For the past decade, Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has helped toss out two-thirds of 249 new coal plant proposals, avoiding more than 654 million metric tons of carbon that would have seeped into the atmosphere each year. Since 2001, only 23 of those proposals have transformed into functioning coal plants, while 167 have been defeated. Next up on the agenda? Closing all of the some 580 coal plants already existing around the nation. Beyond Coal hopes to close a third of them by 2020 and all of them by 2030, and has employed a full-time staff “working on nothing but figuring out how to shut down these plants and replace them with clean energy,” says Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune.
