For Immediate Release
September 26, 2008
Contact: Brianna Cayo Cotter, Communications Director, Energy Action Coalition
E-Mail: Brianna@energyaction.net
Phone: (415) 305 1943- on-site cell phone in Oxford, MS
* Hi res, rights free photos of the windmills available at Flickr.com/powervote*
Power Vote Kicks Off Presidential Debate Tour with Giant Windmill Installation at Ole Miss
Nonpartisan Youth Voter Campaign Aims to Put Clean Energy, Green Jobs on the Agenda in 2008 Election
OXFORD, MS – As the candidates face off in the upcoming Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, young voters will be there to demand a bold new vision for our nation’s future. Power Vote, a nonpartisan initiative working to mobilize one million young “climate voters” in the 2008 election, kicks off its clean energy-powered presidential debate tour today.
Today, Power Vote activists have erected thirty windmills, each approximately 9 feet tall, in the Grove on the campus of the University of Mississippi, the site of the first scheduled presidential debate. At Ole Miss and at each of the subsequent debates, they will make a powerful visual statement about clean energy with this unique art installation project at locations near the debate sites. In Oxford, the installation will be made on campus near “Issue Alley.”
“Our landscape ought to be dotted with wind turbines and solar installations instead of coal and nuclear facilities,” asserts Jessy Tolkan, Director of the Energy Action Coalition's Power Vote campaign. “These windmills are a monument to the clean and just energy future that youth deserve and demand.”
Between each debate, the Power Vote Presidential Tour Bus will be stopping at college campuses along the way to mobilize students to take the “Power Vote Pledge” to “vote for clean and just energy.”
Power Vote is a project of the youth-led Energy Action Coalition. The Coalition and its more than forty partner organizations are supporting hundreds of local Power Vote efforts on campuses and in communities across the country. On the eve of the first scheduled Presidential debate, over 144,000 young voters have already taken the Power Vote Pledge.
“Young people are already successfully fighting for a clean energy future on their campuses and in their communities,” says Reagan Richmond, a Power Vote student leader at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “We need an economy that moves us beyond dirty energy, creates green jobs for all, and secures our climate. As we head to the polls in record numbers this November, that’s what we’ll be voting for.”
For more information, contact Brianna Cayo Cotter at 415.305.1943 and visit PowerVote.org.
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The Energy Action Coalition unites 48 organizations, over 600 local groups, and tens of thousands of young people in 56 states and provinces in an alliance that supports and strengthens the clean energy movement among students and young people in the United States and Canada. The partners of Energy Action work together to build a clean, efficient, just and renewable energy future.
