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Despite Snow — and Irony — a Climate Today in Pictures »

Protest Persists
By BRYAN WALSH / WASHINGTON Tuesday, Mar. 03, 2009
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Protesters stand in front of the Capitol Power Plant in Washington on March 2. The Capitol 10. Attack on Sri Lankan Cricket Team: Echoes of
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Correction Appended: March 3, 2009

The call rang out through Washington early on the

More Related morning of March 2: the biggest act of civil disobedience
Environmentalists against global warming in American history would not, in
Win Big EPA
Ruling on Coal fact, be snowed out.
Emissions
Climate Change, Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace and the
One Light Bulb at Rainforest Action Network, had enlisted eco-celebrities
a Time?
Changing the such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Bill McKibben and
Climate on registered more than 2,000 youth protesters from
Campus
around the country for a march on the coal-fired Capitol
Power Plant, which supplies steam and cooled water to Congress. They planned
to shut down the plant by peacefully blocking the entrances, a textbook act of
civil disobedience for which many expected — perhaps eagerly — to be arrested.
The message was simple: the burning of coal, which accounts for some 40% of
Watchmen's Dave Gibbons
U.S. carbon emissions, "is destroying the planet through global warming," as
Kennedy put it. America needs to get off coal, which supplies nearly half the
country's electricity, if it wants to have any hope of controlling its greenhouse
gas emissions, and it should start with the Capitol plant. (See the top 10 green
ideas of 2008.) Get the Latest
News from
As it turned out, the action may have been almost too successful. On Feb. 26, Time.com
just a few days before the protest, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and
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Senate majority leader Harry Reid called for the 103-year-old plant to switch
headlines delivered straight to your inbox.
from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, a move long pushed for by
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environmentalists but blocked by representatives from coal-heavy states.
Protesters claimed an early victory. "Getting the plant to switch shows the power
of popular pressure," said Steven Biel, the director of Greenpeace's global-
warming campaign. But there was no doubt that by responding before the Quotes of the Day »
protesters hit the streets of the capital, Congress was simply moving one set of "They do have a much larger
goalposts off the field. physique than a lot of people.
So their odds are going to be
But then came the snow. As 2,000-plus young activists — according to the definitely in their favor."
organizers — gathered in the Spirit of Justice Park near the Capitol, bystanders ROBERT SIMPSON, Coast Guard Petty
Officer, on the chances that two NFL player
were greeted with the surreal sight of a global-warming protest occurring in the and a third man missing since their boat
capsized off the Florida coast over the
middle of a freak March snowstorm. They chanted slogans like "Who is hot in weekend are more likely to fend off
here / There's too much carbon in the air" while huddling against the windchill. hypothermia
More Quotes »
The greatest risk to the protesters wasn't aggressive cops — the D.C. police, just
as chilled as the activists, had little interest in confrontation — but frostbite from
the hours of marching and standing in the cold. "It's icy out there, so be careful,"
organizer Joshua Kahn Russell told the crowd before the march began. (There
CNN Headlines
were no reports of injuries, winter-related or other, although after six hours in
Obama taps Sebelius, DeParle for health posts
the elements, this reporter is still waiting to feel his face again.) (Read "Nuclear's Conjoined twins separated after long surgery
Comeback: Still No Energy Panacea.") White House set to reverse 'conscience' clause

The joke was not lost on the media: FoxNews.com noted that it was "snowing
irony in Washington." Nor did the protest end quite as expected. After the Health.com Headlines
Are You an Annoying Patient? Docs Tell All
high-spirited and very well organized marchers left the park and encircled the
Top 3 Problems Your Doctor May Miss
nearby Capitol plant, groups locked arms in front of the three entrances to the Is Your Makeup Making You Look Older?
facility, fully expecting to be arrested by the dozens of police monitoring the
event. But the arrests never came: the police simply waited and watched as
speakers and musicians climbed a mobile soundstage and addressed the
increasingly frigid crowd. After nearly three hours, with activists beginning to
ADD TIME NEWS
wonder what it took to get arrested in this town anymore, the protest's leader
decided it was time to declare victory and go home. "We won!" Russell told the
cheering crowd. "We shut this coal plant down!"

Well, not exactly. Plans are for the plant to open on schedule tomorrow, still
powered for the time being by coal. It would be heartbreakingly easy to mock a
global-warming protest that was nearly snowed out, but what happened in
Washington could be a significant step in the climate-change movement. For all
the attention paid to it in the media, global warming remains an amorphous
issue for many Americans, one with consequences that are far-off and
unconnected to their daily lives. If that is ever going to change, warming
advocates need to make climate change a matter of justice, appealing to
Americans' sense of fairness — just as social movements like the civil rights one
once did. (Read "America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency.")

As speaker after speaker addressed the plant-protesting crowd — from African-

American activists whose cities are blanketed in pollution to protesters from
Appalachia, where coal-mining has stripped the land bare — the message wasn't
about polar bears or sea levels but the essential injustice of climate change.
 Unjust because in the U.S. and around the world it is those least responsible for
climate change who will suffer the most from warming, and because it is a form
of "generational theft," as one activist put it, with the young standing to inherit a
ruined Earth. "My generation has blown it," said Rocky Anderson, former mayor
of Salt Lake City, one of several politicians who joined the march. "But this
power is going to be fueled by the young people."

The young people were fully present, both at the Capitol plant march and over
the weekend at the Power Shift conference, which brought together more 11,000
college-age activists from around the country to strategize and rally over climate
change. For this generation — post–Cold War, post-9/11, perhaps
post-prosperity — global warming is emerging as their issue. Averting dangerous
climate change is going to take smart policy, vast technological change and brave
entrepreneurs, but it will also require a popular social movement that can alter
American values. Global warming is far from inspiring that kind of change — the
Capitol plant protest still only attracted a few thousand people — but it is
beginning and it is growing, and a snowstorm isn't likely to stop it.

The original version of this story misstated that the Capitol Power Plant
supplied electricity, rather than steam and cooled water, to Congress.

See pictures of the world's most polluted places.

Read "Exposing the Myth of Clean Coal Power."

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