The Power Dialog

See below for an announcement about an exciting new project aimed at getting students civically engaged around the Clean Power Plan, and share with teachers and students who might be interested:

Dear Colleagues,

Over the next two years, students have a unique and critically important learning and civic engagement opportunity.  Student voices can impact the scope and direction of state implementation of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, mandating global warming pollution cuts in the electric power sector.

We are circulating this call to help organize a Power Dialog in March of 2016: hundreds of college, graduate, and high school level classes in states across the country taking field trips to meet with their Department of Environmental Conservation heads to discuss state implementation of the EPA’s new rules.

State agency leaders are already seeing their calendars fill up with meetings with utility executives and coal industry lobbyists. Why not our students?

By 2017, each state is required to come up with a plan to meet the targets set by the EPA. New York, for example, has to cut the emission rate from the power sector by at least 44% by 2030; in Ohio the required target is 28%; in Texas, 38%. These are big numbers. They could be bigger. State level plans can be more ambitious then the EPA requires. Yet the states and EPA are being pressured to relax the targets.

According to Dr. Dallas Burtraw, Senior Researcher at Resources for the Future, the climate policy dialogue has moved “outside the Washington beltway to 50 state capitals where stakeholders have long-term relationships and a long-term stake in the outcome. Citizen input is a critical part of the process-- whether it is technical, or simply provides the decisionmakers with information that the public cares about the issue.”  

Typically, it is the state DEC or DEQ that is the lead agency in drafting these plans. With the action now beyond the partisan wrangling of Washington and the state legislatures, students can gain both a powerful learning opportunity and a real voice in the policy process.

DEC officials will welcome visits from unusual suspects. Hearing the voice of students—young people who will live to see the late 21^st century first-hand-- will provide a fresh perspective, focused on the long-term impacts of today’s policy decisions.    

This is not a lobbying effort. We have no collective policy agenda for which we are advocating. Rather it is a learning opportunity for students, and also a chance for students to share their own individual thoughts and policy insights with state officials.

If you are interested in helping organize a class field trip, along with colleagues in your state, to visit your state capitol for a meeting with the relevant state officials, please sign up here. As we move forward with an organizing plan, we will connect you with other interested professors and university staff in your state, and will develop and circulate learning materials to prep your students for the conversation.

The Power Dialog will take place in March 2016, so there is lead-time for planning. The Bard Center for Environmental Policy will be hosting a dial-in conversation on February 18 at noon eastern to brainstorm how to help build a power dialog in your state over the coming year.

Learn more about the EPA’s Clean Power Plan here, or listen to a podcast by RFF’s Burtraw about the EPA’s program and the importance of state level engagement. As a group, we will start scheduling our trips to Phoenix, Nashville, Salem, Tallahassee, Boston and Peoria. 

Sign up here to learn more, and thank you for the work you are doing.

Eban Goodstein, Ph.D.
Director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy
Director, Bard MBA in Sustainability

Debra Rowe, Ph.D.
President
U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development

David Blockstein, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
National Council for Science and the Environment

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Stay going. 

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The American Clean Energy Party

Earlier this month, Eban Goodstein shared an idea to create the American Clean Energy party - ACE - in this article on grist.org.

The entire article is worth the read, as it's a compelling idea.  Goodstein lays out 3 main components that the ACE party would be built around:

1) The American Permanent Fund: Every year, each American family receives a check for $1,000, and rising. The source? A fee on big polluters

2) Clean energy leadership: Thirty billion a year to capture global leadership in the clean energy technologies that will rewire the world.

3) Green collar jobs, today: A large-scale loan guarantee program to finance energy efficiency retrofits of state, city, and federal buildings -- putting millions of Americans to work.

The aim of the party would be to run ACE-endorsed candidates in the primaries of both major parties, with the intention of shifting the debate to the most critical issue of our time - the climate crisis.

I like the concept for a lot of reasons - it will work to engage more people in the political process; it would be built around a positive vision for an energy-independent, safe, secure, clean-energy future; and it holds promise to provide the common ground needed to move past the counter-productive, divisive, partisan stalemates that are so common in our political culture these days.

ACE isn't a party yet - just an idea.  But it is an idea that has legs.  So stay tuned, and share the idea --hopefully, the right people with the necessary resources will come together to make something like ACE a reality soon.

Stay going.

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