Tireless Activism and the Latest Region to Go Coal-Free

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...