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CLIMATE ACTIVISTS IN NEW ENGLAND CAN FINALLY CELEBRATE ‘THE END OF
COAL’  
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Siobhan Senier
April 16, 2024
Waging Nonviolence
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_ With the last of New England’s coal plants now set to close, the
No Coal No Gas campaign is reflecting on the power of fighting
together. _

No Coal No Gas members hosted retirement party for Merrimack Station
in Bow, New Hampshire last year. , NCNG

 

On March 27, Granite Shore Power, or GSP, announced that it will
“voluntarily” stop burning coal at its Merrimack and Schiller
Stations in New Hampshire by 2028. Major news outlets have been
hailing the news as the “end of coal in New England” and casting
GSP as a leader in the transition to clean, renewable energy.

Insofar as media have acknowledged the role of outside pressure on GSP
at all, they have mainly cited a lawsuit by the Sierra Club and
Conservation Law Foundation
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for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act. But activists know
better: Nonviolent direct action gets the goods.

Those of us who have participated in the No Coal No Gas campaign
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or NCNG, have been anticipating Merrimack Station’s closure for some
time. (Schiller Station has not run since May 2020.) In fact, in June
2023, we threw a festive retirement party outside Merrimack
Station’s gates, complete with cake and surveillance by the New
Hampshire Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Then, just three weeks before GSP’s own press release, we held a
weekend retreat to reflect on everything our campaign has
accomplished, plan for the future and strategize when, how and whether
to declare victory.

It had become obvious to us that victory was imminent, if not a fait
accompli. In partnership with the Sierra Club and 350NH, we have been
monitoring the plant’s failed attempts to complete
federally-mandated stack tests
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to measure its pollution emissions. At the same time, from
conversations with local IBEW workers, we also know that employment at
the plant has all but dried up, as union workers only come in to do
repairs. What’s more, by monitoring our regional grid operator’s
annual “forward capacity payments
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taxpayer subsidies for coal — we know that funding for Merrimack
Station is slated to end in 2026.

However, the most striking bit of evidence pointing to the plant’s
demise is the fact that we have not seen any new coal deliveries in
well over a year. We believe this is largely due to the campaign’s
rather spectacular and widely reported coal train blockades. From
December 2019 to December 2022, we stopped multiple trains in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire. We stopped a single train no less
than three times on its route, and we stopped another for hours by
erecting scaffolding on the tracks. This strategy pushed rail carrier
CSX, in one case, to split a very long coal train into segments in an
unsuccessful and expensive attempt to “hide” from activists. 


Halting resupply, even temporarily, is one tactic to convince
corporate oligarchs that coal is a bad investment. Another approach,
used by NCNG’s corporate research group, was to directly target
Merrimack Station’s two private equity owners, Castleton Commodities
and Atlas Holdings. We delivered coal to their corporate offices and
even to the homes of CEOs, holding rallies and dropping banners. In
2021, Castleton decided to divest from the partnership.

Beyond pressuring for divestment, though, these tactics strive to show
what’s possible. In this vein, we’ve also pursued civil
disobedience at Merrimack Station itself. In 2019, 69 people in Tyvek
suits were arrested as they carried buckets onto the property, vowing
to carry the coal out bucket by bucket. In 2021, 18 of us began
renovating the facility’s driveway, digging up asphalt and planting
food for people and flowers for soil remediation. Like so much
nonviolent direct action, these were not only attempts to interfere
with business as usual; they were acts of collective imagination.

On the streets, in the courts, in our writing, art and advocacy,
activists seek to expose, critique and upend systems of power. Like
anyone who practices civil disobedience, we’re often told that there
are “more appropriate” ways to enact change. But as one of our
members, Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor, puts it, “disobedience. . .[is]
an uncompromising vision of radical, as in from the roots, change.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that we see ourselves as some kind of
extreme flank, “throwing ourselves into wild escalation to make
lawsuits and the legislation seem inherently reasonable.” Rather,
Lawton-Sticklor says, “I see this as an invitation to continue
peeling back the layers of systemic power, to make visible the
inherent compulsion for self-preservation that grounds systemic
concession, and to keep going.”

A CAMPAIGN AND A COMMUNITY, NOT AN ORGANIZATION

How does a climate campaign “keep going”? How do we sustain such
pressure and diversity of tactics over a period of years? It actually
has a lot do with NCNG being a campaign, as opposed to a more formal
nonprofit organization.

While we certainly benefit from — and could not continue without —
support from the Climate Disobedience Center
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NCNG is not embedded in or beholden to the nonprofit industrial
complex like many other organizations are. As a result, our strategic
decision-making is not driven by fundraising concerns or donor
preferences. Rather, the campaign draws on capillaries of power
running through multiple, shifting affinity groups and mutually
beneficial relationships with other established groups and campaigns.

