Inside the turmoil at the Sierra Club

Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we’re congratulating Coco Gauff on winning her U.S. Open semifinal match – which was paused for 50 minutes last night as climate activists disrupted from the stands.

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In today’s edition, we’ll cover how President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall harmed the environment, according to a federal watchdog. But first:

When Ben Jealous became the first person of color to lead the Sierra Club, the prominent civil rights leader promised to create more inclusive working conditions at the nation’s oldest environmental group.

“We have to deal with all of the equity issues inside the Sierra Club,” he said in January. “Those include, absolutely, issues of gender, as well as racial equity and also pay equity.”

But today, the 131-year-old group is in turmoil over its approach to diversity, equity and environmental justice, according to interviews with 12 current and former staffers, most of whom spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of facing retaliation or otherwise harming their job prospects.

The tumult intensified in April and May, when the group’s new leadership laid off more than two dozen employees, many of whom were people of color, as part of what Jealous has called a broader “restructuring.” According to the Progressive Workers Union, which represented about 400 Sierra Club staffers before the layoffs, more than 30 of its members lost their jobs.

The leadership laid off the entire staff of the equity team, which was tasked with improving the workplace culture around diversity and inclusion, and several members of the environmental justice division, which had fought to block polluting projects in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods.

Jealous also shortened the name of the People, Culture and Equity Department — which includes the equity team and the human resources team — to the People Department and hired a vocal critic of its past work to lead it.

‘Disproportionate impacts’

People of color accounted for about 48.5 percent of unionized employees who were let go, according to union leaders.

The layoffs had “disproportionate impacts” on Black workers, Indigenous workers and other staffers of color, the union wrote in a Thursday letter obtained by The Post to the Sierra Club board. “We do not present this information to accuse Sierra Club management of targeting these groups, but rather to illustrate the effects of layoffs that run counter to the Sierra Club’s and the Union’s shared goals and vision.”

Sierra Club spokesman Jonathon Berman disputed the data and said these changes did not affect the overall diversity of staff. The organization recently hired several high-ranking executives of color, including a new deputy executive director and chief of staff, and Berman provided a chart showing that before the layoffs, the Sierra Club’s full-time staff was 56 percent White, and that after the layoffs, it was 57.9 percent White.

“At the conclusion of the separations, the organization remains as diverse as it was before the restructuring,” Berman said in an email. “Any claims stating otherwise are false and not supported by data.”

C.J. Garcia-Linz, president of the union and a Sierra Club employee, said that having some of the new senior staffers add diversity does not make up for letting go many minority employees working in disadvantaged communities.

“Having BIPOC people who are on the ground in these communities, who have nontransferable relationships and institutional knowledge, is more important to us,” she said, using a term for Black people, Indigenous people and people of color.

Jealous, who previously ran the NAACP, defended his decisions in an interview Thursday, saying he has “dedicated his life both to advancing civil rights [and] overcoming past patterns of exclusion in our society.”

Budget woes

Jealous also described the layoffs as an economic necessity, saying the group faced a $40 million annual budget deficit when he joined, in part because donations declined after Donald Trump, who rolled back dozens of environmental regulations, left office.

He said the group is also restructuring in the wake of last year’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act by adding chapter directors in more than a dozen states, particularly in Republican-led ones that stand to gain the most investment from the new climate law.

“When I took over at Sierra Club, no one had advertised that I would be inheriting a budget with a $40 million deficit,” he said. “That was news to me walking through the door.”

However, the Progressive Workers Union says this accounting is incomplete. According to an analysis by the union, the cumulative salaries of the group’s top 10 earners — $3,236,620 as of April 30 — nearly offset the projected savings from the layoffs of unionized workers, totaling $3,599,641.

‘Gaslit and disrespected’

Meanwhile, Jealous hired an executive to lead the newly named People Department who criticized the group’s past equity work. In a staff email obtained by The Post, Aida Davis wrote, “Our existing equity initiatives and investigative processes have proven costly and ineffective in addressing very serious harms and needs of our community.”

In an interview, Davis said the Sierra Club’s past equity work had “harmed” employees of color, although she declined to provide a specific example, citing confidentiality concerns.

“We have so many data points on how the most oppressed and marginalized folks were not just underserved but harmed in the previous attempts at this work,” she said. “There are a lot of pieces of evidence that are public that demonstrate that Sierra Club was moving in a performative, superficial and harmful way.”

Davis added that as a Black woman, she had personally experienced disrespectful behavior from staffers. “I have never felt more undermined, gaslit and disrespected, and my dignity diminished, than I have in this role,” she said.

Click here to read the full story about the turmoil inside the Sierra Club.

Agency alert

Trump’s border wall harmed the environment, federal watchdog says

The 450 miles of barrier built along the U.S.-Mexico border under President Donald Trump caused “significant” damage to the environment and Native American cultural sites, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office, Alex Guillén reports for Politico.

The federal watchdog found that the border wall, which was one of Trump’s highest-profile actions, disregarded numerous environmental and historic preservation laws. As a result, it:

Interfered with the migratory paths of endangered species, including wolves and ocelots.
Diverted crucial water flows during high precipitation events, making flooding more intense.
Caused unprecedented damage to Indigenous cultural sites, including by destroying a burial site in the Sonoran Desert.

“This racist political stunt has been an ineffective waste of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars — and now we know it has caused immeasurable, irreparable harm to our environment and cultural heritage as well,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who requested the report, said in a statement.

The GAO recommended that the Interior Department and Customs and Border Protection develop a joint strategy to mitigate the environmental impact of the border wall. The agencies have agreed to work together to do so, the report said.

Biden withdraws Energy Dept. nominee after gas stove spat with Manchin

The White House has withdrawn its nomination of Jeff Marootian to be assistant secretary of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, ending a months-long battle with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) over the agency’s plans to regulate gas stoves, Ari Natter reports for Bloomberg News.

The move comes after Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, canceled a committee vote on Marootian’s nomination in May following the agency’s proposal to improve the efficiency of gas stoves as well as electric cooktops.

“While I appreciate that these rules would only apply to new stoves, my view is that it’s part of a broader, administration-wide effort to eliminate fossil fuels,” Manchin, a vocal advocate for fossil fuel production, said at the time. “For that reason, I’m not comfortable moving forward with Mr. Marootian.”

A White House official said Marootian, who serves as a special adviser to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, will be appointed as the agency’s principal deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

In the states

Alaska firefighters experiment with targeting blazes to save carbon

The Alaska Fire Service is planning to tackle wildfires in parts of the remote Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge as a means to avert carbon emissions and prevent climate change, in what scientists say is a first-of-its-kind approach, The Post’s Alexandra Heal reports.

The experiment, which is part of a pilot program in the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, is meant to address flames that do not threaten people but could trigger the thawing of the region’s ancient, carbon-rich permafrost and exacerbate global warming.

The Alaskan fire service has yet to act on its plans, in part because of an unusually quiet fire season. But the program has already faced criticism from those who say the nation's limited firefighting resources should be devoted exclusively to blazes that threaten people's livelihoods.

So far, Interior has not budgeted any additional funds for the limited pilot, one of its organizers said. It comes as wildfires linked to climate change are increasing in frequency and burning more land in Alaska, releasing vast emissions that further heat the planet. That cycle could in part be broken by fighting fires to protect carbon, scientists hope.

In the atmosphere

Viral

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