Protesters Want To Close Capital Hill’s Power Station

The US Congress gets its electricity from its own coal-fired power station.

The Capitol Hill facility, which stands in front of the dome, was built almost a century ago to give Congress an autonomous supply of power, but is now used only for air conditioning and heating.

The plant is viewed as confirmation that a strong coal industry has been able to influence Congress the way it wants.

The oldest Senator, Democrat Robert Byrd, from West Virginia, a coal mining state, has had many years of practice in protecting his state’s interests.

Matt Leonard of Greenpeace said that the emissions from the plant are not great but it is a very influential symbol.

Vested interests have prevented change to oil or gas.

Last year, Nancy Pelosi, Democratic speaker, insisted, unsuccessfully, that the plant should burn natural gas only.

However, last Thursday Congressional Democratic leaders appealed for a conversion of the plant to natural gas only by end of this year

Civil disobedience was planned for today by thousands of protestors at the plant in Washington, DC and could be the opening for further civil disobedience on global warming in the USA.

The protest will petition for greater efforts to reduce changes in the climate, and the closing of the coal burning plant.

It is timed for the final day of PowerShift09, a four-day meeting that is attracting around 12,000 students to Washington.

They will come from more than a dozen countries and more than 5,000 will lobby their elected representatives around the capital.

Coal is used extensively and is a major source of harmful greenhouse gases.

Climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen of NASA said that civilization is threatened most through the burning of coal.

The construction of over 83 coal plants has been stopped since 2006.

The governor of Michigan declared a freeze on all new coal plants, this week, and a court in Georgia halted a coal plant for neglecting to include controls on pollution.

Public awareness has been increased by Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth”.

The new Obama administration means that both the Democrats in Congress and the White House are ready to move on global warming, which could spell the end of coal in the US.

Leading the opposition to this change is the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCE), financed by the coal industry, which spent almost $40m in 2008 on lobbying for the continued use of coal, including adverts on television.

Joe Lucas, vice-president of the ACCE, was showing no worries about the demise of coal, maintainng that US coal reserves are greater then OPEC’s oil reserves.