During London Climate Action Week, we held a lively Climate Curious LIVE with the theme of Climate Impossible, where we featured two stories about climate wins that seemed impossible, but succeeded despite the odds. One of these featured Bruce Nilles, who headed up Sierra Club’s ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign. He shared how they managed to successfully shut down 390 coal plants and transition the US away from coal and towards clean energy.
It’s not everyday that we see such a brilliant movement and campaign – and one that is inspiring others. So what can knocking out “King Coal” teach us for current and future climate and environment challenges and campaigns?
Coal – a dirty and destructive fuel
In case you’re not up to date with your coal facts, a quick google into coal, will show you how dirty and destructive this fossil fuel is:
– Habitats have to be completely cleared for surface mines, destroying that ecosystem and driving deforestation. Mountaintop removal is a controversial mining technique that uses explosives to remove the earth above coal seams on mountains. It can cause run-off sediment to seep into the waterways, which pollutes them and affects ecosystems further down the mountain. (More information on the environmental destruction caused by coal mining can be found here).
– Coal mining is dangerous for the workers. Whether you’re mining underground, or on the surface, mining is very dangerous for workers and can cause serious health issues like pneumoconiosis or ‘black lung’.
– Burning coal releases more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels. Coal therefore is contributing heavily to global warming and climate change.
– Burning coal also releases other dangerous pollutants. These dangerous pollutants include: sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, mercury, other heavy metals and fly ash and bottom ash (these are residues created during burning). These pollutants cause acid rain, smog, haze, air pollution, water pollution and hugely damage human health and the health of ecosystems and wildlife.
– Coal mining is killing people and impacting healthcare services. For example, Sierra Club shares “Particles released from coal plants kill more than 3,000 people in the U.S. each year, and cost more than $6.1 billion for healthcare.”
The impossible win against King Coal
Considering the environmental and health impacts of coal, you might wonder why anyone would want to use it? However coal is cheap, readily available, offers energy security and for many countries is an important energy source as they grow their economies.
This dependence on coal is what Bruce Nilles faced when he started work to stop new coal plants in the USA. As he says in his episode, What the end of ‘King Coal’ means for Big Oil & Gas, there were people saying to him, “Bruce, it’s half our energy. We can’t get rid of coal. You can’t stop these coal plants. It’s impossible. And these were the energy experts and these were the reasonable politicians”. However Bruce and his colleagues did manage to succeed. As he explains:
“We set off to stop the new coal plants, which we did in about eight years. We stopped 90% of them, but then we turned our attention to the bigger part of the question, which was the existing coal plants… There were still 530 coal plants and… I’m very happy to report we’re now at almost three quarters of the coal plants that are done… 140 left to go.”
Not only have they retired almost three quarters of the coal plants in the USA, they have replaced them with records of clean energy too. Looking across the USA, Bruce shared “It used to be [that] 50% of our energy was coal. Last month it was 12% and it was exceeded by solar.”
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How they stopped King Coal: a transformative question
So how did Bruce and his colleagues actually go about stopping new coal plants and retiring old ones? Well it turns out you need a multi-pronged approach.
Firstly, Bruce and his colleagues stepped up their game by applying for the large funds from philanthropists. When they came into contact with the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, he asked them a really important question: what would it take to win? Asking that question, allowed them to dream big, analyse what they could actually do and then top Bloomberg’s initial funding of $50 million to reach a whopping $147 million total! The response from Michael:
“And he looked at us and said, okay, I’ll give you 50. I’ll help you raise 50 and you raise 47. So we did, and four years later we had got 92% of those coal plants we promised to shut down.”
With funds secured, Bruce pointed out how fundamental the power of local communities, organisers and cities were for success in this movement. He explains:
“What was super interesting as we analysed these coal plants is there was a tonne of places where people actually wanted to do something. These were mayors in cities… Neighbours living next to a coal plant [that] said, we wanna do something about replacing this coal plant. It’s been polluting our neighborhood too much…We want clean technology in our community, not this outdated 19th century coal plant.”
Bruce’s team therefore used their new funds to help these local communities with the action that made sense to them. For instance, hiring lawyers and experts to engage with regulators and compliance, hiring modellers to assess the air pollution and potential impacts on the community, or investing in community organisers to educate communities on a future without coal.
“So it’s that community by community helping support them in whatever way was needed to be able to make the transition, retire their coal plant, and invest in cleaner, safer alternatives.”
Being part of a coalition of different sized organisations also meant that Sierra Club could take the hits from aggressive moves by corporate or fossil fuel interests. Bruce shared an example where a judge ruled they were losing on every count in a case, which would have led them to owing the other side $6 million in attorney fees.
“If we’d been a small nonprofit, we’d have been outta business. If we had not had the backing of Michael Bloomberg, we would’ve gone outta business. Corporations engage in those kind of harassment tactics all the time. But for once, it was a fair fight… We ultimately negotiated out without paying… but the risk if we’d been a small group is that we would have been put out of business.”
Bruce has now moved on from Sierra Club and their Beyond Coal campaign to tackle natural gas and explore how we remove this fossil fuel from our homes, cities and industries. You can see his first Climate Curious episode, Why your gas stove has to go, for more of this. However, he’s taking lessons from his successful coal campaigns with him – and you can take advantage of these lessons too.
What this win teaches us going forward
It wasn’t one singular thing that made reducing coal in the USA successful – it was a combination of many approaches. Here’s some key takeaways:
The power of community organising – Bruce put it best himself when he said, “don’t underestimate what we can get done in the states and the local level, despite the madness in Washington DC”. At Climate Curious, we see communities creating meaningful change time and time again.
Learn from your peers, especially from around the world – Bruce mentioned multiple times that he and his colleagues were inspired by campaigns happening around the world. He explained: “We learned a lot from what was happening here in the UK when you all stopped the last new proposed coal plant.” He has passed this on to others saying their work has “inspired similar copycat campaigns in Europe, in South Korea, in Japan, in Australia. And I’m thrilled to report, we are at 75% [reduction]. Europe’s at 60% [reduction]… but there are amazing campaigns going on where we’re learning from each other.”
Resourcing the movement – this one is for the funders, donors, philanthropists, lottery sources, corporate partners, government and anyone else giving money out to support environmental causes. Would Bruce’s campaign worked as effectively without the big injection of funding? We can’t say, but we do know we need to resource the climate and environment movements for them to stand up to fossil fuel and related corporate/industry interests for the long term and for them to do the job well and safely.
Coalition building – we can’t do this alone or with people who agree with everything we say. Bruce’s top tip was that even if you can’t agree on everything with a partner or individual, finding common ground on an issue like coal can make all the difference. He put it like this:
Building out a coalition that is big enough and powerful enough to overcome the inertia and the corporate interests who are slowing down this transition. [And] making sure we don’t lose sight of that because unless we have [it] broad enough, if we don’t get the politics right, it’s gonna be really hard to sustain progress.
We know that the fight against coal isn’t over, but we hope these insights remind you that impossible fights are winnable.
At Climate Curious, we love celebrating the wins and successes of the climate and environment movement and using those to fuel our next steps and actions. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date with the fight against coal (and natural gas) and other lessons you can takeaway for your climate actions and ideas (big and small!).
