Saturday, June 7, 2008

Natalie's First Week in Tier 2

Hey Atlanta!

My first week at my placement has been very eventful and interesting. I am working in Austin at Public Citizen’s Texas Office, which advocates for consumer rights and environmental issues (www.citizen.org). There are 7 other interns and we are all assigned to a staff member to work on their specific issue area—mine is energy efficiency. Having 8 interns is part of a big growing period for this office; not long ago they only have 3 staff people, now they have 6, so we are a little cramped in our office space, which is the 3rd floor of an old house. It's nice and cozy though.

This week I started out by learning about energy efficiency—I had no idea how much I didn’t know! It’s a little bit difficult to get a grasp on the technical aspects like megawatts and demand savings, but I am working on it. I have also been researching electric co-ops, which are member-owned utility companies, to see how we can get them to improve their energy efficiency programs. I think I will also be working on some media outreach, but I haven’t started that yet.

On Thursday, I went down to San Antonio for a meeting of the anti-nuclear coalition there. The coalition is trying to prevent the city from building a nuclear plant and to improve their energy efficiency programs instead. They can save as much power as the plant would supply, without spending about $10 billion and without producing radioactive waste and all.

Yesterday I went to the Capitol building to pass out information on the economic benefits of reducing the effects of global warming, and to the Texas Democratic Convention to pass out more information to the delegates there. We also had a staff meeting yesterday, so it was a very long day.

I won’t be working as much every week, but I wanted to get as much as possible out of the first week, and I think I did. Anyway, everyone turn off your lights when you leave a room and I hope everything is well in Georgia!

P.S. Sorry about this blog being a day late—I left my laptop in the office overnight. =(

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