Universities are on the cutting edge of solar energy research, but they’re surprisingly laggard when it comes to adopting it.
Only nine campuses have installed systems producing more than 1 megawatt of electricity, and even those system are making only a tiny dent in their campus power supplies. The 1.2 MW system at the University of California San Diego, for one, generates less than 4% of campus energy use. Dozens of other campuses have smaller solar projects, but among them, only 27 top 100 kilowatts.
Compare our nation’s universities with Wal-Mart, and the numbers are pitiful. Wal-Mart has 18 large arrays in California alone, and it just announced it will double that number in the next 18 months.
The City of Berkeley made headlines last fall for its innovative municipal solar financing program, and it quickly became a model for dozens of other progressive cities across the nation.
Mayor Tom Bates now has his sights set on another groundbreaking policy ripe for replication: municipal climate action plans.
But unlike the smooth-sailing solar deal, Berkeley’s Climate Action Plan (CAP) has run into some major snags – most notably an incendiary article from the San Francisco Chronicle that put Berkeley citizens into an uproar.
Published a few days before the plan came up for review before the City Council, the article raised such a wave of concern that the council pushed back its scheduled vote to this coming Tuesday, in order to hear more public comments.
I spent some time getting to the bottom of Berkeley’s publicity woes to find out what caused this bastion of progress to stall on such a landmark policy.
At 648 pages, the Waxman-Markey climate bill is a literal behemoth. But the endless page-count and dry legal jargon isn’t stopping young climate advocates who recognize the potential for movement in Washington now and want the best legislation.
The minute the discussion draft was released last month, policy groups and citizen journalists alike began gnawing through the immense document, finding the weak and strong points, and coming out with compelling analyses and demands for lawmakers in Washington.
Young people have been less than thrilled with what they’ve found, and they’re not shy about saying so.
To get a handle on what they're thinking, and how their congressional “asks” differ from colleagues one generation removed, I talked with a number of young climate policy experts intimately familiar with the Waxman-Markey legislation. I wanted to understand their take on the bill, the political war-zone it has to fight through, and where they see young people contributing in the policy debate.
They want carbon dollars flowing into clean tech RDD&D, green jobs corps, and a portion into citizen’s hands to counter persistent Republican tantrums about increased energy costs (which GOP leaders shamefully exaggerated earlier this month).
What they don’t want is money and policy perks flowing to float the dirty energy industry – and they’re outraged that the bill is chalk full of them.
Fundamentally, they’re calling for a complete reframing of the climate debate, in two major ways.
We all know young people have a handle on the Internet like no other demographic. My generation grew up playing computer games, had PC literacy classes in elementary school, and secretly hijacked the internet for music pirating before we were teens. We have an intuitive sense of the web – its uses, its limitations, and its future.
The nation's young people are now harnessing that power for climate action, and we're beating coal's dirty PR in ways that have industry front groups shaking.
Some people picture Spring Break as a mix of tequila hangovers and Facebook photos that should never be posted, but a contingent of U.S. college students is spending those precious five days of freedom in a very different way: fighting dirty coal and mountaintop mining in Appalachia.
Mountain Justice Spring Break, now in its third year, brings more than 150 young people from around the country to witness the devastation of mountain top removal and coal waste, undergo intensive activist organizer training, and take action.
This year, 14 members of the group were arrested in a direct action protest and “die in” on the steps of the Tennessee Valley Authority headquarters in Knoxville.
The TVA, of course, is responsible for what has been called the greatest man-made environmental disaster since the Exxon Valdez.
On Dec. 22, a coal ash retaining pond at the TVA’s Kingston power plant ruptured, sending more than 1 billion gallons of toxic, mercury-laden sludge spilling into the Emory River. It poisoned the drinking supply of hundreds of people downstream, killed wildlife and wiped out a dozen homes. The spill was 100 times greater than the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Alaska’s Prince William Sound 20 years ago.
And yet, days after the coal ash spill, the major media weren’t covering the Tennessee coal ash devastation. It wasn’t until youth bloggers working for Fired Up Media, the firm that launched ItsGettingHotInHere.org, broke the story and got the attention of the national news.
Young people’s role in highlighting the TVA coal-ash disaster is emblematic of their leadership in the mountaintop removal fight.
They are crossing more lines, devising bolder actions, and implementing more diverse and powerful strategies than ever before in this fight.
Months of planning, negotiating, strategizing and training set the stage for the best orchestrated mass-lobby day in climate and youth activism history.
After 350 meetings between student activists and congressional representatives or their aides drew to a close last week, many of us within the movement began to wonder – what exactly did we accomplish?
Did our reps “get it?” What’s going to be the fallout for national climate policy, for the road to Copenhagen, for the role of youth in national energy justice issues?
In a few Capitol Hill offices, we were disappointed to discover, lawmakers and their aides seemed to know very little about even the basic facts of climate change.
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.
As the renewable energy sector scrambles to sort out its share of the economic stimulus package, many voices within the wind and solar sector are pointing out a problem: The booming industry faces a startling lack of skilled professionals.
The stimulus bill's injection of about $50 billion for clean energy projects is certain to create tens of thousands of green jobs. But much of the clean energy field is still new and developing, and poor federal funding in education has left many colleges without the resources to develop innovative technical curricula. Only a handful of specialized programs currently exist on college campuses in fewer than two dozen states.
The question college administrators and industry officials are asking now is: Who will train the next generation for the new green economy?
Berkeley was buzzing with excitement the day Chancellor Robert Birgeneau introduced the university's landmark Sustainability Assessment. I was a freshman, and the Assessment was the holy grail of what needed to happen to create a sustainable campus – from buildings to food purchasing to transportation, energy and water. The Assessment had everything to get Berkeley started on a comprehensive transformation.
And then – it sat on a shelf. No funding trickled out of the university coffers. No task forces were created to ensure its implementation.
After two years of waiting, the students decided to take matters into our own hands. If the university wasn't going to act on a plan it had spent $80,000 creating, we would.
Our answer was a "green fee." We asked the student body to support a $5 increase in their activity fees to create a fund for campus sustainability and climate action projects. The Green Initiative Fund would last 10 years, raise $2 million and be overseen by a student-majority grant-making committee. Berkeley's green fee fund – approved in 2007 with 69 percent of the campus in support – has already implemented a digital energy monitory program, and it is working on a campus victory garden, among numerous other projects that probably wouldn't happen if students weren't the driving force.
Green fees seem like an obvious and easy step. More than for 60 universities have them, and they expect to raise about $75 million. Students understand that if they don't act now they will see serious problems in their lifetimes.
So why are politicians still getting in the way?
Despite overwhelming student approval and extensive campaigns by green fee organizers to get diverse campus stakeholders on board, some universities and even the Florida Legislature are blocking green fees from taking effect.
In just about every corner of the country, youth climate advocates have been building a grassroots apparatus that would have even David Plouffe salivating. Their regional, state and national networks have powered aggressive and successful campaigns, such as the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, and they are now critical to implementing the policy commitments they've secured.
These networks are as powerful as they are prolific. Students are influencing national policy on a scale never before seen in youth activism.
Before I get into the thick of it, I want to point out that things have changed a bit since young activists were demonstrating against the Vietnam War or even against South African apartheid. Student organizers today are more often behind their laptops, launching virtual actions, spreading congressional phone numbers, gathering petition signatures, and Twittering, Facebooking, Myspacing and emailing their peers into action.
On-campus meetings are still a staple, but students have realized that collective power is where the punch is, so they have constructed deep networks of regional organizations.
Here's a look at the current state of affairs in these youth climate networks.
