Introduction

I will be taking three interesting trips within the next seven months. The first will be to Washington, DC; the second will be to Tokyo, Japan; and the third will be to (again) Washington, DC.
The first trip is the most imminent. It is connected to the Roosevelt Institution, a national, student-run think tank with chapters at many schools. This includes mine, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I am a co-director for the Center on Environmental and Energy Policy. (We are a small policy center, but we make up for that by being the coolest.)
During the fall semester of last year, we mainly worked on a policy for dealing with the nasty drought that was in NC at the time. Our basic policy proposal involved creating a tiered pricing system whereby customers would, for using more water, pay higher rates per a given amount. The advantage to this system was that it would make people conserve, but they could choose how. (If you want, I can send you a copy of our policy brief. It will also be available in the national Roosevelt Institution's "25 Ideas" publication - see below.)
Anyway, we sent our policy brief to the national Roosevelt Institution in the hope that they would publish it. It turned out that there were few submissions to the "25 Ideas" publication, so our paper was picked. That by itself was pretty sweet.
Then, late last month, I got an email invitation (as a 25i author) to the 2008 Expo the national organization is holding in DC. Fortunately, I had enough money saved up to get a plane ticket to DC (and the national organization is also giving me a $100 stipend). Housing will be provided by another Roosevelter in the area.
I will be on this trip from July 10-12. I'm coming in early on the 10th and (in order to allow for touring) am leaving in the early evening on the 12th. The actual expo is on the 11th, but I might be able to meet with a policy-related person on the 10th. Unfortunately, the people who might have come with me could not (for various reasons), so I will be by myself. Those who can't attend know who they are, and they deserve just as much (or more) credit than I do for the policy brief.
I'll post a blog (and, maybe, photos) for each of the days I am at this conference. I'll also tell you about the other two trips (and maybe even a past one) sometime in the near future.