Update: Jim Alexee, director of the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club responded to Vital Colorado’s assertion in the original post:

“Investing in gas instead of clean energy and storage technologies is simply a bad economic decision.  New wind and solar projects are already starting to beat gas in the market, and they’re only getting cheaper. Locking future generations into a gas-dependent energy system that is more expensive, and a threat to environmental and public health, clearly only benefits fossil fuel companies.”

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Loren Furman is calling out the Sierra Club over natural gas.

The vice president of the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry said the Sierra Club has long sung the praises of cleaner burning natural gas over other fossil fuels, but now it’s changed its tune.

Northwest Colorado is sitting on a bonanza of natural gas, but environmental forces are mobilizing against plans to extract it, according to a Time Magazine article, last week.

“The Sierra Club’s opposition to natural gas is extreme and counter to studies showing the benefits in using natural gas,” Furman said in a statement released by the traditional energy-friendly coalition Vital Colorado. Furman is a board member.

“It is also inconsistent with their long-held support for the use of this critical fossil fuel. Colorado has cleaner skies because of the growing use of natural gas in powering our state, and carbon emissions are decreasing in the United States for the exact same reason – more natural gas.”

In the article, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said gas could be tackled the way environmentalists lobbied against coal.

“Gas is part of the problem and not part of the solution,” he told Time.

The magazine noted:

Many environmental groups-including the Sierra Club-once considered natural gas as part of the solution to decarbonize the electric sector. Burning the energy source emits half carbon dioxide of coal, pound per pound, and has been described as a “bridge fuel” that might act as an intermediate step between the move away from coal-fired plants and the adoption of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

In a statement Vital Colorado said, “This latest position coalesces the fringe environmental movement’s efforts to leave all fossil fuels in the ground, something even former Obama Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel called ‘naïve.‘ In 2015, former-President Obama recognized the importance of America’s homegrown energy saying, ‘I would rather us with all the safeguards and standards that we have be producing our oil and gas rather than importing it, which is bad for our people but is also potentially purchased from places that have much lower environmental standards than we do.'”