Since its inception in 2019, NCNG has had three precisely articulated
goals [[link removed]]: 1. Build unity
and community; 2. Show what is possible; and 3. Shut down the
Merrimack Generating Station. It’s worth noting that shutting down
Merrimack Station was only ever our third — and arguably the least
important — goal. We know, after all, that this coal plant is only
one contributor to climate catastrophe and that our own actions are
only one tiny part of a much larger, multi-pronged climate justice
movement.

“Building community” does not simply mean that campaign
participants become their own kind of cohesive in-group, although that
has sometimes happened. Rather, the campaign seeks to establish and
nurture relations among existing and yet-to-be communities.

We are college professors, ministers, farmers, artists, scientists,
lawyers, students, parents, grandparents and shift workers. We bring
connections to schools, churches, radical collectives and political
formations. We help stitch together relations among existing
nonprofits like 350.org and fellow campaigns like Fix the Grid
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support longstanding ones; and we have made our presence known to our
regional grid operator ISO-New England. Sometimes we have done so in
playful ways — for example, by delivering a wheelbarrow of coal to
their security gate during a blizzard on Super Bowl Sunday.

Moreover, we have intently studied their arcane operations and then
elected members to their Consumer Liaison Group in what became known
locally as the “ballroom coup [[link removed]].”
In this capacity, we have pressured ISO-New England to stop giving
ratepayer money to legacy fossil fuel plants. We have enlisted
hundreds of friends and supporters in writing public comments urging
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject these forward
capacity payments.

In turn, we show up for others’ struggles. Perhaps because we did so
much intensive organizing during the height of COVID — when so much
work and sociality had to move online — we have been able to draw in
like-minded activists from around New England and beyond, and to
connect with other activist efforts.

NCNG participants routinely show up for each other’s actions on, for
instance, LGBTQ+ rights or the Free Palestine movement. We sometimes
even put the campaign on pause to lend support to major actions, as we
did during 2021, when many of us traveled to Minnesota in the fight
against Line 3, incurring arrest and continuing to provide remote
legal support to fellow co-defendants. Showing up for other groups’
struggles is critical, not only because our issues are all so
intertwined, but also because in doing so, we learn. We share our
skills and develop new ones. We engage in the critical, sustaining
activity of thinking together.

NEW ENGLAND AFTER COAL

On April 4 we held a mass call on Zoom to celebrate Merrimack
Station’s closure announcement, and to sketch out our next phase.
Continuing to show what is possible, we are looking to shut down all
of New England’s so-called fossil fuel peaker plants — those
facilities that, like Merrimack Station, run only during times of peak
electricity demand, generally during periods of extreme cold or heat.
As the _Christian Science Monitor_ reported
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Merrimack Station ran for only about 500 hours last year.

Peaker plants are expensive and dirty, and arguably unnecessary. In
many places they are being replaced with battery storage. They could
also be eliminated, we believe, with better demand response, which
means encouraging consumers to shift their electricity use to times
when demand on the grid is lower. We feel that leadership from our
utilities and grid operator has been lacking in this regard, so we are
doing what they won’t: building a ratepayer collective
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practice demand response on the New England grid ourselves.

As our demand response cohort puts it, this means “We will stay
grounded in community and mutuality because we are more than
individual ‘consumers.’ We have the power to choose to work
collaboratively to shift our relationship to energy use, to become
more intentional. And this means that together we have the power to
transform how the energy markets in our region work.” In short, by
building an alliance of ratepayers “ready to support each other in
the face of snowballing economic, environmental, health and social
crises,” we will be laying the foundation “for joyful,
community-centered conservation demand response and a just
transition.”

This, maybe, is what “victory” in the climate fight really means:
that we are learning what we can achieve together, with or without the
necessary actions that our governments, economic leaders and
regulators seem categorically or politically unwilling to take.
Something that has always stuck out to me is a series of questions
I’ve heard posed by Marla Marcum, one of the founders of the Climate
Disobedience Center (and our campaign). Many times, after a nonviolent
direct action, we will be debriefing, and Marla will ask,
“Regardless of whether this particular action succeeds in shutting
down this particular coal plant, what has it done for us? What have we
learned? How have we grown stronger? What does this growth make
possible?”

When we fight, we really do win. And what we win is the ultimate
xxxxxx against climate grief and despair. We find each other.

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Siobhan Senier is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the
University of New Hampshire, where she teaches classes on climate
justice. She is the editor of "Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of
Writing from Indigenous New England."

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* Climate Change; Fossil Fuel; Community Protests
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