Year 4, Month 5, Day 28: The Madness Of King George

Well-done, indeed. The Boston Globe:

SOMERSET — Activists in a lobster boat flying an American flag blocked the delivery of 40,000 tons of central Appalachian coal to Brayton Point Power Station Wednesday, bobbing for hours in the path of a freighter nearly 690 feet long.

“The climate crisis is real, and it’s staring us in the face, and we’re not doing anything,” said Marla Marcum, the on-land spokeswoman for the ­activists, who said she was there to bail them out of jail if the need arose.

The activists were not ­arrested, a Coast Guard spokesman said.

The lobster boat Henry ­David T. looked almost quaint, and certainly out of place, against the backdrop of the hulking power plant.

The freighter it blocked, more than 20 times its size, sat at the end of a long pier; the anchored lobster boat turned slowly in the current.

“I choose to place my body between the exploding mountain tops of Appalachia and the burning fires of our consumption and greed as a witness to the new way of being in the world that we know is possible,” one of the boat’s captains, Jay O’Hara, 31, wrote on the website coalisstupid.org, where activists live-blogged the protest.

O’Hara, of Bourne, and his co­captain — Ken Ward, 57, of Jamaica Plain — called for Brayton Point to be shut down immediately for the sake of “planetary survival.”

Ward and O’Hara arrived at Brayton Point around 9 a.m. and dropped anchor, activists said; the freighter, the Energy Enterprise, arrived at about 11:15.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Robert Simpson said the two men cooperated with officials, but when the Coast Guard told them to move their boat, they realized that their anchor was stuck.

The Boston Coal Party. Works for me. May 16:

Boston’s role in our country’s creation lends the action of local environmentalists even greater historical resonance.

By blocking the delivery of almost a million pounds of coal to Brayton Point, Jay O’Hara and Ken Ward have struck a blow against a malign force which has co-opted our government for its own interests. Fossil fuel corporations, arguably the most powerful economic actors on the planet, exert incalculable influence on American politics. That they have offices on American soil doesn’t change the fact that they’re essentially colonial powers, enriching themselves on our tax dollars. Instead of funding schools, infrastructure, and a functional public health system, American citizens’ hard-earned money subsidizes oil and coal, pays to clean up spills, leaks, and toxic waste, and funds expensive wars — a textbook example of taxation without representation in the service of an occupying power.

O’Hara and Ward make me proud to be a Bostonian.

Warren Senders