Public radio does a piece on the Sierra Club's gallant fight against reliable electricity

Living on Earth: Kicking Coal

YOUNG: Technology to strip the CO2 from coal as it's burned, and store it in the ground is probably at least a decade away. Some doubt it will ever really work at the scale needed. CO2 emissions, and what it will cost to control them—that's the burning issue with coal. And Sierra Club attorney Bruce Nilles spent the past two years criss-crossing the country to make sure it stayed on the front burner—firing up public interest, filing lawsuits, and talking to financiers about coal's carbon problems.

NILLES: We beat back 84 of these proposed coal plants—again, states saying no, courts saying no and investors saying no from coast to coast. Today we have somewhere between about 70 to 80 remaining. We still have a long way to go, but we've come a long way from the threat we were facing.

YOUNG: The latest Sierra Club victory came in the form of a letter from new Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson. She's reviewing a last-minute memo from the Bush administration that gave proposed coal power plants a pass on greenhouse gases.

NILLES: For the last eight years the answer has been to put our heads in the sand and ignore carbon dioxide. And the days of pretending global warming does not exist and that carbon dioxide will not be regulated are simply over. The Obama administration is gonna use existing authorities to begin to take a bite out of global warming and do our part.