As reported by India’s Financial Express, the climate change “National Action Plan” consists of a laundry list of programs to be initiated — or more likely, repackaged — on solar power, energy efficiency, agriculture, and a few others. Based on previous performance in the power sector, agriculture seems to be the most promising of those programs (especially considering the Indian government’s success in raising productivity during the Green Revolution). One can hope India will have the same success, and be able to utilize the same distribution mechanisms, in efforts to create seed varieties adaptable to drier climatic conditions.

If McKinsey is right, India’s demand will soar to 315-335 GW by 2017, from 120 GW installed capacity today. To supply that demand reliably would require over 415 GW of installed capacity — that’s triple what the creaky Indian power sector produces now. And about 10 times what even the dozen planned Ultra-Mega plants could hope to supply.

The report identified 10 more or less monumentally difficult tasks for the Indian government to carry out [PDF], including cutting transmission losses in half, building 30 GW of solar, and training 300,000 workers. But the real challenge in India — just to meet power demand but especially if it is to be done with low-carbon energy — is hinted at by the fact that several of the recommendations are purely regulatory in nature. This includes creating a wholesale electricity market and speeding up approval of power plant construction. Yet these may prove the most difficult to enact.

In China, a main task is to redirect massive power sector growth toward cleaner sources. In India, a major challenge is simply getting anything coordinated happening. As if on cue, India’s Investment Commission also chided the Indian government for the fact that national electricity reforms initiated in 2003 have only moved forward in five states.

There seems to be one man at the symbolic center of all this: Ratan Tata, who heads the Investment Commission that has called out the government’s “obsession” to build Ultra-Mega coal plants. He also chairs the Tata Group, which owns Tata Power, the builder of the Tata Mundra Ultra-Mega plant. In India, you also can drive your Tata Nano, wearing Tata gold jewelry and talking on your Tata Indicom cell phone, to buy Tata iodized table salt. The expansive nature of the Tata Group and other powerful Indian conglomerates shows where the real coordinating and scaling capacity in India lies.

If India’s power demand growth is going to be met, it seems that it will only be done if companies like Tata succeed in their efforts to pry open the previously government-controlled power sector. And if low-carbon energy development is to happen, it’s hard to have much faith in plans issued by a government that has never failed to fall short of energy goals. Instead, hope that Ratan Tata and Indian energy entrepreneurs of all kinds look a little further past Ultra-Mega plants to the business possibilities of 100 extra gigawatts of solar and other low-carbon energy sources.

But he cleaned himself up, came back with a joke about surviving Beirut and Jerusalem but running into trouble in Providence, and went on to deliver a stem-winder of an address for an op-ed columnist essentially outlining his latest book.

I found The World Is Flat to be a good window into business models in the 21st century. His new offering, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, promises to be a cogent lassoing and explication of many of the biggest things that matter in the 21st century. Friedman chooses as the crucial drivers: energy supply and demand, climate, the spread of democracy versus petro-authoritarianism, biodiversity, and energy poverty.

A few bits from Friedman’s speech to look forward to in Hot, Flat, and Crowded and when he returns to columns this month:

• The McCain gas tax holiday: A “dumb as we want to be” approach to energy policy.
• On high oil prices and petro-dictatorship: With oil at $25 per barrel, Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul. At $100 per barrel, look into Putin’s eyes and you’ll see “all the instruments of democracy he’s swallowed.”
• Did Reagan bring down the USSR — or was it the decline in oil prices from $80 per barrel to $14.50?
• And finally, China as the Speed bus, except that it must switch from a diesel to a hybrid engine without going below 50 miles an hour. (That’s the first thing since The Matrix that makes you aspire to be Keanu Reeves, isn’t it?)

Before his speech, I had the chance to catch up with Friedman and ask him a few questions. The short interview is below:

I asked Friedman how it felt to be headlining Earth Day at Brown University with two backstories in mind: First, five years ago, Friedman would have been sponsored by the international relations institute and an appearance in late April would have been entirely coincidental. Second, he would likely have been challenged on his support for free trade and the Iraq war rather than thunderously applauded for his views on clean energy. And although it came before the pie, this question hints at why the incident occurred.

