On Feb. 27, nearly 10,000 young people from across the country will come together in Washington, D.C. for one of the largest youth summits in decades, the 4-day Power Shift 2009 conference. Power Shift is a national youth summit with the aim of influencing legislators to introduce and implement sustainable climate and energy policy. The conference will include concerts, speakers, workshops and panels and will end with a simultaneous lobby day in the Capital building and peaceful protest on the Capitol’s lawn. The issues students will lobby for come from online ideas submitted by young people. Thus far, ideas include fighting initiatives such as “clean coal” and biofuels (which many environmentalists view as false solutions), banning deforestation and retrofitting all government buildings to be energy efficient and carbon neutral. This year’s summit, the second Power Shift conference, is sponsored by the Energy Action Coalition (EAC). The EAC is a coalition of 50 student organizations, which also sponsored Power Vote, collecting over 300,000 pledges from citizens to vote and demand support for green jobs, clean energy and real global warming solutions. Many students hope to go to the conference to improve the sustainability of their own campuses. "We all care about green jobs and green energy a lot,” said president of U. of Maine’s Campus Health and Environment Network Jennifer Plowden. “It's a huge national thing; we want to be there - we want to be part of it,"

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