Power Shift 2009

There is far too much to tell about the Power Shift 2009 conference for one blog post.  To summarize: over 12,000 young climate activists, most of them college students, gathered in Washington, D.C. last weekend for two days of panels, workshops, famous speakers like Van Jones, Bill McKibben, and new head of the EPA Lisa P. Jackson, grad-school and career fairs, apparently well-known bands Santigold and The Roots (I’d never heard of them, but then I’m a musical illiterate), and training for the big lobby day on Monday.

In addition to hundreds of meetings with legislators, Monday’s festivities also included a big rally on the East Lawn of the Capitol (which was unfortunately covered in snow) and a march to the nearby coal plant, surprisingly well-publicized considering that it included mass civil disobedience (an idea strongly supported by James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist, who was going to speak at the conference but had his plane cancelled).  Just last Thursday, perhaps as a result of knowing that thousands of young people were about to descend on the Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who was going to speak at the rally but also had her plane cancelled) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ordered the plant converted to run on natural gas by the end of the year.

To save space, the rest of the story will have to be told in pictures:

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The above album display is brought to you by Windows Live Writer, another free product being developed by my team at Microsoft.  I don’t use it much because it doesn’t properly support LiveJournal’s tagging system as yet, but it does have some pretty nifty features.