ON THE GROUND: Power Shift 2009

Power Shift 2009: Capitol Hill Power Plant Protest
Washington D.C. - Monday March 2, 2009

On a snowy, windy, and bitterly cold Monday in early March, 2500 people gathered outside the Capitol Building to march and demand the end of dirty coal electricity. Throughout the protest dozens if not hundreds of different chants filled the air demanding the symbolic closure of the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant and a switch to cleaner sustainable energy.

The Capitol Power Plant is located just blocks from the Capitol in a poor neighborhood and has supplied the legislative branch with electricity, steam for heating, and chilled water for cooling for over 99 years. It is a potent symbol of our long historical dependence on coal - a resource that supplies half of our nation’s electricity, pumps toxic chemicals into our communities, and releases millions of tons of climate changing gases into our atmosphere.

But the negative impacts of coal are not limited to burning it for electricity. Mountaintop coal mining, not so elegantly, involves the use of dynamite and bulldozers to blow the top off mountains and then push the trees, soil, and rock into the rivers and valleys below. The consequences of this and the ensuing mining operations include massive habitat destruction and the displacement of communities, often against their will. In fact in less than two decades alone coal companies have managed to blow up over 450 mountains and bury more than 700 miles of rivers and streams.

In February NASA scientist James Hansen, a leader in the global fight against climate change, urged youth across the country to join the weekend’s events and especially the march to urge President Obama and Congress to protect future generations from the ills of climate change."What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet," Hansen said. "The only practical way to solve the problem is to phase out the biggest source of carbon and that is coal." In the United States, 40 percent of all CO2 comes from burning coal for electricity, by far the largest single source.

But what about “clean coal”? Proponents argue that we can strip the carbon from the air coming out of the smokestacks, liquefy it, and inject it deep into the ground where it can be harmlessly stored. What they don’t say is that the technology to do this is unproven, incredibly expensive, and at least 20 years away from being a reality. Added to the destruction involved in its extraction, pursuing clean coal looks more like a cooked up fantasy of the coal companies than a viable option for future investment.

The reality is that we have everything we need to invest in renewable energy right now:

1. Enough potential renewable solar, wind, and other resources to supply almost all of our energy needs
2. All the technologies needed to tap clean electricity from those resources on a massive scale already exist
3. The funds necessary to build all the renewable energy infrastructure we need if all the public and private resources that currently go to coal to build and subsidize the coal industry are instead used to promote clean renewable energy

In the four days before the protest, more than 12,000 students gathered to advocate for an end to coal power. Hundreds of these students clad in green helmets stood in lines streaming into Congressional offices to deliver this message of change to lawmakers.

2500 protesters marched to the Capital Power Plant, blocked all the entrances, and demanded the end of coal-fired power. It’s been less than a month since that day and already things have changed. Mountaintop coal mining has been at least temporarily halted and Senate and Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill have demanded that the plant stop burning coal. This is a start and much of the credit goes to all those who protested that day. A national effort that joins voices from all across the country is needed to continue that effort and permanently ban mountaintop coal mining, close coal plants, and achieve a sustainable clean energy future.