With the End of the Coal Era, It Just Got Easier to Breathe in New England By Ben Jealous Jerry Curran has been organizing to retire the Merrimack Station coal power plant in Bow, New Hampshire for 17 years. He is one of many local activists who have brought inspiring tenacity and creativity to the fight to make New England coal-free. Last week, that goal was realized. After lengthy negotiations with the Sierra Club, The Conservation Law Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Granite Shore Power announced it will retire Merrimack and Schiller Stations’ remaining coal units by 2028 and 2025 respectively. That means the end of the last coal power plants in New England, which will now join the Pacific Northwest as the second major region in the country to be free of one of the dirtiest energy sources known to humanity. I am personally elated. My father’s family has been in New England since 1624. I have family in New Hampshire now – the kind of outdoors enthusiasts who helped instill in me my own love of nature. We never could have gotten to this point without years of activism calling attention to the harm caused by coal. In addition to the economics of clean energy, the incremental wins by activists along the way – including hard-won legislation and safeguards – are what ultimately made it impossible for the last coal plants to continue. Curran has examples to share: “Around 2008, New Hampshire ranked in the top four states in the country for childhood asthma rate. We worked with schools to encourage kids to make those paper dolls that link up and make a chain. They created 18,000 of them – representing the 18,000 children in New Hampshire living with asthma. We hung the chain of paper dolls across the statehouse in our grassroots lobbying to pass tougher pollution standards for coal plants.” And about that same time period, activists recruited local hairdressers for an event at the state capital in which more than 100 legislators had hair samples taken to be tested for mercury. Most of […]
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