The Litigator

If the planet has a lawyer, it's John Adams. In 2003, when the Bush administration failed to curb auto emissions as mandated by the Clean Air Act, Adams unleashed his team of attorneys at the Natural Resources Defense Council to file a landmark lawsuit against the government. He also sued the nation's five largest power companies for spewing the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, and he will soon be going to court to stop automakers from blocking a new clean-car law in California. All told, the organization currently has more than 200 lawsuits pending against polluters. "NRDC represents the gold standard," says Eric Schaeffer, former head of law enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency. "Their attorneys rival the sharpest minds in the EPA and are defending public health right now in a way that officials under the Bush regime can't."

At seventy-two, Adams is a white-haired, button-down attorney who comes across as mild-mannered and unflappable. But he can display a mean bark in the courtroom, as well as an impeccable command of the facts. A crackerjack strategist who co-founded NRDC in 1970, he promptly made a name for the organization by playing a key role in writing the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. NRDC now boasts more than a million members, an annual budget of $60 million and a more powerful climate arm than any other environmental group. In his thirty-five years of shaping NRDC's legal tactics, Adams says, he has never seen a more worthy target than the Bush administration: "Their denial is stupefying. Here we have an administration that invaded Iraq on sparse and even bogus evidence, and yet they claim to be unconvinced by the overwhelming data on climate change -- despite a bigger scientific consensus than most any we've ever seen in history."

Adams grew up in New York's Catskills and still owns a farm there, often wheeling guests around on an ancient Cub Cadet tractor. But he is not afraid to draw the ire of his allies: NRDC has taken flak from fellow environmentalists for siding with the Bush administration and fossil-fuel producers on the benefits of "clean coal," a new technology that filters out climate-warming pollutants so they can be "sequestered" underground. "We're not going to solve the climate problem unless we get industry to join us in the fight," Adams insists. Coal currently accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, and Adams believes that a complete shift to renewable energy will simply take too long to protect the climate. "The bottom line," he says, "is that America has to start significantly reducing greenhouse gases even before we phase out fossil fuels."

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