For the past seven weeks, college students from around the region have been camping out on Boston Common on Sunday nights calling for Massachusetts to run entirely on clean energy by 2020. After a final, snowy sleep-out last Sunday, the demands of The Leadership Campaign were answered, sort of.

On December 7, state officials introduced a bill to create a task force charged with proposing ways to get Massachusetts to 100% clean electricity by 2020.

The resolution seems like a nice way of saying we’ve heard you, now bugger off, but then again Massachusetts relies on coal for only 25 percent of its electric power (about half the national average) and has set a goal of 20 percent renewable electricity production by 2020.

I wonder what it would take for the state to get to 100 percent “clean electricity”—the Leadership Campaign seems to include fossil fuel plants that use waste heat capture and recycling in its definition of clean—by 2020.

Image Credit: Ian Maclellan for The Leadership Campaign