11,000 Students Flood Washington with Demand for Bold Climate Action

There’s an electric current rushing through our nation’s capital today, and it’s not from the future stimulus-funded smart grid.

Right now, more than 11,000 young people from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 other nations are barnstorming Washington, D.C., for Power Shift 2009 – the largest youth summit on climate and energy policy in history.

In the massive D.C. Convention Center, student organizers are partaking in an extended weekend of workshops, training sessions, speeches, concerts, rallies and even a huge direct action slated for Monday. With big shots showing up like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Congressman Ed Markey, activists Majora Carter, Van Jones and Billy Parish, and musicians like Adam Gardener of Guster and the hip-hop group The Roots, Power Shift feels like a mix between Kyoto and Woodstock.

Students are here, in essence, to take the message of bold, comprehensive and immediate federal climate action directly to Capitol Hill. 

They are leveraging the momentum the youth movement has built locally through the Campus Climate Challenge, their first national mobilization, Power Shift 07, and their recent electoral engagement campaign Power Vote to pressure political leaders to take the action their generation's demands.

“It’s our future,” they proclaim – and they’re going to fight for it.

Power Shift is designed to not only deliver the youth message of change to elected officials, but also to continue to strengthen the climate and clean energy movement by infusing the nation's young leaders with new ideas, skills, connections and opportunities for employment and action. Workshops cover the spectrum, from dismantling oppression to corporate accountability, environmental justice to high school organizing, international impacts to domestic policy to new media.

“Just seeing so many activists united is a life-changing experience,” says Keith Brown, a junior from the University of California, Berkeley.

"When you're an environmentalist or an activist, you often get it drilled into you that you're going it alone, that you're on the fringe, that the changes you’re fighting for are impossible. Well, as a first-time Power Shifter, I can't imagine how powerful it'll be for me to see 12,000 fellow bright, passionate young activists around me--it'll be living proof we aren't on the fringe, but that it's our future, and we are going to take it back."

They wouldn’t have been able to pull off such a gigantic feat of organizing without using their generation’s most defining feature: mastery of the web.

350.org's online organizer, Jon Warnow, talks about the new tools and media power youth are wielding in 21st century politics:

"Power Shift represents a ground swell of youth uniting around a common cause and harnessing a toolset that didn't even exist a few years ago. From building a buzz on Twitter to remixing CSPAN clips for online recruitment videos, the Power Shifters are reshaping the nature of activism and advocacy for a new era of American politics."

Power Shift has a strong political component. Monday is entirely dedicated as a lobby day, and 6,000 students will be undergoing intensive lobby strategy training the day before. Contact information for each representative has been available on the Power Shift site for months, and central organizers have succeeded in getting meetings (at least with congressional aids) for student groups from nearly every state.

Madeline Garner, Partnerships Director for the Energy Action Coalition, explains:

"Our generation voted in the new administration – now we are letting them know loud and clear that this is the year to fix our economy with green jobs and secure our future from catastrophic climate change.”

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