Power Shift is the monthly newsletter for the Campus Climate Challenge with updates, insights and the low down on whats next in the fight to stop global warming.
The Contents
- Week of Action Report – 600 Campuses, 49 States, 8 Provinces, and 50,000+ People!!!
- Campus Campaign Highlights Victories, events, actions and more.
- News and Views Some interesting stories coming off of the presses.
- Whats Next A New Challenge Website, Midwest Summit, Mountain Justice Spring Break, Step it Up, Photo Petition, NJ March
Week of Action Report
First off, is the awesome news that the Challenge now has students at more than 500 campuses working to advance clean energy policies on their campuses. This is huge and puts us half way towards our goal of engaging students on 1,000 campuses. The week of action had even more campuses involved with events on nearly 600 campuses across 49 states and 8 Canadian provinces. During the week of action, an estimated 50,000 young people were reached through screenings of An Inconvenient Truth, educational forums, rallies and petition campaigns. Read on for highlights of the week of action. For the full recap, visit http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgtwqhfr_81tz68ks.
Campus Highlights
University of Southern California Led by CCC coordinator Ruchika Gupta, CALPIRG students at USC have collected 800 invitations to get Congressman Becerra to attend a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. The students delivered the valentines to the Congressman with balloons and fanfare on Valentine’s Day. Due to the delivery, the Congressman will be visiting campus on April 3rd to talk to students about his plans to fight global warming.
Towson University Working through the night, students declare a snow day on campus by dumping snow on their campus and building snow…err…people. Attracting the attention of the Baltimore Examiner and campus media, they use the buzz to raise awareness about their campaign, gather petition signatures, build the buzz that surrounds their group.
St. Mary’s College 60 students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland participated in the “Polar Bear Splash” by jumping into the St. Mary’s river that runs through their campus. Over 100 interested students and faculty stood on the banks and observed their frigid jump. Off campus media came out in full force including the Washington Post and Southern Maryland Online. View a short video clip of the event (5MB WMV File). Warning: Video contains Bare Buns!
University of Virginia After a 2 year clean fee campaign that lead to no institutionalized change, students decided to do what all young people should do when their plans are disregarded, organize. On Saturday, February 3rd, nearly 30 students convened for Energy Unplugged, a speaker series and planning session to kick off the second semester of the Campus Climate Challenge and re-energize coalition efforts. They are organizing a strategy session to generate a new campaign for this year. The school also recently committed to building all new buildings to LEED standard!
James Madison University Students at have been demanding 100% clean energy for months now, but only during the Week of Action did they take their truly fight to the campus streets. Their weeklong series of events culminated with a 50 student JMU Green Team march from one end of campus to the other this past Thursday in celebration of their recent successes on campus. In conjunction with collecting nearly 2000 signatures in a few short weeks, they were able to pass a Bill of Opinion through Student Government adding further support to their incredible demands. 
University of Connecticut-Storrs CONNPIRG students invited Congressman Joe Courtney to attend a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. The day before the showing, CONNPIRG advocate Chris Phelps met with Representative Courtney and got him to agree to co-sponsor the Safe climate Act. Right before the showing, the Congressman got called back to DC, but not to worry, the students stormed ahead without him. The students packed the room with 200 people, and even recruited 3 new interns from the event! Before people entered the room, CCC volunteers asked folks to take part in their Safe Climate Act photo petition. The tactic was so popular that they even landed a picture on the front page of the campus paper (see link below). Check out the article and the great front page picture ConnPIRG students got in The Daily Campus. (PDF) 
Fighting Coal in North Carolina Running with the momentum from the Southeast Student Renewable Energy Conference (SSREC) in Clemson Feb 16-18, Mattie with EJN has plugged a network of student activists into a struggle to fight Duke Energy’s two proposed Cliffside coal-fired power plants. In coordination with several community groups in the area, EJN is hosting a write-in/call-in action to pressure the North Carolina Utilities Commission into REJECT the proposed plants; they plan to make a decision by Feb 28th. The issue has recently gotten tons of local media and even a couple of national hits.
Warren Wilson College Students at Warren Wilson tabled two days in a row in their school cafeteria and educated the classmates about the proposed power plants and the damaging impact they would have on the local communities and the environment. They had 5 laptops on site and got more than 100 fired up students to email their state legislators in opposition to the power plants.. They cause quite a ruckus and set the campus abuzz with their message.
University of North Carolina, Charlotte Students from the Earth Club have been attending meetings and hearings for months on this issue. Over the weekend they stepped it up by filling their state representatives’ voicemail boxes demanding that serious action be taken to stop the proposals.
Rutgers University-Camden Mike Ewall attended and spoke at the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance Common Ground Conference at the Rutgers-Camden campus Feb 23-24. Mike presented on environmental justice and energy issues to more than 200 young people including many people of color. One key high-school leader was really inspired by all the speakers, and is already eagerly devouring student organizing resources. 
Howard University Students are organizing a block party for April 21 that will include entertainment and booths with information on HIV/AIDS, energy conservation and sustainability. The event will bring together student leaders, inspirational speakers and local leaders.
Stanford University Shadia Wood is working with students at Stanford University to organize a symposium for April 13-14 that will examine the impact of climate change on native lands. A key focus will connecting students with the local communities in Northern California to amplify the voices of the indigenous people. The documentary Homeland will be screened. Local tribes such as Yurok, Hupa and Karuk are already seeing their communities impacted by the construction of a dam. Shadia is a also bringing 3 high school students from Detroit and Dearborn, MI to the Midwest Summit. This will be a great chance for the students to gain new skills that will help them create change in their local communities.. The student from Dearborn goes to a high school that sits literally in the shadow of a huge Ford auto plant. 