But I believe Friedman has good answers to the questions about whether a progressive environmental movement that is uneasy with neoliberalism should embrace him as a thought leader: His long and personal interaction with Conservation International gives him a deep green awareness that one doesn’t find in most geopolitically motivated advocates. His understanding of the motivations — if not the social histories — of diverse people around the world is sincere and the crucial spark beneath his increasingly fiery writing. (He spoke more in that speech about the 2 billion people who lack electricity than I’ve really ever heard from most of those who criticize him for his support for globalization.)

Friedman also comes to his forceful analysis of the interrelation of energy, democracy, and environment in an organic way, from decades of reporting and observation of oil politics, international relations, and more. And he’s still in the business of reporting and analysis more than advocating specific policies. All this is just to say that given the movement’s struggle to have prominent non-Hollywood faces, it needs all the analytical NYT columnists it can get.

On with the interview …

I know that your interest in conservation is long-standing, but five or 10 years ago, would you have imagined that you’d be the headline Earth Day speaker at Brown University?

I was hired by The New York Times in 1981 to be their oil reporter. I’ve had interest in energy and environment for a long time. And ever since I’ve actually been a columnist, once a year, I’ve done a trip to a biodiversity hot spot with Conservation International. This wasn’t something that just came out of nowhere.

September 11th, energy, environment — it all came together in the past few years, along with climate change, to be a big story. My interests and the news came together, and it’s very difficult to disentangle them. A lot of my thoughts on energy relate to how we drive reform in the Arab world, like if we bring down the price of oil. Where [my interests] stop and the other starts is hard to determine.

You’ve written on young people and climate change a bit — have you gotten a response to your columns on young people?

I triggered a lot of discussion, I noticed, and that’s good. The point I’m trying to convey is that it’s your world. You’re going to inherit this so you’d better pay attention. … [B]ig energy companies? They’re not on Facebook. They’re not in your chat room. They’re in the cloakroom, and they’re in your face. So unless you get off of Facebook, unless you get out of the chat room into the cloakroom where the rules get made, you’re not going to have an impact. So I’m all for the blogosphere; I love it. I love the fact that my column gets spread all over the world thanks to the internet, and that I can have this dialogue with so many people. And I love the blogosphere for all the wild, crazy ways it enriches the conversation.

But do not confuse that conversation with having an impact. At some point, the conversation has to stop and the lobbying and the arm-twisting has to start. Let us all talk and chat and criticize and yammer, but at some point, if you’re not in the cloakroom when the rule gets written — if you’re in the chat room — you’re not going to have an impact. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

What reaction have you gotten from young people in other countries — in China, in India?

The World Is Flat is a big bestseller in China and India, so I have a lot of young people who read it there, and I hear from them — not so much on climate stuff but on other “techno” stuff. That tends to be where I have a dialogue with them — less so on the environment.

In The World Is Flat, you write about the need to enhance education to compete in a flat world. What do American colleges and universities need to be doing on energy and climate specifically?

I think it’s so great that so many schools are teaching ecology and the environment, and I would have taken that if I could have; I’ve had to learn that myself. The thing I would love to see? We really need a course in every school on environmental policymaking. Do you know how a utility works? I didn’t before I wrote [Hot, Flat, and Crowded]. I had no idea where the regulations got written. You really need a course in policymaking. If you don’t understand where the choke points and the leverage points are in the system, you can have all the environmental awareness in the world and you’re not going to be able to tilt the system. I’d love to see courses on environment and ecology because you need that foundation in science, but I think you also need to know where the policy is made. It’s much more important to change your leaders than your light bulb.

To many people, sustainability means local, but as you see it, a “flat” world means global supply chains. So what does sustainability look like in a “flat” world?

I don’t think that [sustainability in a flat world] is “buy local.” I’m kind of against that. If everyone bought local, there are a lot of people in the developing world who would starve, because they would have nothing to sell. Locally grown things can be grown in a hothouse here, instead of having them come from Chile, and be much more environmentally damaging. You’ve got to really understand the full carbon footprint that’s going on.

My solution is much more systemic. You need a smart grid into a smart house into a smart car. That’s how you get scale. It’s not by buying your peaches here or there. Basically, you need a systemic response. And that’s a much more complicated organism. You just gotta prove [local] to me. What was the carbon footprint of that hothouse, compared to shipping it? And by the way, what are you doing to that farmer in Peru or Colombia? Think about that. He may end up going and chopping down trees, because he has nowhere to sell his peaches.

