Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous

The head of the Sierra Club is gearing up to fight the incoming Trump Administration’s anti-climate policies, while also building off support for clean energy jobs on the ground.

During the last Trump administration, the Sierra Club filed some 300 hundreds of lawsuits intended to fight back against efforts to gut environmental protections. It expects to file even more during the next.

“Our short-term strategy is to run our playbook from 2016,” executive director Ben Jealous told Forbes. Along with lawsuits, the nation’s oldest and largest environmental group plans to submit scores of Freedom of Information requests to find ties to fossil fuels and potential corruption among Trump’s incoming Cabinet members.

“We are gearing up aggressively to get ready to defend the United States against the corrupt individuals he will undoubtedly attempt to appoint as his Cabinet,” said Jealous, who was previously president of the NAACP and took charge of the Sierra Club in November 2022.

“That’s how we took out his EPA chief last time,” he said, pointing to how the group’s Freedom Of Information act requests helped expose former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s conflicts of interest. Among other things, he had enlisted aides to obtain special favors for him and his family. Pruitt, who was behind Trump’s first-term effort to aggressively rewrite environmental regulations, resigned in July 2018.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to again roll back environmental regulations, push more drilling for fossil fuels........

© Forbes