Sierra Club Clarifies CREA Ad

CLARIFICATION: An ad running in today's Washington Post quotes a Doug Wheeler as a former Executive Director of the Sierra Club and an environmentalist. While Doug Wheeler was the Executive Director of the Sierra Club for about a year, he left over 15 years ago. In his professional work since, then he's taken positions against environmentalists on a number of issues. His views do not represent the Sierra Club or its more than 700,000 members, who oppose drilling in the Arctic National Refuge.

The group responsible for the ad, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), was once led by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, and has been criticized by prominent pro-environmental Republicans for its anti-environmental positions on many issues.

In 1998 when the Atlanta Constitution asked highly respected environmentalist Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) for his thoughts of CREA, he said, "Oh gosh, no. I belong to a respectable environmental organization."

Martha Marks, the head of the highly respected Republicans for Environmental Protection, told the same reporter that CREA was a "green scam," and a "Who's Who of anti-environment Republicans."