IN THE SPOTLIGHT

We wage innovative legal and public-pressure campaigns to curb global warming pollution, and in particular to sharply limit its damaging effects on endangered species and their habitats.

ABOUT OUR CLIMATE, AIR, AND ENERGY WORK

The Earth is heating up, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity is at the heart of the matter. Fossil fuel combustion — which drives most cars and power plants — is producing a critical mass of greenhouse gases that has already shifted the planet’s climate system into new and dangerous territory.

The Center has built an aggressive and highly successful litigation and lobbying campaign to address global warming. First and foremost, we take direct legal action to protect species and places across the globe that are in the vanguard of climate-change extinction. Since both the North Pole and the South Pole are flashpoints in the global warming crisis, the Center is campaigning to save key species there — including polar bears and 10 penguin species — to protect both their habitat and our own. We litigate at the state and national levels to enforce laws already on the books that can speed progress toward greenhouse gas reductions, while we also advocate for new laws explicitly capping and rapidly reducing emissions. Finally, we work to promote renewable energy and halt fossil-fuel development on public lands.

HOW WE DO IT

• Strategic, creative litigation
• High-profile species listing petitions
• Administrative and policy advocacy
• Public education and outreach

MILESTONES

OUR CLIMATE PROGRAM:

• Won the first-ever Endangered Species Act listing for global warming-threatened species: two Florida-coast corals.

• Won a key victory on greenhouse gas vehicle emissions when the nation’s highest court sided with the Center and our partners and struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

• Forced the Bush administration to publicly acknowledge for the first time, in December 2006, the scientific connection between greenhouse gas emissions and species endangerment in response to our petition to gain Endangered Species Act protection for the polar bear.

• In August 2007, won a landmark case challenging federal suppression of climate science. Under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, we argued that the Bush administration must complete a research plan and scientific assessment of climate change impacts in the United States. The court agreed, ordering the government to produce the overdue reports by May 2008.

• Filed the first-ever petition for protection of an endangered species from global warming under state law when we asked California to protect the American pika, directly threatened with habitat loss due to climate change.