To people in India facing daily brown-outs or a lack of electricity altogether, it may seem like environmental organizations in the U.S. are opposing this power development from a different universe. They may be. But the financiers trying to justify this project in the public interest are themselves in their own universe of self-justifying arguments.

The main justification for international aid for this project is that “super-critical” coal-generating technology will make this plant more efficient than others in India. However, the broader situation in India’s power sector is such that nearly all of the efficiency gains at the plant are likely to be eaten up by the world-beating levels of transmission and distribution loss of the rickety Indian electricity grid. It’s a good bet that the equivalent of the output of at least one of the plant’s five 800 MW generating units will disappear before it gets to an actual electricity consumer [PDF].

Why does the Indian grid lose this much electricity? After building mega-dams and large coal-generating stations, state-level utilities have been in debt for decades because they’ve never been able to recover the costs of these projects (for myriad reasons) and invest in maintenance of the grid. In turn, because electricity isn’t reliable, industrial facilities are converting to “captive generation” that further deprives utilities of their highest-paying customers.

In the state of Gujarat, where this plant is going up, captive generation capacity has been growing three times as fast as utility-generating capacity [PDF] since the early 1990s. Not surprisingly, captive generation is incredibly dirty: oil, naphtha, coal, etc. at larger scales, and diesel generators at small scales.

This is where the rabbit hole really gets twisted. Coal is supposed to be preferable because renewables aren’t supposed to be able to generate power on a gigawatt scale. But investing in coal generation and plugging it into an unreliable grid (rather than building renewables close to consumers or fixing the grid) has the effect of — get ready for this — spurring the construction of small-scale fossil fuel generation on the other end, which is not only incredibly dirty (no “40 percent efficiency gains” here) but at a scale that likely has an even smaller cost advantage, if any, over renewables.

The cost of unreliable electricity is so great for industrial facilities that I find it hard to believe that any will give up the captive generation they’ve built in favor of the marginal improvements in power supply that would come from the additional supply from this plant, spread over five Indian states. So who exactly is going to pay for all of this electricity? Lest you think the budgetary situation of state utilities in India is not of great social or environmental import, this debt is what helps prevent the investment that would actually bring electricity to the 500 million Indians who lack it, and the financing needed to do it with clean power.

Powering India and delivering energy services to millions will be a monumental task. But the Tata Mundra plant will simply be a monument to a failed approach. The history of energy mega-projects in India has not been encouraging. Mega-coal plants masquerade as stopgap measures to fill shortfalls in meeting electricity demand while the next generation of clean power can be put in place.

But by eating up financing that could go to renewables and perpetuating a dysfunctional system, it is this very approach that is holding back a more nuanced and effective approach.

Since my Mandarin is a little rusty, I’ve done this in part by keeping in touch with a number of young Americans who are there working on various endeavors after graduating from college — my future bosses, I am sure, by virtue of the language skills they’re developing. One particularly cool project that’s getting started is a blog/vlog called China’s Green Beat, started by a friend based in Beijing and a Chinese friend of his. You can check out videos shot in different parts of China exploring different energy and environmental issues here.

I wanted to highlight the Green Beat this week because I got the following email:

From April 4-6, thirty Chinese students will gather for a meeting in Beijing, during which they will be trained in how to make a “Green Beat” video, a video that focuses on communicating environmental solutions and empowering citizens to protect the environment. Ten of the students will come from Beijing, while the other twenty will come from all over China representing nearly ten cities, including Harbin, Shanghai, Urumqi, Changsha, Hong Kong, Taiyuan, Xi’an, Tianjin, Chengdu, and Nanjing … After the training is over, the students will return to their home cities and have four weeks to make a video for submission in the first annual China’s Green Beat — China Dialogue environmental video contest.

In a place where lack of access to information about pollution and other environmental degradation is one of the biggest initial impediments to Chinese citizens taking action to protect their communities, giving young people access to new media tools is a great idea. I’m looking forward to the results and to some groundbreaking footage that will show up on Chinese YouTube.

