Sierra Club Foundation

The Sierra Club Foundation was founded in 1960 to administer funds in support of scientific, educational, charitable, and literary efforts to preserve, protect, and restore the natural environment. The Sierra Club Foundation’s Clean Transportation for All campaign aims to reduce climate and air pollution, create jobs, and expand access to transportation by ensuring that 100% of the road vehicle fleet in the U.S. is electric. This grant supports the program’s plans to work within federal regulatory and state policy to advance clean trucks and buses and secure funds for EV charging infrastructure. (Substrategy: Electrification)

The Sierra Club’s Beyond Oil Coalition has led and re-engaged environmental organizations and other allies to develop a more comprehensive strategy around oil to achieve more carbon reductions from the transportation sector. We recommend renewing support to the Sierra Club to facilitate the continued coalition building, and to refine strategy and start elements of the strategy addressing communication, redefining the debate around oil in the United States in the midst of an oil boom, and seeking strict environmental regulations for oil production.

This is our third year funding the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, which seeks to retire at least one-third of the nation’s coal-fired power plants by 2020. This campaign is a major component of the Hewlett Foundation’s U.S. climate and energy strategy for 2014. Over the next three to five years, utilities will face market and regulatory pressures that could make coal plant operation more expensive than cleaner energy alternatives. This project is designed to seize those opportunities, with the aim to retire 105 gigawatts of existing coal capacity in the United States and replace that output with clean energy.