his pocket and started playing old Mississippi River tunes.

The music didn’t end there. A quartet from a military band was playing at the reception. Yo Yo walked in, tapped the cellist on the shoulder, and stepped in to play. I thought the other musicians might faint, but they did a great job of keeping up.

During the reception, I had the opportunity to speak with Libby Little, who accepted the Medal of Freedom on behalf of her husband, Dr. Tom Little, who was killed while providing medical care to families in Afghanistan. The Littles had been working in Afghanistan for decades before Dr. Little and his colleagues were caught in an ambush.

The thing I will remember most from our conversation is that she said the FBI and the CIA are still trying to figure out who killed her husband and his colleagues, but identifying the culprits is not a concern of hers. She simply wants to continue the work of helping people. Her two daughters remain in Afghanistan, and together, they will carry on Dr. Little’s legacy. I was impressed by the power of their dedication.

I have had the good fortune to have been surrounded by remarkably dedicated people much of my life. After the event at the White House, my family and I headed over the NRDC’s Washington office to celebrate with the staff.

After I thanked everyone for such a lovely party, I took off the medal and said, “This is really yours,” and I passed it around the room so the people who did all the hard work could enjoy it.

NRDC’s staff members—past and present—have poured their hearts into fighting polluters, protecting wild places, and putting solutions in place. This medal is most definitely a team victory.

When I looked around the room at the NRDC office, I was struck by how many young people there are on our staff, and I felt so pleased that the work we are doing here—creating a cleaner future for all our grandchildren—will continue for decades to come.

New DEC head has a long record for protecting NY's environment

2011-01-04T19:59:43Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

Incoming New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation a much needed boost today, by selecting Open Space Institute (OSI) president Joe Martens as its new commissioner.

I have worked closely with Joe for many years, including at OSI, where I am chairman of the board. I consider Joe to be the one of the finest and fairest people I have ever met in the environmental movement. He has dedicated decades of his life to safeguarding New York’s environment and can claim responsibility for protecting of tens of thousands of acres in the state. Over his distinguished career, he notably focused on conserving land in the Adirondacks and Catskill regions.

What’s more, Joe is in tune with the enormous challenges facing DEC today and will undoubtedly use his talents to reassert New York’s leadership on national environmental policy. The entire state will now benefit from his tireless dedication and proven record of success. Governor Cuomo has made an excellent choice.

Our New Book Offers a Roadmap for Making Change and Protecting the Environment

2010-10-05T14:16:31Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

Forty years ago, a very distinguished group of lawyers fought to stop Con Edison from building a power plant on Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Highlands. They soon realized that a public interest law firm should be established so that ordinary citizens could fight the wealth and power of great corporations.

At the time, I was an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, and I was asked to start this organization. We called it NRDC. Looking for funding, I went to the Ford Foundation, and they introduced me to a group of recent Yale Law School Graduates who had a similar idea.

And so we began this great experiment—with passion and determination but absolutely no guarantee it would work.

Over the next four decades, we proved the power of our founding idea, and in the process we helped clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the landscapes we leave to our children.

Now the modern environmental movement has reached a level of maturity and influence we couldn’t have imagined back when NRDC started and our future seemed so precarious that Johanna Wald, one of our first lawyers, remembers waiting for the phone call that would announce our experiment was over. Luckily that call never came.

But I still view the fight to protect the Earth as a work in progress. Each generation must confront new challenges and invent new solutions. Hopefully, they benefit from the lessons of the past.

That is why my wife Patricia and I wrote our new book, A Force for Nature. It is part memoir, part historical record. But it is also a roadmap for how to create political and societal change.

We learned early on, for instance, that it is possible to make change working within the system. We started discovering this on our first day of business, January 1, 1970. That was also the first day that one of the most important environmental laws went into effect.

The National Environmental Policy Act, as well as such great statues as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, is what gives people the power to stop pollution. It established the principle that planning should come before action and that environmental impacts need to be factored into major projects.

But a law means nothing unless it’s enforced. The 1970s was the decade we made our name as NEPA’s enforcers. We examined, commented on, and sued when necessary over the new regulations to make sure they were implemented and protected the public interest. And we did it with only about a dozen lawyers.