In other China environmental news — it might seem like a late-breaking April Fools’ joke if you know Chinese history, but it’s not — I noticed that an event called the Green Long March, named to evoke Mao’s Long March (China’s equivalent of George Washington at Valley Forge, and a central story in Chinese Communist Party mythology), is being sponsored by Goldman Sachs’ China office. Irony aside, this too looks like it should be an inspiring example of what young Chinese are doing to build a citizens’ environmental movement in China.

For those who think China is simply an uncaring, monolithic emitter of greenhouse gases, there are many potential partners in China, inside and outside of government, who are eager for climate change solutions. For those of us concerned about China’s carbon emissions, success is simply a question of figuring out how external governmental and nongovernmental strategies can support these people in their respective places in Chinese society.

Trying to live-blog an event while you’re also trying to finish your senior thesis — not a good idea. Nonetheless, a belated report from the Clinton Global Initiative’s new youth event:

The pillars of the event were global issues like climate, poverty, health, and human rights. And over the course of the four times that Clinton addressed the group in more and less formal settings, it became clear, from the policy ideas he would riff on, that the issue on his mind these days is climate change. Like at grown-up CGI, each participant was intended to leave with a “commitment to action” in one of these areas. The approach lends itself to individualistic projects like raising money for a school in a developing country, or to starting a local micro-finance effort in the rural U.S.

At CGIU, it was abundantly clear that Kyle Taylor, a young “social entrepreneur,” was entirely correct when he was quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine saying, “Our generation is replacing signs and protest with individual actions.” Eerily so … and for better or worse, I’m inclined to add. It’s an approach far from the campaigns to change the policies of — or even shut down — international financial institutions that were all the rage when I first got engaged in these issues. But my peers’ inclination to propose small-scale (and to be fair, potentially scalable) solutions that poke at the intractable global problems that our political leaders fail spectacularly to address — rather than rally to protest these leaders — is not without its merits.

As hundreds of young people outfitted in CGIU T-shirts did a morning of service work in the Ninth Ward, clearing dirt and debris where Brad Pitt and Bill McDonough’s Make It Right project will soon grow, I pondered how this became the dominant approach to change for “millenials” in America. (Consider: Would several hundred European youth address social welfare issues by clearing off sidewalks? It’s more likely they’d be digging up the sidewalk cobblestones to throw at riot cops.)

A full exploration of this phenomenon would take more than a blog post, but I think it has something to do with Reagan telling America that government couldn’t solve our problems, and the George W. Bush years confirming that corporate America wasn’t going to, either. What’s left but to do things yourself, from the ground up?

During the event, Clinton seemed to catch on to the limitations, or at least the peculiarities, of this apolitical approach to change. He queried speakers on the panels he moderated about how they thought hands-on service projects should interact with initiatives for policy changes. I didn’t hear a good answer from any of them, and I’m unsure if Clinton thought he did either, because he kept asking. I hope that Clinton’s questions provoked some reflection in the audience, and that my peers catch on — sooner rather than later — to the ways that direct service work can, and must, complement the policy and market changes that can ultimately solve global problems. It’s through volunteer and direct service, among other things, that we can engage the base of people needed to call for policy change on any of these four global issues. Once we have that base, though, it has to be applied as political pressure, or service efforts will remain only Band-Aids.

On the other hand, the biggest thing I think these young people deserve credit for is seeing — far more intuitively than their forebears running NGOs — how global health, poverty, human rights, and climate issues are four peas in a really messed up pod. The apolitical approach taken by millenials may be related to the fact that these issues poll as high concerns for us, and they are apolitical issues themselves (although climate didn’t used to be). It is simply clear that these are the four greatest moral challenges we face today.

I give President Clinton credit for attempting to answer, in his post-presidency, the unanswered social and environmental questions that were raised, in a way, by his administration’s policies of economic globalization in the 1990s. In the closing remarks to the conference, he posited that an obligation to solve problems of climate change, poverty, and disease comes along with the interdependence that we enjoy every day in the form of global communication and trade. It was fascinating to hear the man who ushered the World Trade Organization into being in 1994 join a panel discussion on the role of local food in rebuilding a sustainable New Orleans.

But all this reflection on the event doesn’t detract from the fact that, on their own, all of these commitments to action are inspiring examples of the imagination and impatience of young people. These commitments to action are well-conceived and crucial interventions that are going to help innumerable people. They will take off even more if they gain long-term and institutional support from the university presidents who attended the event — as Clinton suggested when he said that schools should be branding themselves based on the social ventures they nurture. Check out the commitments for yourself (and watch webcasts of the event) here.

