WASHINGTON – If the youth voice doesn’t matter, somebody forgot to tell the thousands of environmental activists at Power Shift.
This weekend, 12,000 college-age activists, including more than 130 students from this university, converged in Washington for Power Shift 2009, an event for environmental policy reform and prioritizing climate change as a major national issue. Organizers said they hope the students in attendance from all 50 states and around the world will return to their home districts after the event ends to mobilize community members and campus officials.
“College students have the ability to be at the forefront of this movement,” said Jessy Tolkan, executive director of the Energy Action Coalition, the organizing group for the event. “They have the power to make their campuses models showing these policies are possible.”
Andrew Nazdin, a junior government and politics major and campaign director for the Maryland Student Climate Coalition, was one such student.
“We want to send those 10,000 students back to their campuses like a trained army,” Nazdin said. “Representatives are going to go back to their home districts, and we’ll be there waiting.”
That army turned out yesterday, leading a march attempting to peacefully shut down the coal-burning Capitol Power Plant – an action not directly associated with Power Shift.
The Capitol Climate Action, another environmental activism organization, met in Spirit of Justice Park in Washington yesterday, where thousands of protesters turned out with megaphones and banners on 10-foot poles. The group then marched along police-lined streets to the Capitol Power Plant, where more than 200 officers – some with riot gear – awaited their arrival.
Officers from all specialized units, including SWAT teams, were present, said Capitol Police spokesperson Sgt. Kim Schneider. She also said blocking the entrances of the building was not illegal, and no police action would be taken unless crimes were committed.
“They could be out here all day and do this,” she said. “They should.”
A podium was assembled on the sidewalk across the street from the plant and several people, including Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), spoke.
“Welcome to Washington,” she said. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Bill McKibben, co-founder of environmental website 350.org who also spoke at Power Shift Saturday night, articulated the objections of the protesters.
“A coal power plant operating just the way it’s supposed to still destroys this planet,” he said. “Nothing has to go wrong with it- it’s wrong to begin with.”
Several students from this university’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society marched in the protest and stopped to block the main gate of the plant.
“What’s really great about this is that it’s a critical mass of young people that are finally standing up,” said sophomore English and government and politics major Malcolm Harris, who is also an opinion columnist for The Diamondback.
The protesters packed around the plant chanting: “No coal, no warming, resistance is forming,” and “unicorns, leprechauns, clean coal” until 5 p.m., when they “declared victory” and left together. There were no arrests, according to Davey Rogner, environmental liason to the university’s Student Government Association.
It is not clear what impact the protest had on actual plant operations. The goal was to block all entrances for the 3 p.m. shift change, preventing the next shift from starting work, but the plant had ample time to simply move the shift change to avoid the protest.
But participants still viewed the action as a success.
Sophomore American studies and LGBT studies major Josef Parker reused signs from a November protest at the Bank of America on Route 1 for the march on the plant.
“This is amazing,” he said. “It’s all about setting a tone and sending a message. Young people are setting a very assertive tone.”
The protest, however, may have had political impact before the conference even started: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) released a letter Thursday asking the Capitol architect to switch the nearby Capitol Power Plant from coal to natural gas by the end of the year.
The fact that politicians were looking at a power plant that has burned coal for 103 years and demanding change hours before Power Shift began was a huge sign of the conference’s potential power, McKibben said.
“That’s not a coincidence,” he added. “That’s a movement.”
The Power Shift conference that inspired the protest began Friday and featured more than 200 seminars, workshops and lectures designed to provide attendees with tools to lobby their elected officials more effectively.
But despite being less than 30 minutes from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, where most Power Shift sessions occurred, and Clean Energy for UMD offering to subsidize registration costs, this university was ranked fourth among attending colleges with 131 registrants. But overall, Power Shift saw a jump in attendance from 5,500 last November, when it was held on this campus, to about 12,000 this year, said Kim Teplitzky, national field director for the Sierra Student Coalition.
The students that attended were excited for the opportunity to make a difference, they said.
“I wanted to come together with students that have a common purpose,” said Leah Weiss, a sophomore environmental science major.
The power of the growing youth voice, along with the tremendous momentum coming out of the election of President Barack Obama, was a recurring theme of the conference. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) reaffirmed the power of the youth voice theme in her keynote speech Saturday night.
“It was young people who got themselves a president,” she said. “It was young people who got a new Congress. And it is young people who put climate change on the agenda.”
After Edwards’ and other keynote speeches, The Roots performed for more than 1,000 people, after which the conference-goers left the convention hall, chanting: “This is what democracy looks like.” They then made a spontaneous march to the White House in the middle of the night, Nazdin said.
Tolkan said young people are a new political force to be reckoned with.
“Twenty-four million young voters came out this past election,” Tolkan said. “We showed that we could make political change in this election. It is critical that we flex that new political muscle and demand bold legislation.”
And in meetings with more than 350 members of Congress, including House Majority Leader and university alumnus Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, young voters attempted to flex that new muscle by questioning the politicians on their positions.
“Young people voted in record numbers,” Teplitzky said. “Now, they’re looking for what’s next: This is it.”
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