Thread by @ssteingraber1

BREAKING: Right about NOW the 64-yo coal-burning power plant on Cayuga Lake is burning its last oven-full of coal. It will NOT thereafter become a fracked gas power plant bc we stopped that shit.

End of an Era: Power plant shutting down after 64 years 14850.com/082911026-mill…

Here’s how long I’ve been fighting the Cayuga Power Pant, which sits directly across the lake from my house:

My daughter was 6 when I wrote my first essay about this soot and mercury spewing hunk-o-junk for @Orion_Magazine. Faith is now a junior at @smithcollege.

That original essay, Tune of the Tuna Fish, has been reprinted, course-packed, and anthologized so many times it’s become its own cottage industry. You can download TTF study guides, sample term papers, and literary analyses of its metaphorical structure. csub.edu/~kgobalet/file…

Throughout all those reprints, the plant itself went on burning coal, and we kept fighting—and fought really hard when a plan was floated last year to convert it to fracked gas.

And now today, August 39, 2019, its deadly ovens are going cold.

We fought. We won.

So much gratitude to Fossil Free Tompkins, Irene Weiser, Judith Enck @enckj, @SaneEnergy, @leemzee, @StopCayuga, @MothersOutFront @ToxicsAction and the Latina grandmothers of Holyoke MA who showed the world how to shut down a coal plant @N2NMA_Education n2nma.org/en/chapters/ho…

Basically, on a near daily basis for the last 15 years or whenever I saw its plume of smoke on the horizon, I have pointed at the Cayuga Power Plant stacks and declared, “Someday I am going to shut you down.” I may embarrass my kids but they know I will fight for their future.

Here’s what my beloved Cayuga Lake looks like right now. I’m standing on the west shore looking east. See that power plant? Just blue skies above it. No longer pouring soot, CO2, and mercury into the atmosphere. It’s finished. I am so happy.