At the end of the day, former President Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have done something that doesn’t happen very often: They’ve put serious resources into supporting youth-led initiatives in an open-ended way. Because there is no real student-union movement in the U.S. or national student association of much size, forums like CGIU are few and far between. There’s much more that could be done to help young people with good ideas make them great and make them real.

For all that they depend on young people for energy and donations, most NGOs working in all of these issue areas do very little to fund, equip, train, and support leadership among young people outside of their own directed operations. Hopefully CGIU will be back, bigger and better, with more resources for young social entrepreneurs next year.

Photo: iStockphoto

The quick version is that Ross makes a strong case that women are hurt by a previously unappreciated effect of the infamous “resource curse” that imperils democracy in countries with abundant fossil fuels.

Saudi Arabia and Nigeria are textbook examples of the “curse”: when ruling elites and governments can get rich quick by exporting oil (or natural gas, or even tropical timber), they don’t so much have a reason to care about the well-being of their citizens, or anything else for that matter. Many. Bad. Things. Ensue.

Speaking today at Brown University’s Watson Institute, Ross emphasized that when developing economies are dominated by oil and don’t diversify into things like textiles and manufacturing, women don’t go into the labor force, their social status remains low, and — because women are stuck at home or in informal employment — their political movements remain nascent. The preponderence of oil in the Middle East and parts of North Africa would explain why traditional gender roles remain enforced even as oil wealth brings the accoutrements of liberal modernity.

Can Ross really suggest that oil impacts women’s status in the Middle East and North Africa more than Islam does? Academics at his talk raised questions about the strength of his methodology. But I tend to believe, and I think there is strong evidence to suggest, that social mores shift to accommodate demonstrated economic opportunities. When women can bring home good money in the labor market, traditional gender roles bend to allow it.

Read the paper (PDF) to get the full — and fascinating — report. Among many others, I think this should be of specific interest to the World Bank and other development agencies that currently fund extractive industries. Ross points out that nations in sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia are revving up to pursue oil- and gas-led growth strategies — and getting lots of international development loans to do it.

The upshot: more diversified, clean-energy economies may promote gender equality in ways that direct attempts to reduce the role of religious traditions in society might not. And the bottom line: coal may be the enemy of the human race, but in developing countries, oil may specifically be the enemy of women’s empowerment.

But in the past of couple years, while it has remained fairly partisan, climate change has been rapidly depoliticizing as an issue. Even with a former Democratic vice president as its standard-bearer, it’s now acceptable for companies, organizations, and institutions that would never consider taking what they see to be a political stance on an environmental issue — or any other issue not directly concerning their core business — to take a stance on climate change.

In my role as a grassroots organizer with a student environmental organization, it has only recently become possible to approach a wide variety of potential coalition partners for the very first time. My organization could never have approached a typical university president to register the school’s public opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — but we can and do approach hundreds to work on climate change.

This is phenomenally important in repositioning the environmental movement beyond its role in the ’90s as a “special interest.” It’s an immense boon to anyone trying to figure out how to spark the political moment that could result in good clean-energy legislation getting to the president’s desk, and the society-wide coalition that will succeed in getting her or him to sign it.

I’d measure the completion of this depoliticization process to be when primary and secondary schools start including climate change — and then carbon reductions and clean energy — in their curricula, assemblies, and more. I’m not talking about when high schools stop teaching kids that there’s a scientific climate debate — I mean when they take the only step a responsible educator could take and ask students to consider this: Now that we have a problem, what are the solutions to this problem?

Obviously, we’re not there yet.

The New York Times recently reported that a principal in Colorado was too scared of angry townsfolk to invite a Nobel Laureate to speak on climate at his high school without “balance.” (Happily, the reaction from students and parents in this rural ranching town was that this decision was absurd.)

Showings of An Inconvenient Truth at high schools get spiked every once in a while. Every time this happens, it causes a huge local media storm, the people opposing it look like idiots, and the community generally gets closer to agreement that this issue is worth civic consideration. Not far behind will be the community thinking and talking about what can be done on the issue (because it is so simple a high schooler can understand it).

