Were Washington’s senators on your Valentine’s Day list this year? University of Washington WashPIRG members hope so. On Feb. 9 and 10, WashPIRG volunteers set up a card-making shop under the Suzzalo-Allen Sky Bridge complete with valentines, glitter, glue, markers, and candy hearts to munch on.

Their goal was to get students to sign Valentine’s Day cards pledging their support for global-warming initiatives. These cards will be delivered in person to Washington state Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. A total of 342 students signed multicolored hearts with the lighthearted poem, “Wind turbines are white, solar panels are blue, support American clean energy, and then we’ll support you!” By 12:30 p.m. yesterday, Liam Fitzgerald, student leader for the global-warming-solutions segment of UW WashPIRG, announced to volunteers that they had run out of cards. Fitzgerald hopes to drop off these valentines in person to Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray’s offices by Feb. 15. While it will be a bit late for Valentine’s Day, the group hopes it won’t be too late for UW students to make a meaningful statement.

The global warming committee that planned the event is one of four intern-run UW WashPIRG focus groups. UW WashPIRG is a campus branch of WashPIRG, one of 24 state Public Interest Research Groups moderated by the US PIRG. Each branch has a campus organizer, but the rest of the leadership positions are taken up by student interns and volunteers. The other three focus groups for the UW campus are hunger and homelessness, textbook affordability, and the Campus Sustainability Fund.

Fitzgerald, freshman and potential environmental-studies or English major at the UW, got the idea to make Valentine’s Day cards from his WashPIRG campus coordinator, who did a similar project when she was an intern. Fitzgerald was drawn to the idea because he felt that it would be “attention grabbing,” both to students at the UW and to Washington’s senators.

“It’s always good to get kind of positive feelings for these sort of things,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s better to thank politicians when they do what you want them to than complain when they don’t.”

Members of the global-warming-solutions-group see great potential for more positive changes in global-warming initiatives, especially after the passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act in the House of Representatives. With the current focus on health care in politics, the global-warming-solutions group at the UW wants to ensure that environmental issues don’t disappear from the public eye.

“The main goal of the Valentines is to show our senators that this is an issue that is still very important to the citizens. It’s been kind of put on the back burner, and we want to show that we still want meaningful change. We’re not focused on, ‘Please pass this specific bill,’ we just want to make the senators aware that we still care about this issue, that it still matters to us,” Fitzgerald said.

Reach contributing writer Erin Flemming at development@dailyuw.com.