It\’s Getting Hot In Here

Pittsburgh youth aren’t waiting to kick-off their Define Our Decade efforts.  They launched it this past week with “Rustbelt Renewal: a town hall forum on the promise of a clean energy future.” More than eighty young people and community members engaged with a distinguished panel on the issues of climate legislation and building a clean energy economy.   The four panelists were Congressman Mike Doyle; Patrick McMahon President of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85; Dr. Constantine Samaras of Carnegie Mellon University and RAND Corporation; and Bob Wallace, director of Penn State University’s BioBridge Program.

The panelists touched on the importance of educating the masses, changing mindsets around energy usage, and how creating clean energy jobs could boost the local economy. Congressman Doyle explained how “the US will benefit from a green revolution,” and spoke about Pittsburgh’s importance as a hub for the new clean energy economy saying, “there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between a healthy environment and a good economy,” because clean energy jobs are just “good business sense.” The sentiment shared by all panelist was that even if we’re wrong about anthropogenic climate change, we’ll still have made the best economy in the world.

Angela Wiley, a student organizer at Chatham University remarked, “tonight, there was space for education, discourse, and political action — this needs to happen consistently if climate legislation is to be revived in the Senate to support what local governments and independent groups are already trying to accomplish with respect to a clean energy economy.”

Congressman Doyle went as far as to say that “we need a swell of grassroots support” and encouraged to keep the action going and build the dialogue in our communities. That’s exactly what the Pittsburgh Student Environmental Coalition, a new network of  local campuses and other area youth, did by hosting the forum. Forums like these, and hundreds of Define Our Decade events next month across the nation, will make climate and energy part of a real conversation, taking it from a transient topic in the media, to real solutions in our communities.