Climate change activists from Maine will be on trial in New Hampshire this week as they defend their 2019 blockade of a train carrying coal to a power plant in the Granite State town of Bow. 

The five defendants were arrested on misdemeanor criminal trespass charges for protesting on a railroad bridge in Hooksett, N.H., where they delayed a shipment of coal to Merrimack Station. 

“Activists will make the case that the harm of burning coal necessitates direct action to protect people and the planet,” the campaign said in a press release. 

The power plant is the last in New England that still uses coal and now supplies about 1% of the region’s electricity annually. Activists with the No Coal No Gas campaign, which includes groups like 350 and the Climate Disobedience Center, have been arrested several times in the past few years protesting at and around the facility and calling for it to shut down permanently. 

Defendants in the train blockade and at a large earlier protest at the plant, in fall 2019, have opted to request jury trials during their sentencing hearings, while other activists took plea deals. 

According to New Hampshire Public Radio, a judge previously denied the train protesters’ request to use a “competing harms” defense at their trial, in which they would have argued that civil disobedience is a necessary or justified way to try to avert the harms of climate change. 

The train protest trial is slated to begin Tuesday, after being delayed from a planned start Monday, and will run through at least Wednesday or Thursday in New Hampshire’s Merrimack Superior Court. 

This story was updated Monday after the trial's start was pushed to Tuesday.