Monday green rally and lobbying on Capitol Hill

On Monday, March 2, a coalition of student and other volunteer groups will lobby U.S. Congressional and Senate Offices on the urgency of reducing carbon emissions starting this year. The organizers have also announced a civil disobedience action at the nearby U.S. Capitol coal-fired heat/air conditioning plant. Interestingly, the NASA atmospheric scientist James Hansen will take part in that civil disobedience, and he expects to be one of the ones who will be arrested Monday.

For anyone on ATS/BTS who lives in the U.S. National Capitol area, you might want to check out the lobbying Monday, or the power plant picketing, or the related ongoing PowerShift09 conference at the Washington D.C. Convention Center. The link for the lobbying and picketing activiities is:


www.capitolclimateaction.org...

Interestingly, the "climateaction" site shows a letter just written by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the Capitol power plant asking them to switch from coal power to natural gas. According to comments posted further down on this website, however, Pelosi and Reid sent a similar letter to this power plant with this request before, but Congressional action on this topic was blocked by guess who, Senators Robert Byrd and Mitch McConnell of the great coal-producing states of West Virginia and Kentucky. So it's unlikely that the current letter will get far either, unless Congress actually flinches under the scrutiny of these thousands of young people.

Note: If anyone can attend either the lobbying effort or the civil disobedience, can you post photos or Twitter comments as breaking news?


The link for the affiliated conference at the Washington D.C. convention center is:

powershift09.org...


[edit on 2/28/2009 by Uphill]