Colleges and universities are small cities, and they often pollute like them. More than 60 higher-ed institutions across America still have their own coal-fired power plant, belching soot and climate-changing CO2 right on campus.

The Sierra Student Coalition's Campuses Beyond Coal campaign is trying to convince them to shut down those plants and move toward clean energy. Since the effort began in August 2009, 19 schools have committed to upgrading their power supply.

Here's how student activists have been turning up the heat.

I LIKE CLEAN AIR

At Iowa's three public universities, students delivered 7,000 petitions to school administrators urging them to adopt clean energy. When the suits didn't get the message, Sierra Student Coalition activists turned to Facebook, getting hundreds of supporters to post photos of themselves holding signs in favor of clean air.

Suspecting that the school's directors weren't so social-media savvy, the students printed out the pictures, made a giant collage, and delivered it to a regents' meeting.

DUNKING IN COAL'S FACE

For years, Friends of Coal, an industry trade group, has sponsored the Friends of Coal Bowl between football rivals West Virginia and Marshall Universities. They've recently expanded their reach by sponsoring basketball and football games in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Unwilling to give up points to dirty energy, the Sierra Club sponsored two NCAA basketball games this season: Indiana versus Minnesota and Kentucky versus Arkansas. Organizers dubbed them "Sierra Club Clean Energy Matchups."

"I grew up in rural Kentucky as a Wildcats basketball fan, and now as a student, I'm working to make sure UK is a real leader in clean energy," says senior Patrick Johnson. "I couldn't be more excited to see two things so important to me come together."

Newly graduated Megan Anderson of Indiana University adds, "We hope to get more Hoosier basketball fans involved in making Indiana a leader off the court—by retiring the coal plant on campus."

SAVE THE ALES

Student activists at Michigan State University in East Lansing have tried everything to convince the school's board of trustees to shutter the campus coal burner. They even got author Bill McKibben to speak by video at a Clean Energy forum: "If we're going to break our addiction to fossil fuels," he said, "we need our great educational institutions in the forefront." They criticized the university's "energy transition plan," which lacked a retirement date for the campus coal plant: "How can they say [the plan] is 100 percent clean energy and ignore the fact that they own a coal plant?" asked senior Paul Mooney.

Students also erected a two-story-high inflatable inhaler to emphasize the link between burning coal and respiratory diseases like asthma.

But when the campaigners really wanted to get attention, they ran the above ad in local newspapers. Climate change brought on by the coal industry may disrupt future harvests of hops and barley—two essential ingredients of beer.