Portside

David Graeber once posited that “the biggest problem facing nonviolent direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.” He observed that, by the time activists recognize some of our initial successes, those gains tend to be obscured by infighting and/or repressive backlash. More to the point, he said, activists unsatisfied with anything short of a total revolution miss the steady gains that our movements make.

A New England-based campaign to phase out fossil fuels provides a helpful counter-example. Activists with No Coal No Gas, or NCNG, have shown that we do know how to handle victory. Earlier this year, we learned that we won our major campaign demand: to close the last big coal plant in New England. With the announcement that New Hampshire’s Merrimack Station will stop burning coal, NCNG has reissued our three campaign goals — with an update to the third — as follows: 1. Build unity and community; 2. Show what is possible; and 3. Shut down all fossil fuel peaker plants in New England. 

These goals do not map precisely onto the short, medium and long-term goals that Graeber describes for his two case studies: the anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements. In Graeber’s reading, those movements fell apart after some initial mid-range victories because they were hamstrung by intractable debates about radical, long-term goals — namely, “smash the state and destroy capitalism.” Meanwhile, their short-term goals (e.g., block construction of a nuclear plant or a particular summit meeting) almost always failed, because “[g]overnments simply cannot allow themselves to be seen to lose in such a battle.” But Graeber believes that their mid-range goals succeeded quite dramatically. The anti-nuclear movement “raised public awareness to the point that when Three Mile Island melted down in 1979, it doomed the industry forever.” And the global justice protests succeeded equally in delegitimizing the World Bank, IMF and WTO. 

One wonders what Graeber would think had he lived to see the rebound in advocacy for nuclear power (and indeed the construction of new plants in Asia, post-Fukushima) or the stubborn hegemony of the Bretton Woods institutions. But I like to think he would applaud the climate movement for our ability to recognize and celebrate victories, and to understand, as he puts it, that “any effective road to revolution will involve endless moments of cooptation, endless victorious campaigns, endless little insurrectionary moments or moments of flight and covert autonomy.” 

Joyful mischief for corporate overlords

On Aug. 11, No Coal No Gas celebrated our victorious campaign with a Fossil Fuel Free Future Festival across the river from Merrimack Station. We had cake, kids’ art-making, a brass band and a kayaking dinosaur to bid this fossil fuel plant goodbye.

Earlier that morning, we traveled around the state for little insurrectionary moments at four other peaker plants — those power generating stations that run only occasionally, at times of peak demand. At the tiny Lost Nation oil burner, in the northern country, we planted goldenrod and other native species that restore soil, as well as hung a banner reading “Peaker by peaker, plant by plant.” At the White Lake generating station in Tamworth, which never ran at all in 2023, we left messages including, “Last year this oil burning power plant cost us $331K.” At Schiller Station in Portsmouth, which is supposed to become a three-acre renewable storage facility — but still holds an enormous coal pile — we left a 35-foot banner saying “Congrats on your battery park. What’s all this, then?” 

No Coal No Gas banner drop at Newington Station. (NCNG)

Most spectacularly, two friends climbed a 300-foot smokestack at Newington Station to drop a 175-foot banner. 

NCNG chose New Hampshire as the beginning of our campaign against peakers for several reasons. Among the New England states, New Hampshire has by far the worst record for transitioning to renewable energy: It’s the only state in the region without any greenhouse gas emission reduction goals of any kind, and it has the fewest incentives for solar or wind. It also has a relatively small number of peaker plants, and most of these hardly ever run. Not incidentally, these five plants are all owned by one company, Granite Shore Power, backed by one global asset management firm, Atlas Holdings. For good measure, on Aug. 11, activists also stopped by the home of GSP CEO James Andrews, who has been trying to rebrand himself as a “green” visionary, and dropped off a small banner reading “Expect us #plantbyplant.” 

It’s important to note that No Coal No Gas did not invent the campaign against peaker plants. Activists across the country have identified peakers as a strategic target in the fight against fossil fuels because they are exceptionally expensive, inefficient and polluting. What’s more, they’re often located near environmental justice communities.

In 2017, for instance, local activists and city officials in Oxnard, California, managed to defeat plans to build a new gas plant in a majority Latino neighborhood, creating a blueprint for communities across their state. In New York, grassroots activists are similarly putting effective pressure on local and state governments to make strong commitments to cleaner and more reliable energy. Closer to home, our friends at No Fracked Gas in Mass have successfully shut down two peaker plants in the Berkshires and helped transition a third to solar and battery storage. 

