Panel of experts discuss energy policy at Fetzer Center

By Ben Coleman
Western Herald

A panel of experts on energy policy met Monday at Western Michigan University’s Fetzer Center to engage a group of junior and senior high school students from throughout the state. Students listened to the panel and asked questions about the changing nature of energy policy.

The students and experts were called together for the Keystone Youth Policy Summit, a week-long workshop where high school students work to develop recommendations for energy innovation in Michigan.

The panel was made up of representatives from utilities, corporations, lobbyist groups, academia and state and local government. They spoke with students from several high schools throughout Michigan including Portage Northern and the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center about the obstacles that arise when trying to influence and create sustainable energy policies.

“We all sell ideas,” Jon Allan, the executive director of environmental policy and intergovernmental affairs for Consumers Energy said to the student policymakers.

“Now, whatever you may think of being a salesman, what you’re going to be doing this week is selling ideas to each other.”

Over the next week, the students will work together, representing different stakeholders’ interests from around Michigan, to come up with new policy recommendations addressing problems that may arise from all parts of society, Keystone Educational Excellence Programs director Jeremy Karowitz, said.

The students will submit their final recommendations to the public Thursday at the Fetzer Center at 3:30 p.m.

The panelists stressed that there was not one solution that would transform the way Michigan or the United States changes the way they are powered and that the shift to renewable energies would be an evolutionary approach.

“From a business side, we try to diversify our resources and cover all of our bases because we don’t know what the answer will be,” said David Lyons, Dow Corning Corporation’s director for Global Energy and Utilities.

“It’s a complex issue, there’s a lot of heads at the table,” Lyons said.

“It serves a good function for us (as well as the students),” David Gard, energy program director for the Michigan Environmental Council, said.

“It forces us to come together in a setting that we otherwise wouldn’t and we can carry what we learn back with us.”

Several panel members also expressed the need for some sort of action at the federal level, possibly as a tax on carbon emissions.

“The leap from here to getting it done is huge though,” Gard said, citing that the political sway was not available in Washington to pass a carbon tax.

A’Kiem Gardener, 17, a student from the Winans Academy of Performing Arts in Detroit, was optimistic about the week ahead.

“Yeah, I’m learning a lot,” Gardener said.

“It’s thinking about the little things that we learn that will help us get the [recommendations] across. You have to think what’s at stake here, in other words, our world.”

“It’s a great educational experience,” Lyons added.

“The sooner we expand new leadership, by exposing these students to the realities of all the stakeholders, the better the solutions will be.”

Reservations to attend the final presentation of the Keystone Youth Policy Summit can be made by contacting Susan Grammer at susan.grammer@wmich.edu or (269) 387-8642 or by contacting Elizabeth Roush at eroush@keystone.org or (970) 513-5824.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=18406

Posted by kleonard on Jul 27 2010. Filed under Breaking, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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