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NO COAL NO GAS BUILDS ON RECENT VICTORY WITH FOCUS ON COMMUNITY AND A
NEW STRATEGIC TARGET  
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Siobhan Senier
October 4, 2024
Waging Nonviolence
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_ The campaign that ushered in ‘the end of coal in New England’
has its sights set on peaker plants and reclaiming energy democracy. _


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David Graeber once posited
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“the biggest problem facing nonviolent direct action movements is
that we don’t know how to handle victory.” He observed that, by
the time activists recognize some of our initial successes, those
gains tend to be obscured by infighting and/or repressive backlash.
More to the point, he said, activists unsatisfied with anything short
of a total revolution miss the steady gains that our movements make.

A New England-based campaign to phase out fossil fuels provides a
helpful counter-example. Activists with No Coal No Gas, or NCNG, have
shown that we _do _know how to handle victory. Earlier this year, we
learned that we won our major campaign demand
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to close the last big coal plant in New England. With the announcement
that New Hampshire’s Merrimack Station will stop burning coal, NCNG
has reissued our three campaign goals — with an update to the third
— as follows: 1. Build unity and community; 2. Show what is
possible; and 3. Shut down all fossil fuel peaker plants in New
England. 

These goals do not map precisely onto the short, medium and long-term
goals that Graeber describes for his two case studies: the
anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements. In Graeber’s reading,
those movements fell apart after some initial mid-range victories
because they were hamstrung by intractable debates about radical,
long-term goals — namely, “smash the state and destroy
capitalism.” Meanwhile, their short-term goals (e.g., block
construction of a nuclear plant or a particular summit meeting) almost
always failed, because “[g]overnments simply cannot allow themselves
to be seen to lose in such a battle.” But Graeber believes that
their _mid-range _goals succeeded quite dramatically. The
anti-nuclear movement “raised public awareness to the point that
when Three Mile Island melted down in 1979, it doomed the industry
forever.” And the global justice protests succeeded equally in
delegitimizing the World Bank, IMF and WTO. 

One wonders what Graeber would think had he lived to see the rebound
in advocacy for nuclear power
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indeed the construction of new plants in Asia, post-Fukushima) or the
stubborn hegemony of the Bretton Woods institutions. But I like to
think he would applaud the climate movement for our ability to
recognize and celebrate victories, and to understand, as he puts it,
that “any effective road to revolution will involve endless moments
of cooptation, endless victorious campaigns, endless little
insurrectionary moments or moments of flight and covert autonomy.” 

JOYFUL MISCHIEF FOR CORPORATE OVERLORDS

On Aug. 11, No Coal No Gas celebrated our victorious campaign with a
Fossil Fuel Free Future Festival across the river from Merrimack
Station. We had cake, kids’ art-making, a brass band and a kayaking
dinosaur to bid this fossil fuel plant goodbye.

Earlier that morning, we traveled around the state for little
insurrectionary moments at four other peaker plants — those power
generating stations that run only occasionally, at times of peak
demand. At the tiny Lost Nation oil burner, in the northern country,
we planted goldenrod and other native species that restore soil, as
well as hung a banner reading “Peaker by peaker, plant by plant.”
At the White Lake generating station in Tamworth, which never ran at
all in 2023, we left messages including, “Last year this oil burning
power plant cost us $331K.”_ _At Schiller Station in Portsmouth,
which is supposed to become a three-acre renewable storage facility
— but still holds an enormous coal pile — we left a 35-foot banner
saying “Congrats on your battery park. What’s all this, then?” 

No Coal No Gas banner drop at Newington Station. (NCNG)

Most spectacularly, two friends climbed a 300-foot smokestack at
Newington Station to drop a 175-foot banner. 

NCNG chose New Hampshire as the beginning of our campaign against
peakers for several reasons. Among the New England states, New
Hampshire has by far the worst record for transitioning to renewable
energy: It’s the only state in the region without any greenhouse gas
emission reduction goals of any kind, and it has the fewest incentives
for solar or wind. It also has a relatively small number of peaker
plants, and most of these hardly ever run. Not incidentally, these
five plants are all owned by one company, Granite Shore Power, backed
by one global asset management firm, Atlas Holdings. For good measure,
on Aug. 11, activists also stopped by the home of GSP CEO James
Andrews, who has been trying to rebrand himself as a “green”
visionary, and dropped off a small banner reading “Expect us
#plantbyplant.” 

It’s important to note that No Coal No Gas did not invent the
campaign against peaker plants. Activists across the country have
identified peakers as a strategic target in the fight against fossil
fuels because they are exceptionally expensive, inefficient and
polluting. What’s more, they’re often located near environmental
justice communities.

In 2017, for instance, local activists and city officials in Oxnard,
California
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managed to defeat plans to build a new gas plant in a majority Latino
neighborhood, creating a blueprint for communities across their state.
In New York, grassroots activists are similarly putting effective
pressure
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local and state governments to make strong commitments to cleaner and
more reliable energy. Closer to home, our friends at No Fracked Gas
in Mass [[link removed]] have
successfully shut down two peaker plants in the Berkshires and helped
transition a third to solar and battery storage. 

