Michigan

There’s one vote on climate and clean energy this election that’s pretty clear and simple: Michigan’s renewable energy ballot initiative, Proposition 3. And right now, it needs our help.

Prop 3 is being called “the most important clean-energy vote this year” because it would substantially boost the state’s Renewable Energy Standard (RES) and help further develop Michigan’s clean energy economy, bringing much needed jobs to the state.

Not surprisingly (but still outrageously), dirty energy utilities and fossil fuel-funded front groups are spending million of dollars to defeat Prop 3, running misleading Ads, producing faulty reports and spreading disinformation about the initiative. And it’s not just from in-state utilities, Canadian pipeline company Enbridge, which dumped nearly 1 million gallons into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (a coal industry front group) also contributed to the campaign to defeat Proposition 3.

This fall, students in Michigan have been participating in the Power Vote campaign and collecting "Clean Energy Champion" student pledges to vote for Clean Energy. Here is an update for our activities during the Power Vote Day of Action. Students collected pledges on the campuses of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, and handed out facts about corporate polluters to students passing by. This day also coincided with the release of NWF's Student Guide to How Corporate Oil, Gas, and Coal Money Influences US Energy Policy, which is where we got our facts from. Overall this was a great day of solidarity and action in Michigan and across the nation. Read below to learn more about how we did!

The Michigan State University (MSU) T.B. Simon coal plant is the largest on-campus coal plant in the country. The MSU coal plant burns 200,000 tons of coal every year, and is one contributor to the 31 annual deaths in the Lansing area due to coal-fired power plants.

Since 2009, hundreds of MSU students have been waking up and saying “today I am going to shut down our campus coal plant!” For nearly three years, two student groups, MSU Greenpeace and MSU Beyond Coal, have been working tirelessly to pressure their administration to shut down the coal plant and transition to 100% clean energy.

Cross-posted from QuitCoal.org.

Hi my name is Jordan Lindsay and I am a sophomore at Michigan State University. I'm a member of the campus group MSU Greenpeace that has been running the Quit Coal campaign for the past two and a half years.

I first got involved with the group last year, my freshman year, when a friend invited me to a meeting. From the very beginning I was hooked. I had always wanted to do something good for people and the planet and now was my chance. I started petitioning, and planning a movie screening, and basically volunteered for whatever I could.

Sign up to take bold action on your campus!

The people in the group made me feel so welcome and I learned so much about the true costs of coal. Not only did I learn how huge of a contributor to climate change burning coal is, I also learned of that its entire life cycle is hazardous to human health. We continued my first semester by disrupting Board of Trustees meetings and having a die- in on campus. As a result of the pressure we were putting on the administration we got to put a representative on the Steering Committee for a 20-30 year energy plan for the university.