The EPA told us that when it came to NEPA, NRDC was like the American Revolutionaries—behind every tree.

Other battles taught us that relying on environmental laws wasn’t the only way to get things done. In the early 1990s, Rich Kassel, one of our young attorneys, biked to work and would often get stuck behind dirty diesel buses as he rode the whole way down Fifth Avenue – or Diesel Canyon as he called it.

Rich wanted to clean up the buses, but he wasn’t getting any traction through policy channels, so he tried another approach: a guerilla advertising campaign of sorts. He knowingly tried to place inflammatory ads on the back of MTA buses that read, “Standing behind this bus could be more dangerous than standing in front of it.”

We expected the MTA to balk and when they did, we slapped them with a First Amendment lawsuit. The fight turned into a PR disaster for the MTA because all major news networks picked up the story and that became more important to the public than the ads themselves. This became the springboard for negotiating with MTA and led to a wholesale clean up of New York City’s bus fleet, which is now made up largely of clean diesel, natural gas, and hybrid buses.

This diesel work became a template for NRDC’s diesel projects across the nation, as well as in Mexico City and Nairobi, and led to federal clean diesel rules. It taught us, as Rich says, “to start small and think big, because sometimes a local project may lay the foundation for a national solution.”

We have learned many other lessons over the years, including the power of consumer outrage to get toxins out of everyday products, the ability of citizen activists to get the attention of Congress, and the occasional need to meet your sworn enemies at the negotiating table.

These strategies continue to be effective in our current battles to confront climate change and create a clean energy future. But these and other challenges will also require new tools which new generations will develop.

Our strongest force is the respect for nature found in the backbone of the NRDC staff and the determination of our members and activists. This strength will carry us into the future.

The Clean Air Act at 40: Still Vulnerable to Polluters' Falsehoods

2010-09-14T19:23:44Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

Forty years ago, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970. That same year, with a group of colleagues we founded NRDC, and we spent the next four decades using the Clean Air Act to improve the health of millions of Americans.

After 40 years of pushing the EPA to carry out Clean Air Act, going to court to enforce the law when necessary, and returning to Congress to defend and strengthen it, I have noticed a clear and obvious pattern.

Nearly every Clean Air Act program that we now take for granted—removing lead from gasoline, curbing acid rain, cutting pollution from cars and trucks—was bitterly opposed by industry. Each time, businesses claimed they would be shuttered by the effort to make our air safer, yet the costs of complying were almost always less than they maintained.

That same pattern holds true today. Power companies still generating power from dirty coal-fired plants say that using the Clean Air Act to curb global warming pollution will run them into the ground.

But we have 40-years worth of experience with the Clean Air Act that proves we can cut pollution and save lives, and still enjoy economic growth. Indeed, since Congress passed the law, we have prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths AND the economy has grown by 70 percent.

They say those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. I have come to realize that unless we recognize polluters’ patterns, every generation will be destined to fight the same environmental battles over and over. We will be forced to defend the Clean Air Act time and again from self-interested assaults and overblown predictions of demise.

We have faced these attacks many times before. I remember back in the late 1980s when NRDC was pushing Congress to reduce the pollution that causes acid rain. Scientists had documented the devastating effect acid rain had on forests, lakes, fish, and human health, but coal-fired power plant operators painted the science as unsettled and the remedies as too costly.

One industry group wrote, “In light of the evolving science, uncertainties, and staggering costs, can we justify acid rain controls now? We think not.”

But according to an MIT study, the true cost for implementing the acid rain program was about 80 percent lower than originally predicted. Costs came down because the new rule triggered innovation. Industry started making more effective scrubbers that made the job of capturing pollution easier and more affordable.

Meanwhile, the acid rain program dramatically reduced fine particulate levels, preventing about 19,000 premature deaths every year. EPA analysis found that the benefits of the program outweigh the costs 40 to 1.

That same pattern unfolded when the EPA proposed phasing out ozone-depleting CFCs. Manufacturers claimed they did not have the technology to keep machines running and that the industry would come to a screeching halt.

