Business as usual

Would someone just make all this crap stop! From The Hill:

Sierra Club took $26M from gas industry to fight coal-fired plants
The Sierra Club disclosed Thursday that it received over $26 million from natural-gas giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. between 2007 and 2010 to help the group�s campaign against coal-fired power plants.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said Thursday that he learned of the funding shortly after beginning the job in 2010 and moved to end the arrangement.

He discussed the funding on the Sierra Club�s blog Thursday after Time magazine broke the news of the Chesapeake-Sierra relationship earlier in the day.

Here�s Brune:

At the same time I learned about the donation, we at the Club were also hearing from scientists and from local Club chapters about the risks that natural gas drilling posed to our air, water, climate, and people in their communities. We cannot accept money from an industry we need to change. Very quickly, the board of directors, with my strong encouragement, cut off these donations and rewrote our gift acceptance policy.

The revelation could nonetheless become a political sore spot for the Sierra Club, one of the nation�s biggest and most influential green groups.

It comes as environmentalists are increasingly battling hydraulic fracturing, the controversial natural-gas method that Chesapeake and other gas producers are using widely.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy again -- what is it that these people actually do that is good for us. Just a bunch of watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) obstructionists.