Last week, the state Air Pollution Control Board in Virginia aproved pollution permits for the $1.8 billion, 585-megawatt power plant in Wise County - granting Dominion Virginia Power the final go-ahead to begin construction on the plant.

Yesterday morning, as Dominion announced that the bulldozers were moving [1] into place, members of Blue Ridge Earth First! [2] (BREF!) and Mountain Justice [3] (MJ) blockaded the company's Richmond Headquarters in protest. The all-woman lock down team anchored a climber who hung off a suspension bridge and together, the four shut down Dominion's offices for many hours of the morning. The Dominion shut-down was the most recent in a line of increasingly frequent acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against the coal industry this year ranging from blockades of coal plants [4] and hanging banners [5] outside banks financing the industry to mass protests [6] outside coal-friendly utilities. Earlier this month, U.K. activists joined the fun, stopping and occupying a coal train [7] headed to the Drax power plant.

In all cases, their message to the coal industry was clear: We won't stop until you do.

While plants in Florida, Kansas, Georgia [8]and beyond are successfully being stopped in the courts, boardrooms, regulatory commissions and statehouses, there are still plants under construction around the country. After all the official avenues have been exhausted, it is no wonder that communities and activists are heeding the words of Dr. James Hansen [9], NASA’s climate scientist, who last week repeated his call for “radical steps” to stop the “perfect storm” of catastrophic climate chaos.

Will civil disobedience actually work where the regulatory and legal systems have failed? Perhaps the more appropriate question is: do we have a choice but to try? And more to the point, when four young women can effectively disrupt business as usual for a company the size of Dominion for half a day...who's to say what eight could achieve, or eight hundred?

Given the scale and intensity of the clmate crisis and the growing sophistication and power of the movement to prevent it, it is hard to imagine that any single coal plant will make it far into construction without being confronted by people willing to join the four young women from yesterday's action and sit down in front of the bulldozers.

Here's more photos of the coal protest. [10]