Lobbying and the petition right
Frank H. Buckley placed the Sierra Club among the organizations that employ lobbyists in Washington, listing it alongside the NAACP and the National Rifle Association. In his account these are not trade associations but public interest groups with an ideological agenda, and what they do is exercise the First Amendment right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. Buckley called that activity not merely neutral but a positive good, because congressmen arrive in Washington poorly informed and need to be told what is in the legislation before them. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Bob Zadek framed the same question from the other side, asking what there is about the occupation of lobbying — petitioning and educating the government — that rises to the level of corruption. Buckley’s answer drew the line not at information provision but at purchased influence: the golf trips Jack Abramoff organized for congressional friends, since outlawed, and the remaining practices he thought could constitutionally be curtailed, such as a lobbyist serving as a conduit for corporate campaign contributions or running the apparatus of campaigning out of his office. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Crony capitalism and the environmental label
A caller identified as David from San Francisco raised the Sierra Club in the course of an argument about what he called fake greens. His example was the California electricity deregulation of 1996, which he said was written by Enron. The night before the vote, he said, there was common agreement from everybody from the Sierra Club to the Heritage Foundation on the deregulation; the next morning, he continued, somebody put a new bill on the table and everybody thought it was the same bill and voted for it — bait and switch, in his words, on which basis Enron looted California. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Bob Zadek did not dispute the deregulation account but separated the principle from the execution, saying California’s approach was utterly moronic because it deregulated only wholesale rates and not retail rates. The caller extended the pattern to MTBE, which he described as a waste product from the oil and gas industry that the industry conned the state legislature into treating as an emissions reduction, and to mercury light bulbs, which he said honest greens had opposed. Zadek agreed on the light bulbs, invoking Nick Gillespie’s earlier point that once a business can find an environmental reason, even junk science, a proposal sails through. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Forest management and wildfire
Myron Ebell named the Sierra Club as one of the groups whose demands produced what he called gross environmental mismanagement. Describing the Sierra Nevada, he said there are millions of acres of dead trees ready to go up in smoke in a very hot fire, because the trees are too dense and the land is not really forest but heavy brush. A well-managed forest, in his account, is one with big trees and a lot of open ground, and in the big forests of the Northwest the main tool for keeping fires down is timber production and logging. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
Ebell grouped the Sierra Club with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund as large organizations with budgets in excess of $100 million a year, some approaching $200 million, money he said can buy a great deal of public relations and movement of public opinion. He attributed to these groups the fostering of the belief that nature is good when left to itself and goes haywire when human beings become involved, and contrasted American forests unfavorably with the heavily managed forests of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He added that he was not against unmanaged wilderness in its place, but that national forests and public lands were created to be managed and would be better managed in private hands. What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020)
The movement’s political turn
Randal O’Toole said he spent the first 25 years of his career working for environmental groups, serving as a consultant for almost every major group in the country, the Sierra Club among them. In that period, he said, these groups cared about protecting the environment and did not care whether markets or government were used as tools. That changed after 1990: with the fall of the Soviet Union it became disreputable to call oneself a socialist, so socialists looked around, found that the one thing Americans think government is needed for is protecting the environment, joined the environmental movement and took it over. The goal now, he argued, is not to protect the environment but to make government bigger — call it socialism or progressivism, he said, it is the same thing. Never let a good crisis go to waste (2020)
O’Toole dated the shift more precisely to fundraising. In the 1980s, he said, environmentalists discovered that demonizing someone — James Watt, the Reagan administration — brought in contributions. When a Democrat was elected to the White House in 1992, those contributions stopped, and the groups turned to foundations, which gave money on the condition that the groups agree on the same policies. The socialists, in his account, took over those meetings and drummed out anyone who spoke in favor of markets, so that foundation money went only to groups that wanted big government; environmentalists who did not want big government were shunned, got no money, and either left the movement or kept quiet. He said he left at that time and that friends who stayed tell him privately they cannot speak their true opinions without being fired or shunned. Never let a good crisis go to waste (2020)
Across episodes: the same charge in three registers
The Sierra Club is treated across these episodes as an institution whose power is the problem, but the diagnosis shifts with the guest. Buckley, in 2017, treats its lobbying as legitimate petitioning and locates corruption in gifts and campaign conduits rather than in the group itself. Ebell, in 2020, treats it as one of three $100-million-plus organizations whose demands dictate forest policy against the science of forest health. O’Toole, in the same year, treats it as a movement captured after 1990 by socialists who wanted big government and who purged market-friendly environmentalists from the foundation-funded consensus. The caller David, in 2014, supplies the earliest and least theorized version: the Sierra Club as one signatory, alongside the Heritage Foundation, to a deregulation bill that was swapped overnight. What changes between the earlier and later treatments is the mechanism — from bait-and-switch legislation, to purchased influence, to sheer institutional wealth, to ideological capture — while the underlying claim that the group’s stated environmental goals do not explain its political behavior is constant.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no founding date, no membership figures, no organizational structure, and no named Sierra Club officer, spokesperson or publication. No guest speaks for the Sierra Club or quotes its materials; every characterization of its motives comes from outside critics, one of whom, O’Toole, describes his own former consulting relationship with the group. The California deregulation bill is discussed without a name or a vote count, and the Australia firefighter case mentioned in an episode heading is not developed in the excerpts. Nothing in these sources describes a Sierra Club position taken in its own words.