Can the Youth Climate Movement Influence Congress Right Now?

At Open Left, Matt Stoller outlines a fight for power over the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

In terms of personnel moves in the administration, it's a bit opaque as to what's going on. But in terms of committees and Congress, the personnel changes translate directly into policy, which makes the fight between progressive Henry Waxman and the union conservative John Dingell over the Chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce committee so consequential.

The E&C committee is one of the big three committees in the House - the Ways and Means committee, which handles tax issues, and the Appropriations Committee, which handles spending, are the others. E&C regulates health care, the internet and telecom (including net neutrality), trade, media policy, energy, consumer protections, and climate change, and is sort of the honeypot for corporate interests and lobbying. Waxman is making a major play to take the committee leadership away from Dingell because Dingell, who is from Michigan and represents the auto industry, is basically refusing to get serious on climate change legislation.

John Dingell, as per the usual rules of seniority, is the Chairman of the committee. Though he has recently admitted climate change exists, he's done so grudgingly, and put forward wholly inadequate plans to cap greenhouse gas emissions along with his coal-state colleague, Rick Boucher. Pelosi considers climate change a national emergency, and so tried to undermine Dingell in 2006 by creating a select committee on global warming without legislative authority headed by his former protege, Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Dingell had a number of unkind words about that committee, like "We should probably name it the committee on world travel and junkets", ""We're just empowering a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs to go around and make speeches and make commitments that will be very difficult to honor", and "I'm unaware of anything they will do that will be of any value."

It was a gutsy move by Pelosi, but she didn't have enough votes to make it stick. But there are 20 more Democrats in the House now, 6-9 more Senators, a clean energy President, and fewer and fewer denialist oil patch Democrats, so the move to clean energy is increasingly political important. The second most senior member on the committee, Henry Waxman, is trying to take over and modernize the leadership of the policy-making body. Waxman is a progressive green jobs kind of legislator, who shepherded the Clean Air Act through in the early 1990s, and is now sponsoring the Safe Climate Act to cut greenhouse gas emissions qutie aggressively. This is actually the renewal of an old fight; Dingell cut out Waxman in 1992, when Waxman first tried to get a climate bill through Congress.

As Matt outlines in his post, Dingell is the chair due to his seniority, but Pelosi, a proponent of strong action on climate change, tried to do an end-run around Dingell in 2006 through a subcommittee devoted specifically to addressing climate change, but lacked the votes. BUT, we now have a number of incoming freshman who can be strong progressive allies on climate change, and a President who will likely look favorably on strong green energy legislation.

My question is this: can Power Vote - which compiled a list of almost 350,000 young people voting in favor of a green energy economy, wield the power of that list to help out Waxman and Pelosi and Obama against Dingell and other centrists who want to tread water on the issue?

Maybe someone with more Capitol Hill experience can chime in on the possibility of influencing the outcome of a fight for committee chairmanship, or devise a strategy to influence committee members to support Waxman's legislative proposals over Dingell's in the next session?

After reading Matt's post, I get the overwhelming impression that decisions are now being made that will affect the quality of legislation we see come out of the next Congress. How can we leverage our turnout in 2008 to influence these decisions and set the most favorable playing field for our issues running into 2009 and 2010?