From the Wonk Room.
On
March 2, thousands of youth activists participating in Power Shift ‘09
descended on the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress take action to fight
climate change.
While students from South
Dakota
to North Carolina
lobby their elected officials, others will be engaging in mass civil
disobedience to protest the
United States’ continued use of coal.
They were in the halls of Congress and surrounded the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant despite a wicked snowstorm that was ensnarling the East Coast – or, in many ways, because of it.
As predicted by models of climate change, the South and West is increasingly gripped by extreme storms and extreme drought: California is in its third consecutive year of drought conditions and now in a state of emergency. Drought conditions in Oklahoma are “terrible.” Despite the triple storms of Dolly, Gustav and Ike in 2008, nearly 97 percent of Texas is in drought – already this year, “about 3,400 wildfires have been reported across the state, scorching nearly 105,000 acres.”
The
youth activists are trying to keep it snowing in the
Northeast,
raining in
Texas,
cold in the
Rockies,
and sunny in
Florida.
They’re trying to prevent California from burning
up,
Iowa from being flooded
out,
and Alaska from melting
away.
They’re trying to get our elected leaders to take action to put an end
to the destabilization of our climate.