Six thousand student leaders from 2000 colleges, universities and high schools all across the country traveled to Washington, D.C. over the weekend as part of Powershift to ask our nation’s legislators how they plan to protect their generation from global warming. After participating in over 300 panel sessions and workshops on the weekend at the University of Maryland, the student leaders proceeded to Capitol Hill where they spoke at a Congressional hearing, paid hundreds of visits to lawmakers and held a large rally on the Capitol steps wearing hundreds of green hard hats.

The green hard hats symbolized the students’ vision of a prosperous economy through the creation of thousands of new green jobs. This is not a distant prospect. The National Wildlife Federation’s report, Higher Education in a Warming World: The Business Case for Climate Leadership on Campus (released November 2007), cites several studies illustrating how hundreds of thousands of exciting new jobs are likely to be created through investments in clean energy in the near future.

Photo by Fritz Myer.