Ben Jealous: Tireless activism and the latest region to go coal-free

Adobe Stock Photo (TriceEdneyWire.com)—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...