The fight against peakers thus involves a diversity of tactics, overlapping campaigns and shared actions. We often meet these friends at the Consumer Liaison Group of ISO-NE, our regional grid operator. In concert with them, we have spent years researching ISO-NE’s funding of peaker plants, its arcane rules for awarding that funding and its mandate vis-a-vis the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. We’ve filed endless public comments with FERC, getting to know (and getting to be known by) some of their officials. We’ve also managed to disrupt business as usual at ISO’s extremely exclusive stakeholder group, the New England Power Pool. Not surprisingly, the more we learn about the groups with the power-making authority — and the closer we get to their centers — the more they shrug off responsibility.

No Coal No Gas at the New England Power Pool gathering. (NCNG)

Building community and reclaiming energy democracy

So often, the media, politicians and the general public construe activism as confined to the most spectacular direct actions, as if these were not part of much larger, more sustained, and often frankly tedious research and advocacy projects. One of our members, Leif Taranta, likes to point out that some of this comes down to impoverished understandings of social movement history. We’ve had judges mis-quote John Lewis at some of us as they’ve sentenced us for actions, telling us that famous civil rights leaders would have preferred “more appropriate” methods of making change.

But of course activists know that change doesn’t happen through electoral politics, letters to the editor and rallies alone. We also know that when a group of people march across a bridge or occupy the halls of power, there are even more of us behind the scenes involved in endless planning, calling, writing, investigating, driving, feeding, painting, sewing, conflict-mediating and thinking together. 

This is why “building unity and community” has been our number-one campaign goal all along. As Nathan Phillips explained, from his experience as an ecologist and an activist, in a recent episode of the Vermont Movement News podcast: “Restoring is a theme that I find very regenerating, myself, in working in this campaign, because while it is ‘No Coal, No Gas,’ and a lot of it is about shutting bad stuff down, there’s always a part about ‘what are we building?’ that can build community — and that’s human community, and the ecological communities in which people live.” 

In that same discussion, Leif Taranta amplified the relationship between community and fighting fossil fuels, explaining that peaker plants are a strategic target not just because they’re dirty, expensive and unjust, but also because their continued existence is key to the entire fossil fuel system, particularly to expansion pipelines. “If we have peaker plants in our neighborhoods, those are most likely the places where new pipelines try to get built, so we have this whole community already mobilized against fossil fuel infrastructure and we’re ready to just stop the pipeline!” 

Similarly, as Taranta noted, we can mobilize our communities to drive peakers offline altogether. Our campaign has figured that if every ratepayer simply turned their microwave down from high to medium during peak demand, we could eliminate the peak altogether. That simple change suggests a low bar for involvement in climate justice. “It’s fully legal to not use your microwave for an hour!” said Taranta, stressing that this is not a question of individual burden (or blame). Rather, we could intentionally share the mandate to shave the peak, with the idea being that “collective action at strategic times can undermine the way our grid operates,” and perhaps even make some of that ratepayer money available for people in need.

In grid operator parlance, this would be called “demand response.” And it would be driven by things like smart meters and corporate-determined incentives, such as paying customers to use less energy during times of peak demand. That is better than nothing, of course, but NCNG wants to go further, imagining intentional, local projects that get people not only turning down their thermostats, fans and microwaves, but also sharing resources and taking care of one another.

If I live in a larger house with a lot of shade cover, I could invite my neighbors living in stuffy third-floor apartments over during a peak to cool off, to share a meal; if I have a fireplace, I could do something similar in winter. I could reduce my own energy use to allow elderly and other neighbors, who might need that electricity more, to get what they need. We can enjoy showers, cooking and charging our electronic devices at mid-day, when solar energy is abundant. 

If this sounds impractical or utopic, it is really the way many people in the Global South are already living; for those of us with heightened consumption patterns, it’s really a bold imaginative exercise that tries to get at something Graeber suggests: “The question is how to break the cycle of exaltation and despair and come up with some strategic visions (the more the merrier) about how these victories build on each other, to create a cumulative movement towards a new society.” And maybe this is the key to not being shocked by victory: knowing that, whatever happens or does not happen inside that ISO meeting, at a coal plant, at FERC or in the next election, we are the ones who will take charge of our energy use and keep each other safe.

Siobhan Senier is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches classes on climate justice. She is the editor of "Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England."

Waging Nonviolence is a nonprofit media organization dedicated to providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements around the world. With a commitment to accuracy, transparency and editorial independence, we examine today’s most crucial issues by shining a light on those who are organizing for just and peaceful solutions.