Taking on King Coal

New Article in Time magazine about direct action and the coal movement

Holy smokes!!

All in the pages of a national news magazine.

Check out this great story by Bryan Walsh at Time magazine about the Wise County action
from September. A very good piece on the growing use of direct action
in the coal and climate movements and how we need more of it.

Taking On King Coal

By Bryan Walsh

Nothing could sway the Dominion 11 from their mission–not the cops
and certainly not the prospect of free food. Early on the morning of
Sept. 15, activists from a range of environmental groups formed a human
barrier to block access to a coal plant being built by Dominion in
rural Wise County, Virginia. As acts of civil disobedience go, this
wasn’t exactly Bloody Sunday. The police took a hands-off approach and
even offered to buy the protesters breakfast if they unchained
themselves. (They declined.) But the consequences were far from
trivial. The activists who had formed the barrier to the construction
site were arrested and charged with trespassing, and they eventually
paid $400 each in fines. That’s nothing, of course, compared with the
punishment the Dominion plant will inflict on the environment. If
completed, the plant will emit 5.3 million tons of CO2 a year into the
atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of putting a million more cars on
the road.

The future of coal will dictate the future of the climate. Plants in
the U.S. that burn this low-cost, high-carbon fuel account for about
40% of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions, not to mention other air
pollutants. Right now there are about 600 coal power plants in the
U.S., and an additional 110 are in various stages of development.
Without ways to capture the carbon burned in coal and sequester it
underground, new plants all but guarantee billions of tons of future
carbon emissions and essentially negate efforts to reduce global
warming. “Business as usual can’t continue as long as coal is
destroying the climate,” says Hannah Morgan, 20, one of the Dominion
11. “We are not going to back down.”

Environmentalists are fighting new plants with every weapon in their
arsenal, from launching lawsuits over CO2 regulations to lobbying
financiers to stop investing in coal. Governors in states like Kansas
and Florida are blocking new plants. But to some greens, the threat of
new coal plants coming online is so dire that it demands a more
corporeal level of engagement. This fall, at the annual meeting of the
Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, Al Gore announced, “I
believe we’ve reached the stage where it’s time for civil disobedience
to prevent the construction of new coal-fired power plants that do not
have sequestration.”

Hard-core activists like Morgan have already heeded Gore’s call.
Many work in groups like the Rainforest Action Network (motto:
“Environmentalism with teeth”) and Rising Tide. But this isn’t just the
work of coastal élites; on Oct. 26, dozens of locals in Kansas picketed
the massive Lawrence Energy Center, the 12th most polluting coal plant
in the U.S. Similar protests pop up anywhere a new plant is being built.

“People are willing to put their reputations and their livelihoods
and physical well-being on the line for the climate,” says Scott
Parkin, an organizer for the Rainforest Action Network who has been
involved in the Dominion campaign in Virginia. The September protest in
Wise County was just the latest in a string of nonviolent acts against
Dominion’s new coal plant, including a blockade of the company’s
Richmond headquarters in June.

The coal industry counters that the sheer rise in demand for
electricity–projected to increase 30% by 2030, according to the federal
Energy Information Agency–means a new generation of coal plants is
inevitable. Dominion executives point out that Virginia has a projected
shortfall in electricity supply and that the Wise County plant is
needed to close that gap.

Coal remains cheap and plentiful in the U.S. (as long as no price is
put on carbon emissions), and its supporters argue that “clean coal”
will solve the pollution problem. But it’s not clear what they mean.
“Clean coal” can refer to new technologies that remove pollutants like
soot and sulfur dioxide from the waste process, or it can mean
capturing and sequestering the carbon burned in coal. The former
exists–the Dominion plant is a good example–but the latter does not.
And a new report by the International Energy Agency noted that research
for sequestration projects remains badly underfunded. “Clean coal is
like healthy cigarettes,” Gore said. “It does not exist.”

For many green activists, climate change is fundamentally a moral
issue. To accept a new generation of polluting coal plants is to doom
future generations to an impoverished planet. So the response should be
fundamentally moral as well, using the same tactics–civil disobedience,
nonviolent protest–as those of the civil rights movement.

Technology and economics alone won’t solve the climate crisis. Moral
suasion of the sort exemplified by frontline activism is needed too, as
Gore noted. “It’d be more powerful if he put his body where his mouth
is,” says Abigail Singer, a Rising Tide activist. In other words, there
will always be room on the human chain for you, Al.

And BTW, this is our movement and we need you to join us. If you
want to get more involved in it, Nov 14-15 is a mass day of action
using all sorts of creative direct action in (currently) 47 locations
around the U.S. and Canada.

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