Greenpeace

Today, MSU Greenpeace launched a nationwide week of action demanding our Board of Trustees reject the university’s unambitious, incomplete, and flawed energy transition plan.

Four student activists unfurled a large 20ft x 20ft banner on a parking garage at a busy intersection near the Hannah Administration building, home to the university’s executive offices of the President and Board of Trustees.This begins two weeks of action where campuses nationwide will join MSU Greenpeace demanding the MSU Board of Trustees pave the way for a clean energy future by voting NO on MSU’s faulty, unambitious energy plan.

We'll get to the encounter with Mr. Gerard below, but first, some context:

Gas prices! Everyone's talking about them, including our government at a Congressional hearing today held by the House of Representatives Energy & Power Subcommittee featuring, among others, Mr. Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute. As API's president, Jack Gerard is Big Oil's top lobbyist, and today he was doing what companies like Exxon and Shell pay him the big bucks to do - justify government subsidies and giveaways to Big Oil.

On September 26th, more than 200 people crossed over a police barrier on Parliament Hill, making the Ottawa Tar Sands Action the largest civil disobedience in the Canadian climate movement. As an American student attending a Canadian University I found the day particularly exciting for several reasons, not least of which was the sense of international solidarity in this fight against TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Last night over 75 people joined us to kick-off 100% Clean: 100 Actions for Clean Energy.

Phil Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace, started off the call saying, “Students always lead social movements, and you guys are kicking ass!” Following that, we heard from Michael Brune, Executive Director of Sierra Club, who expanded on the fact that young people are indeed leading us through their effort to retire dirty coal plants on college campuses across the country.

It was truly inspiring to hear from these top environmental leaders as well as youth activists from across the nation. Radford himself got his start as a high school student living in Chicago. As a young man he was struck by how many people he knew were getting cancer living around the waste incinerator.  He expressed that even if one less person was told their mom had cancer it was worth the fight. This sentiment struck a chord with many of us who have grown up with family and friends battling cancer. The health effect of dirty energy was a theme throughout the night. Maura Friedman a student at University of Georgia said that in the South, “We don’t really talk about climate change, but we do talk about health. People get health and the impacts of the campus coal plant on our community’s health”.  Jordan Lindsay, a student from Michigan State University said, “We must draw a line in the sand: No more dirty air and no more dirty water. Energy should not cost lives.” Jordan also spoke about the personal sacrifices many in our generation are willing to make in order to take bold action and cited the arrests in DC around the Tar Sands as an inspiration.