One refrigeration company representative forecast: “We will see shutdowns of chiller machines, which cool our large office building, our hotels and hospitals.”

In fact, the sky did not fall. Chemical companies developed alternatives to CFCs and were able to meet the EPA’s standards four to six years early and at 30 percent less cost than expected.

The health benefits of phasing out CFCs are enormous. The phase-out will avoid almost 300 million cases of skin cancer between 1989 and 2075.

The successes of the Clean Air Act have transformed how we view pollution. Back in 1970, when the law debated in Congress, one Representative quoted the mayor of a small town who said, “If you want this town to grow, it has got to stink.” There was a prevailing view that economic growth depended on foul, malodorous pollution.

Now we know better. From hybrid cars to organic foods, clean tech to energy efficiency, environmental safeguards and economic prosperity go hand in hand. The numbers back it up: Green jobs are growing 2.5 times as fast as traditional jobs, and California's clean energy economy has attracted more than $6.5 billion in venture capital in the past three years.

Yet despite this reality, polluters will still try to convince lawmakers that the next set of standards will cause the sky to fall. I have heard the same industry complaints time and again—and I hear them today regarding efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But I have also seen how sound science, hard-nosed advocacy, and public concern can rise above the racket. That’s how we got lead out of gasoline, phased out CFCs, and cut acid rain.

We can do the same with global warming pollution, as long as Americans see through industry falsehoods and make their own voices heard. Click here to tell Congress not to weaken the Clean Air Act.

My Take on Oil and Gas Industry's False Claims about Climate

2010-03-12T01:54:35Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

The oil and gas industry spent a record $168.3 million in lobbying expenses in 2009, and a good deal of it was directed to blocking clean energy and climate legislation.

That is a staggering number, but after my 40 years spent fighting for environmental protections, I am not surprised. Every time we have advanced a new safeguard, there is always one sector of industry trying to stop it. It happened when we wanted to take lead out of gasoline, stop acid rain, and removing ozone-depleting chemicals.

We prevailed every time, and we will prevail on climate action too. Because unlike the fossil fuel industry, we are right on the science, the economics, and the protections for people’s health.

Read more about it in my recent blog on the Markup.

A New Day for the Catskills

2007-09-17T20:31:38Z

John H. Adams, Founding Director, New York City

People think of the Catskills and they think of "Dirty Dancing." But really, it's about barns and cows and fishing and hiking. The first fly fishermen fished in the Neversink and the Beaverkill. We have a great river system, trout system, and hiking system. There are several thousand operating farms in the Catskills. When you add up all the public spaces and wilderness and wildlife preserves that are in the Catskills you will soon find it's the biggest recreational area within reach of New York.

NRDC and other groups just ended a seven-year standoff over a massive development for the Belleayre Resort, right in the heart of the Catskills. Through years and years of work, we've convinced the parties to preserve two-thirds of the land as "forever wild" in the State Forest Preserve and to build a smaller and more environmentally sensitive project on a portion of the remaining land. It was a very difficult fight because of the pressure for economic development, pressure not only from the developer but people in government, and elsewhere.

I'm from Sullivan County, in the center of the Catskills. And I think the most important thing about that long fight was the debate it created over the future of the Catskills -- a whole new awareness about what we should be doing up there.

I look at the work of the Open Space Institute. Over the past 15 years they have purchased as much as 25,000 acres in the Shawangunks, as much as 18,000 in the Catskills. They are working now on farmland preservation. New York City is working on the Catskills in the watershed area.

And most recently, through the efforts of a number of people, the Catskill Mountainkeeper (http://catskillmountainkeeper.org/) has been started. They are going to be working to help to organize the Catskills, the people from north, south, east and west who don't have the same newspapers or radio stations or ways to talk to each other, yet they have common interests: in highways, and power lines, and in development, like casinos. We know these folks care deeply about the beauty of the Catskills. And once they know that they can have a voice together, we think that the future of the Catskills, the branding of the Catskills, the planning of the growth of the Catskills will take place in a responsible way. With a protected watershed, clean rivers, more trail heads, more recreation, more tourism, and more industry that is Catskill-appropriate.

So I would say the day of the Catskills has come.