Students

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.

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.