The fight against peakers thus involves a diversity of tactics,
overlapping campaigns and shared actions. We often meet these friends
at the Consumer Liaison Group of ISO-NE, our regional grid operator.
In concert with them, we have spent years researching ISO-NE’s
funding of peaker plants, its arcane rules for awarding that funding
and its mandate vis-a-vis the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
We’ve filed endless public comments with FERC, getting to know (and
getting to be known by) some of their officials. We’ve also managed
to disrupt business as usual at ISO’s extremely exclusive
stakeholder group, the New England Power Pool. Not surprisingly, the
more we learn about the groups with the power-making authority — and
the closer we get to their centers — the more they shrug off
responsibility.

No Coal No Gas at the New England Power Pool gathering. (NCNG)

BUILDING COMMUNITY AND RECLAIMING ENERGY DEMOCRACY

So often, the media, politicians and the general public construe
activism as confined to the most spectacular direct actions, as if
these were not part of much larger, more sustained, and often frankly
tedious research and advocacy projects. One of our members, Leif
Taranta, likes to point out that some of this comes down to
impoverished understandings of social movement history. We’ve had
judges mis-quote John Lewis at some of us as they’ve sentenced us
for actions, telling us that famous civil rights leaders would have
preferred “more appropriate” methods of making change.

But of course activists know that change doesn’t happen through
electoral politics, letters to the editor and rallies alone. We also
know that when a group of people march across a bridge or occupy the
halls of power, there are even more of us behind the scenes involved
in endless planning, calling, writing, investigating, driving,
feeding, painting, sewing, conflict-mediating and _thinking
together. _

This is why “building unity and community” has been our number-one
campaign goal all along. As Nathan Phillips explained, from his
experience as an ecologist and an activist, in a recent episode of
the Vermont Movement News
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theme that I find very regenerating, myself, in working in this
campaign, because while it is ‘No Coal, No Gas,’ and a lot of it
is about shutting bad stuff down, there’s always a part about
‘what are we building?’ that can build community — and that’s
human community, and the ecological communities in which people
live.” 

In that same discussion, Leif Taranta amplified the relationship
between community and fighting fossil fuels, explaining that peaker
plants are a strategic target not just because they’re dirty,
expensive and unjust, but also because their continued existence is
key to the entire fossil fuel system, particularly to expansion
pipelines. “If we have peaker plants in our neighborhoods, those are
most likely the places where new pipelines try to get built, so we
have this whole community already mobilized against fossil fuel
infrastructure and we’re ready to just stop the pipeline!” 

Similarly, as Taranta noted, we can mobilize our communities to drive
peakers offline altogether. Our campaign has figured that if every
ratepayer simply turned their microwave down from high to medium
during peak demand, we could eliminate the peak altogether. That
simple change suggests a low bar for involvement in climate justice.
“It’s fully legal to not use your microwave for an hour!” said
Taranta, stressing that this is not a question of individual burden
(or blame). Rather, we could intentionally share the mandate to shave
the peak, with the idea being that “collective action at strategic
times can undermine the way our grid operates,” and perhaps even
make some of that ratepayer money available for people in need.

In grid operator parlance, this would be called “demand response.”
And it would be driven by things like smart meters and
corporate-determined incentives, such as paying customers to use less
energy during times of peak demand. That is better than nothing, of
course, but NCNG wants to go further, imagining intentional, local
projects that get people not only turning down their thermostats, fans
and microwaves, but also _sharing _resources and taking care of one
another_._

If I live in a larger house with a lot of shade cover, I could invite
my neighbors living in stuffy third-floor apartments over during a
peak to cool off, to share a meal; if I have a fireplace, I could do
something similar in winter. I could reduce my own energy use to allow
elderly and other neighbors, who might need that electricity more, to
get what they need. We can enjoy showers, cooking and charging our
electronic devices at mid-day, when solar energy is abundant. 

If this sounds impractical or utopic, it is really the way many people
in the Global South are already living; for those of us with
heightened consumption patterns, it’s really a bold imaginative
exercise that tries to get at something Graeber suggests: “The
question is how to break the cycle of exaltation and despair and come
up with some strategic visions (the more the merrier) about how these
victories build on each other, to create a cumulative movement towards
a new society.” And maybe this is the key to not being shocked by
victory: knowing that, _whatever _happens or does not happen inside
that ISO meeting, at a coal plant, at FERC or in the next
election, _we _are the ones who will take charge of our energy use
and keep each other safe.

_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."_

_Waging Nonviolence is a nonprofit media organization dedicated to
providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements
around the world. With a commitment to accuracy, transparency and
editorial independence, we examine today’s most crucial issues by
shining a light on those who are organizing for just and peaceful
solutions._

* Climate Change
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* fossil fuels
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* Environmental Activism
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* peaker power
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