So here’s my point: I was recently introduced to a high school student, Taylor Francis, who has become a pro at giving Al Gore’s slideshow to packed crowds. For every other high school student (or high school teacher) out there, you don’t have to get specially trained to give the Inconvenient Truth slideshow to hundreds of people.

All you have to do is get together some friends (or fellow faculty) at your school, set up a meeting with your principal, and say that you’d really like to have an assembly this semester with a speaker on climate change — maybe a professor from a local university, or failing that, a school-wide showing of An Inconvenient Truth. If you’re in a city where the mayor has signed the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement, get the mayor to back you up on the fact that climate education is important in your community.

This will force the issue in your community. Will your principal, your school board, and other local opinion leaders in your area stand up on the side of science, community preparedness, doing their part, and being good citizens? Or will they stick with politicization of a threat to human well-being?

When principals and school boards find some guts, or blink, or whatever, and allow lectures and Inconvenient Truth showings to go forward, that’ll just be the first step. (The next is to join the Campus Climate Challenge and turn your school into a green school.) But repeating this exercise in rationality is the cleansing process that is going move climate away from being a political issue — and toward being considered, fully and finally, the civic, human, and humanitarian issue that it is. Class dismissed.

This weekend, 5,500 students from across the nation came to the nation’s capitol for Powershift 2007, the first national youth summit on climate change — and the solutions to it. Yesterday, upwards of 3,000 people packed into the offices of members of Congress to press them for action to stop climate change with clean energy development that’ll create 5 million new green-collar jobs. More on that in a later post.

Representative Ed Markey invited five young people to testify before the House Select Committee on Global Warming and Energy Independence, one of which was 18-year-old Cheryl Charlee Lockwood, a Yup’ik Eskimo from the community of St. Michaels on the Bering Sea. (Footage available here.)

Here’s what she told the committee:

Just through my lifetime, I have seen so many changes in our community that it just hurts to not be able to have our — it’s really scary to live — lose our tradition, our culture, and we’ve been living here for thousands of years.

Rush Limbaugh played her testimony on his radio show yesterday and proceeded to mock her:

The Republicans are going to cut my school lunch money, too. I don’t know what to do, Congressman Markey. Wah, wah, wah, wah.

So, things that don’t particularly concern Rush Limbaugh: Tradition. Traditional culture. Community. Family. Homeland. Yep — he is really making some strong arguments here. He’s a parody of himself:

Nobody wants a child to cry. It’s just an attempt here to tug at people’s heartstrings. And, you know, to do whatever we can to make sure the child stops crying. And what do we gotta do? Well, we gotta stop global warming so the child’s spiritual connection to her homeland and her communities and so forth doesn’t melt away into the Arctic.

Some people might come to that conclusion, yes. But here’s the most important thing: Limbaugh said all this to accuse the Democrats of "exploiting children" to further their agenda — although Cheryl is an 18-year-old adult, not a child.

Cheryl was one of 3,000 young people who flooded Capitol Hill yesterday, none of whom were invited by the Democrats or anybody else. They drove hours in full buses and vans and slept on friends’ couches this weekend to press for their own agenda: a Congress that will act to build a clean energy economy that lifts people out of poverty and solves climate change.

Cheryl traveled from remotest Alaska to Washington, D.C., to speak up for what she believes and tell the story of what her family is going through. She came to meet with her senators, Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, and Representative Don Young. She was a citizen taking part in democracy, not a prop for political theater.

What I want to know is — what do Stevens, Murkowski, and Young have to say about Rush Limbaugh attacking one of their young constituents for taking part in the democratic process? Is this what young people from Alaska should expect when they try to make a difference and take part in democracy? Yesterday, according to the Anchorage Daily News, Senator Stevens had "no comment."

What about today?

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage … of Generation Q [for "Quiet"]. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t email it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it …

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall.

Big numbers? Washington Mall? Why haven’t students thought of this before? Oh, wait:

This weekend, some 5,000 young people from every state in the nation will be convening at the University of Maryland at College Park for the first national youth summit on climate change. The summit will bring together the diverse leaders of a generation that is voting in greater numbers in every election, volunteering more than any generation in history, and leading campuses to the clean energy economy of tomorrow by getting schools to purchase renewable energy and go climate neutral.

