Michigan Youth Policy Summit

Energy Innovation Kalamazoo, MI

July 24-29th, 2010

The Keystone Center's Youth Policy Summit (YPS) provide students with a unique training and preparatory experience that engages a contemporary, science-intensive policy issue. Their experience provides them with the research, negotiation, problem solving, and policy analysis skills they will need to be successful in their future endeavors as scientists, lawyers, doctors and business professionals.

In partnership with the Michigan Geologic Repository for Research and Education (MGRRE) and Western Michigan University The Keystone Center will conduct a Youth Policy Summit in 2010 focused on Energy Innovation. Keystone will work with MGRRE to select 40 students from 10 different schools around the state to participate in this program. Participating students will be asked to negotiate consensus-based recommendations for their respective Governors, state legislatures, and leaders in the business and non-profit sectors.

The topic of energy innovation is particularly timely. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences entitled “America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation” highlights a number of potential actions that can tackle the issue of greenhouse gas emissions, the limits of our electricity transmission system, and our fragile dependence on oil and potentially natural gas. According to the report, there is:

“a growing consensus that our nation must fundamentally transform the ways in which it produces, distributes, and consumes useful energy. Given the size and complexity of the U.S. energy system and its reach into all aspects of American life, this transformation will be an enormous undertaking; it will require fundamental changes, structural as well as behavioral, among producers and consumers alike.”

Students will examine and explore possibilities to generate energy with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and with domestically available resources. This will include not only renewables like wind and solar, but also nuclear power, as well as methods to continue using fossil-fuels more efficiently and with carbon capture technologies. Students will also explore the ways in which energy is distributed in the nation, and explore possibilities to improve transmission. All these choices will result in fewer carbon emissions to the atmosphere, but every choice also has economic and social implications. Students will balance the political, legal, economic, technological, environmental and social factors associated with each possible solution.