100actions

Thirty five top youth leaders will meet with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and White House Liaison to Young Americans Ronnie Cho today to thank Administrator Jackson for her leadership and discuss their concerns about a range of environmental issues, including the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The delegation includes student representatives from universities across the country, as well as Energy Action Coalition, Greenpeace and Sierra Club representatives, will start the day with a roundtable meeting with Administrator Jackson at 10 a.m. at Howard University. Youth leaders will then make a visit to Capitol Hill before meeting with Cho, from the White House Office of Public Engagement

What do flashmobs, football and coal have in common? Well, nothing really… unless you were on Lowry Mall yesterday afternoon at Mizzou.

At exactly 12:21pm, nearly 50 students in bright yellow Beyond Coal t-shirts showed off their best touchdown victory dances in front of a giant hand-made football goal post in the heart of campus. At the sound of “Let’s Get Ready to Ruuuumble,” the students and several alumni danced their butts off in the name of clean air.

It's Mizzou's 100th Homecoming week, so the idea was to raise Coal Free Mizzou's visibility and get people excited about the game by promoting clean air. “Better Air. Better Football. Better Mizzou.” was painted on the banner held in the background of the flashmob along with other posters demanding clean air and clean energy.

This past Friday, the only thing I was worried about was coming up with a good presentation for the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference. While relaxing on my porch after a strenuous week of midterms, our student government president happened to walk by and inform us that the White House had just contacted her about President Obama coming to Pittsburgh on Tuesday. We had been planning to confront the Organizing for America office the following Friday to tell Obama to stop the pipeline, but if Obama was in town, we had to send the message to him directly. I, however, had a midterm during the exact hour that Obama would be coming and resolved to recruit a few friends to greet him.

On Sunday at the AASHE conference, we grabbed Bill McKibben right before his speech and let him know we planned to greet Obama on Tuesday. At the end of his speech to a national conference of hundreds of climate leaders, he said the best thing they could do was attend the rally to meet Obama with a strong message to say NO to the Keystone XL pipeline at 11AM, Tuesday at 313 Oakland Ave. My heart skipped a beat- Bill McKibben, one of my idols, had just announced my house address to a national conference. What’s more- he then told us to stand up so everybody knew who to find. I hesitantly stood up with two of my friends, Nikki Luke and Seth Bush, who looked around nervously. What happened after was chaos. Within five minutes we were interviewed by the City Paper, the Tribune Review, and asked by dozens more what our plans were. The problem was—we didn’t have a plan. And I had a midterm when Obama was coming. Here’s the thing: if Bill McKibben calls you out at a national conference to organize a rally, you are going to organize a rally, whether you have a midterm or not.

#OccupyStateDept - approximately 4 am (Photo Credit: Josh Lopez)

Late Thursday night close to 50 people descended on the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC. We were there for one reason: #OccupyStateDept.

It was the eve of the final State Department public hearing on the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and news was breaking about the corrosive influence that big oil and TransCanada were having on the State Department's deliberative process. We had heard reports from other hearings across the country that big corporations and their front groups were bussing in people, paying line-sitters, and skirting the rules to try to dominate the hearing process.

It was clear that Big Oil was once again going to try to flood the political process, using their financial muscle to drown out the voices of people across the country who oppose this disastrous pipeline. So we decided if Big Oil was going to try to flood this process, we would occupy it.