Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...joke was not lost on the media: FoxNews.com noted that it was "snowing irony in Washington." Nor did the protest end quite as expected. After the high-spirited and very well organized marchers left the park and encircled the nearby Capitol plant, groups locked arms in front of the three entrances to the facility, fully expecting to be arrested by the dozens of police monitoring the event. But the arrests never came: the police simply waited and watched as speakers and musicians climbed a mobile soundstage and addressed the increasingly frigid crowd. After nearly three hours, with activists beginning...
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...
...young people were fully present, both at the Capitol plant march and over the weekend at the Power Shift conference, which brought together more 11,000 college-age activists from around the country to strategize and rally over climate change. For this generation - post-Cold War, post-9/11, perhaps post-prosperity - global warming is emerging as their issue. Averting dangerous climate change is going to take smart policy, vast technological change and brave entrepreneurs, but it will also require a popular social movement that can alter American values. Global warming is far from inspiring that kind of change...