The event, sponsored by the Energy Action Coalition, is called "Power Shift 2007" to signify a shift in how we produce and use energy, as well as a shift in power from entrenched interests like Big Oil to a generation that believes that the problems that confront humanity — like AIDS, global poverty, and climate change — can be solved if we are ready to act boldly.

And since the campus at College Park is only a short subway ride from D.C., the young people behind Power Shift will also be convening there on Monday, Nov. 5. This could be the largest group of people ever — young or old — to flood Capitol Hill and press Congress for action on climate change and clean energy.

If you, too, think this sounds like a good idea — and especially if you’re a member of "Generation Q" — it’s not too late to sign out of MySpace, step away from the blogosphere, and make plans to come to Power Shift.

—–

A debate has been swirling on Gristmill for the past few weeks over the role of voluntary actions versus government policy in solving climate change specifically, and environmental problems generally. I’d like to stir this pot further and add another ingredient — what might be looked at as an in-between of sorts: social entrepreneurship.

Bill Clinton in the Atlantic Monthly touted a reinvention of charity, and Adam Werbach in Fast Company touted a reinvention of Wal-Mart. This whole social entrepreneurship thing is clearly "the new black." For the purpose of discussing it, I’ll define social entrepreneurship as business that achieves profit through the delivery of public (social or environmental) goods.

I could tell that this was not just a media phenomenon after only a few days back on campus this fall.

At the Activities Fair the first week of school, a leader of the Entrepreneurship Club approached emPOWER, the climate-neutrality campaigners on campus, about partnering. And the Engineers Without Borders group came to emPOWER’s first general body meeting to talk about working together.

Soon after, a housemate rested a foot on the empty keg sitting in our kitchen and told me about his idea for a business that would collect compost from households and sell it to farmers as fertilizer. Another housemate, talking over the gangsta rap pumping out of his iTunes, described a small-scale, methane-capture, waste-to-energy project he is working on. And a friend who worked with a nonprofit consulting firm over the summer is taking corporate finance this semester — for all the right reasons. There’s actually a whole class on social entrepreneurship, popular despite its 9:00 a.m. time slot.

It’s difficult to make a blanket statement about the real and lasting impacts of business changes made as a result of the current media spotlight on the climate. Some companies are going to find new, innovative revenue streams and business models that are environmentally positive, but some are going to make, um, cosmetic changes, or worse, do nothing meaningful and call it something. But I think this social entrepreneurship craze is different, and potentially powerful.

I don’t think that social entrepreneurial ideas and ideals, half-baked corporate do-goodery, old-fashioned greenwashing, or even better-organized markets for public goods — as Clinton refers to in the Atlantic — will replace or out-do regulatory structures and incentives in creating a new clean-energy economy. Rather, in order to build bedrock support for governmental climate action that grows rather than diminishes with time (even when they cause energy prices to go up, for instance), we need to — in the words of a fellow leader on my campus — "ground policies in reality by engaging people in tangible actions."

These actions can’t be the small, voluntary suggestions that Mike Tidwell has argued end up taking the pressure off corporations and government. Even if these things are subtle psychological reinforcements of environmental values, as 22 psychologists wrote in response, they’re the climate equivalent of giving change to a panhandler: taking pity on the climate and changing a light bulb, or being guilt-tripped into not eating meat. These are not the emotional pathways that lead to deep personal change or participation in political movements.

Instead, we need as many people as possible to take part — as entrepreneurs, workers, volunteers, and more — in the actual business of emissions reductions at institutional and community levels, so that they understand these actions as being means to personal goals of success and fulfillment. Once people imagine themselves serving their (perhaps even latent) environmental values through a successful career in whatever field they are drawn to, they’ll be far more likely to follow this up with personal habits and political choices than to reach this through encouragement to engage in peripheral actions like recycling, or counterproductive actions such as buying a third car because it’s a hybrid. Social entrepreneurship should not be viewed as free-market opposition by policy-oriented organizations, but a powerful means to deepen support for their cause.

So there’s an important role for nonpolitical action to play in building a clean energy future, but it doesn’t look like a list of tips from a "green issue" of a magazine. By getting engineers to audit buildings for efficiency, or having business majors compete in business-plan competitions judged on the basis of carbon emissions prevented as well as profits created, we’re hoping on my campus to not only graduate people who attended a climate-neutral university, but who see stabilizing the climate as a central issue in their lives because of the careers that they hope to follow.