Who Obama Loses By Not Defending Van Jones?

Real News CEO Paul Jay talks with Executive Director Jessy Tolkan of Energy Action Coalition, a coalition of 50 leading youth organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada,  at the Momentum ’09 Conference of the Tides Foundation in San Francisco.

The Energy Action Coalition leverages the power of young people to organize on college campuses, high schools, and in local communities to build models of the clean energy future. Under her leadership the Energy Action Coalition is growing a generation-wide movement to stop global warming, by advocating for green jobs, stopping new coal plants, and making young people’s voices heard in the policy debate around global climate change.

Jessy has spent most of her career working to build power amongst the millenial generation. In 2004, as state director for the New Voters Project, Tolkan helped to register more than 130,000 young voters and produce one of the highest youth turnout rates in the country.

She’s been featured in Time Magazine, Hard Ball with Chris Matthews, and Vanity Fair Magazine. Jessy helped to plan the largest youth gathering on global warming in our nation’s history – POWER SHIFT 2007, a conference that brought together more than 6000 youth representing all 50 states, and culminated with the largest single lobby day on capitol hill focused on global warming.

Most recently, Jessy spearheaded POWER VOTE, a campaign to mobilize 1,000,000 young voters are climate and energy issues in more than 30 states across the country.