Tomorrow, 31 Ithaca College students will join thousands more from across the country and Canada at Power Shift 2007, a rally on Capitol Hill to demand Senate action for climate control.

The conference, sponsored by the Energy Action Coalition, is the first national youth summit about the country’s climate crisis. It plans to confront the “empty promises and inadequate results” of national, state and local leaders, through discussion with presidential hopefuls about their climate campaigns and a lobby of elected representatives.

The youth response on campus and across the country is a refreshing challenge to analysts who claim today’s youth are politically indifferent. Global warming, an issue widely ignored or questioned by leaders before us, is a problem taken seriously by our generation and one of the only national issues we can claim as our own.

This activism is an illustration of what few students achieve from static classroom participation: the ability to take global and social interests off campus and, in turn, create a discussion that can address them in a larger context. It shows students understand the time and effort an issue as large as this requires and that acting now will reduce frustration — and irreversable consequences — in the future.