North Dakota IEN’s new Challenge organizer Kandi Mosset (Welcome Kandi!) has hit the ground running and has helped to connect our friends at Step It Up with the Environmental Action Committee on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. EAC is investigating a proposed oil refinery that would further damage the reservation’s land, air and water. The residents pf the reservation are in a serious bind because the Environmental Protection Agency leaves the monitoring of air quality to the states and the state of North Dakota has no direct responsibiity for the reservation. And many of the tribes don’t have the environmental capacity to effectively monitor the proposed refinery. 
Rutgers College NJPIRG students hosted a talk by Congressman Frank Pallone on Wednesday that 300 students attended. The event started off with Congressman Pallone (a Safe Climate Act champ) fielding questions from the crowd. The students asked him on whether he would stick to his guns and vote only in favor of Safe Climate Act, the only piece of legislation that will stop the most detrimental effects of global warming. He replied that he would, and he hopes that other Congressmembers do the same. He also agreed to encourage the Rutgers administration to adopt the students on campus policy proposal. After the Q&A, Congressman Pallone sat and watched the whole film. He sat right next to a CCC intern, and made comments throughout the film.
Penn State Finally Does It!!! Thanks to several years of excellent student organizing (remember Maura’s sit-in??), Penn State University announced its commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 17.5% below 2005-2006 school-year levels by 2012. This reduction will take place on all 2+ of the school’s satellite campuses, which serve more than 80,000 students. To put this commitment in perspective, Penn State will be eliminating as much carbon as Middlebury would if it went carbon neutral 20+ times.
Climate-Neutral Cornell? In the midst of perhaps the fastest climate neutrality campaign known to humankind, students have gotten a $5 green fee on the ballot which will be voted on by students in March. As if that weren’t enough, the KyotoNow! group, led by SSC Executive Committee Chair Katherine McEachern, has also gathered more than 4,700 petition signatures, 91 faculty endorsements, 15 student org coalition sign-ons, and the support of the university’s facilities department in their campaign to get President Skorton signed on to AASHE’s Presidents Climate Commitment. And what have they gotten for all of their hard work? President Skorton has agreed to sign the Presidents Climate Commitment Yeah baby!
Madness in Minnesota! Ask and you shall receive! Students at Winona State University asked their president to sign the AASHE commitment — and she said yes! (Granted, she was thinking of doing this anyway, but still, pretty cool.) Also, Winona State is one of 14 Minnesota campuses participating in the student organized Campus Wars during the month of Februrary, during which students at different schools will compete to reduce their energy use by the largest amount. Crazy event highlights include a bicycle-mounted jousting-match between dirty coal and clean energy crusaders at Macalester College, and a beard-growing competition at St. John’s University to promote turning down the thermostat. Yes, beard-growing. 
Northwest Climate Justice Summit From February 2-4, more than 130 youth climate leaders from Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia met in Seattle, WA for the first-ever Northwest Climate Justice Summit. The conference was organized by SSC student leaders Christina Rajan Billingsley and Juliana Williams, and featured key skills trainings, inspiring speakers, and the creation of the first-ever Northwest regional network of climate activists. Highlights included: – Speaker Faith Gemill of REDOIL, an indigenous activist from Alaska who is working on oil and climate change issues; – Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, creator of the US Mayors Climate Agreement, who also addressed the conference; – Peer-to-peer trainings on skills like campaign planning, working with the media, and meeting with administrators that were run almost exclusively by students; – The involvement of at least SEVEN Energy Action coalition partners, including the SSC, Global Exchange, WashPIRG, OSPIRG, Campus Progress, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Rainforest Action Network. All in all, it was an inspiring weekend full of plans and progress! For more, you can check out Juliana’s blog post about the event here: http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/1046.
Climate Neutrality Summit Through an SSC internship, 11 Middlebury College students spent their January Term planning and running the first-ever climate-neutrality summit. More than 120 students met in Middlebury, VT on Januray 19-21 to learn about climate-neutrality and gain campaign planning skills. Based on this summit and their research, Middlebury students are also in the final stages of creating a climate neutrality toolkit that will help other students run these campaigns on their own campuses. Middlebury students presented their own plan for climate neutrality by 2016 to their Board of Trustees on February 16.
News and Views
A Conservative Conservationist? Washington Post op ed, MTV shows love to the Challenge. Ottawa Citizen on IPCC report and photo of Canadian Youth Climate Coalition. Ottawa Rush Hour photo. (pdf) USA Today on the IPPC report. Detroit Metro Times on the week of action. Scientific America on The Gore Effect. Utne Reader on the Challenge and the College Sustainability Report Card. Southern Maryland Online on the week of action. ABCNews.com on the Challenge. Diamondback (University of Maryland).
What’s Next?
Stay tuned for the redesigned Challenge site. In the words of the most awesomest digital organizer ever, Arthur Coulston, “Its going to be sweet!” Midwest Summit will begin on March 2. Get more info. Mountain Justice Spring Break will kick off on March 10. Get more info. Join with over 730 actions happening across the U.S. for Step It Up 2007, calling on Congress to Cut Carbon 80% by 2050! Find out more. Photo Petition to Congress. We are still accepting photos, so make a cool sign that says “Congress: Cut Carbon Emissions by 80% by 2050, take your picture and email them now to photos@climatechallenge.org. Check out the photos that have been submitted here. Folks in New Jersey will be marching to conserve the Garden State. For more info.
