- YouTube
“I really struggled with the decision to do that commercial,” Kim Wasserman told me yesterday.
The commercial begins with a closeup of Wasserman as she relates that, after her infant son’s asthma attack, she realized there were “a lot of people affected in Pilsen and in Little Village by air quality issues,” and that “these coal power plants were having an impact on our community.”
Another headline appears over a smokestack—”Chicago’s two coal-fired plants to close”—as Wasserman adds, “That’s the kind of leadership that our communities need.”
A coalition worked with 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore in the drafting of a clean power ordinance that would regulate particulate matter and limit carbon dioxide emissions—and likely force the Crawford and Fisk plants to close. Meantime, the advent of fracking was making natural gas cheap, a financial blow to coal-power companies like Midwest Generation.
“You can never say it was this one single thing that did it,” Faith Bugel, a lawyer for one of the groups involved in the fight, Environmental Law & Policy Center, told Lydersen. “The ordinance and the organizing were critical and also coming at a time when natural gas prices and electricity prices were putting pressure on coal.” The activists’ pressure had helped topple the plants, Bugel said. “With coal teetering on the brink, everything came together.”
