Roughly 6,000 college students from across the United States converged upon the University of Maryland at College Park this weekend to attend Power Shift 2007, a national youth summit aimed at confronting a wide variety of environmental problems, focusing primarily on climate change.
The conference, which took place over four days, was by far the largest conference on climate change ever held by college students, and one of the largest conferences for students in recent American history.
Roughly 20 students from Hopkins attended the conference through means provided by the Hopkins Energy Action Team (HEAT), a coalition of student organizations on campus dedicated to the prevention of climate change and other significant environmental problems. At the conference, a series of panel seminars and workshops allowed these Hopkins students to learn and ask questions about issues related to the environment, as well as explore various means through which they could attempt to implement solutions effectively here on campus.
"The Conference was a great success - 6000 students registered, and our Hopkins group learned a lot. I think that Hopkins students can look forward to seeing even more involvement on campus this year," said Julia Blocher, Assistant Director of HEAT and the organizer of Hopkins's involvement in Power Shift. The 2006-2007 school year marked HEAT's inaugural year as an organization on campus.
"And Pelosi was fantastic," Blocher said, referring to the fact that Nancy Pelosi, the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, headlined the event.
The Conference was organized by members of the Energy Action Coalition, a coalition of 40 different student-led environmental groups across the country. The nationwide Energy Action Coalition aims to catalyze interest and knowledge about the climate change crisis in order to work for a transition toward solutions such as clean energy alternatives.
In terms of registered participants and media coverage, Power Shift 2007 was the Coalition's greatest success thus far. The staff and student organizers, who consisted of recent college graduates as well as current college underclassmen, including Hopkins's own sophomore Kevin Pai, outlined three main goals for the Conference: "1) Make U.S. presidential candidates and Congress take global warming seriously; 2) Empower a diverse network of young leaders and 3) Achieve broad geographic diversity."
Power Shift also included a networking session in which college groups met with similar groups from the various colleges in their state. Hopkins joined with MICA, Towson, Goucher and other schools in order to brainstorm ways of working together.
"Because we're all working toward the same goals, we need to organize, share ideas, form a state coalition," Blocher said.
The Conference was strategically timed to take place just months before the national primaries in order to galvanize student action for the upcoming presidential election.
"What Power Shift 2007 is really meant first and foremost to do is take the movement against global warming to new levels," said Teryn Norris, another Power Shift participant and president of HEAT.
"That means educating students about the crisis so that when the national elections roll around, they have the tools to make choices."
Not all felt that the Power Shift Conference was as effective as it could have been, however.
"Unfortunately the Conference came across as a partisan event," College Republicans Vice President Evan Lazerowitz said.
"The Republican Party, to a large extent, is concerned with the issue of global warming. Perhaps we don't take as quite as an alarmist philosophy, but we agree on the problem, the fundamental issue. Unfortunately there was little Republican representation at a Conference that was supposed to unite the entire country on the issue. What about McCain, who is lead author of an environmental bill in Congress? Or Newt Gingrich to discuss his book?" (Gingrich's A Contract with the Earth, which came out in October, discusses among other things ways market forces can be brought to bear on affecting change in environmental reform.) "We agree on the problem - we just have different methods for solving it," he said.
Granted, in the competitive bipolar political process, differences between parties tend to become amplified.
Consensus can be reached easily enough on one thing, however.
Discussion on climate change and sources for alternative energies is destined to play a significant role in the next year's hunt for the new U.S. president.
