Word: coal
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Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, had enlisted eco-celebrities such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Bill McKibben and registered more than 2,000 youth protesters from around the country for a march on the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant, which supplies steam and cooled water to Congress. They planned to shut down the plant by peacefully blocking the entrances, a textbook act of civil disobedience for which many expected - perhaps eagerly - to be arrested. The message was simple: the burning of coal, which accounts for some 40% of U.S. carbon emissions, "is destroying the planet...
...turned out, the action may have been almost too successful. On Feb. 26, just a few days before the protest, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid called for the 103-year-old plant to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, a move long pushed for by environmentalists but blocked by representatives from coal-heavy states. Protesters claimed an early victory. "Getting the plant to switch shows the power of popular pressure," said Steven Biel, the director of Greenpeace's global-warming campaign. But there was no doubt that by responding before...
...addressed the increasingly frigid crowd. After nearly three hours, with activists beginning to wonder what it took to get arrested in this town anymore, the protest's leader decided it was time to declare victory and go home. "We won!" Russell told the cheering crowd. "We shut this coal plant down...
Well, not exactly. Plans are for the plant to open on schedule tomorrow, still powered for the time being by coal. It would be heartbreakingly easy to mock a global-warming protest that was nearly snowed out, but what happened in Washington could be a significant step in the climate-change movement. For all the attention paid to it in the media, global warming remains an amorphous issue for many Americans, one with consequences that are far-off and unconnected to their daily lives. If that is ever going to change, warming advocates need to make climate change a matter...
...speaker after speaker addressed the plant-protesting crowd - from African-American activists whose cities are blanketed in pollution to protesters from Appalachia, where coal-mining has stripped the land bare - the message wasn't about polar bears or sea levels but the essential injustice of climate change. Unjust because in the U.S. and around the world it is those least responsible for climate change who will suffer the most from warming, and because it is a form of "generational theft," as one activist put it, with the young standing to inherit a ruined Earth. "My generation has blown it," said...