Answering for Taking a Driller's Cash
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The recent disclosure of the Sierra Club's secret acceptance of $26 million in donations from people associated with a natural gas company has revived an uncomfortable debate among environmental groups about corporate donations and transparency.
The gifts from the company, Chesapeake Energy, have drawn criticism from some environmentalists. "Sleeping with the enemy" was a comment much forwarded on Twitter posts about the undisclosed arrangement.
"Runners shouldn't smoke, priests shouldn't touch the kids, and environmentalists should never take money from polluters," John Passacantando, a former director of Greenpeace who is now an environmental consultant, said in an interview.
Yet the donations to the Sierra Club, reported by Time magazine's Ecocentric blog and a blog called Corporate Crime Reporter, have plenty of precedents. Between 2004 and 2006, the National Audubon Society accepted $2.1 million from the chemical giant Monsanto to find a strategy for ensuring the safety of waterfowl near industrial farms using pesticides, for example.
The Environmental Defense Fund was an early adopter of the partnership model, working two decades ago with McDonald's to stop using polystyrene clamshells for packaging, thus eliminating tens of thousands of tons of waste. Later it teamed with Fedex to reduce the emissions of its truck fleet.
The Sierra Club used the Chesapeake Energy money, donated mainly by the company's chief executive from 2007 to 2010, for its Beyond Coal campaign to block new coal-fired power plants and shutter old ones. Carl Pope, then the club's executive director, promoted natural gas as a cleaner "bridge fuel" to a low-carbon future.
Immediately after the Time report surfaced on Feb. 2, the Sierra Club's executive director, Michael Brune, acknowledged the donations and said he had decided to cut them off after he took over in 2010. In a blog post, he wrote that the group no longer viewed natural gas as a "kinder, gentler" energy source because of the environmental risks posed by hydraulic fracturing, a controversial gas-drilling process.
First Published February 14, 2012 12:00 am
