For context, a statement from the legal experts who monitored the trial.
> It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense.
> Greenpeace maintains it only had six employees visit the protest camps, and that all worked for Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International.
> The jury found Greenpeace USA liable for almost all claims.
how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.
The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.
The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.
> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.
It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.
Voting for Trump is not “removal for cause.” Though maybe one could use that as an indicator of bias/stunted brain development that would be cause, I’m not sure, I’m not a lawyer.
North Dakota voted 67% overall for Trump, this is not too far from being representative of the general population. Considering that anyone who is openly hostile against energy companies is going to be removed during selection I don’t see the jury as the issue.
Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...
People can hide their biases (or claim they can set them aside, which will often be acceptable during jury selection), and in a county with 30k people you're gonna run into people who recognize you at the grocery store a lot. This certainly wouldn't have been a pressure-free scenario.
It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.
That is objectively not what happened here though, the point of SLAPP is that it's a frivolous suit that's meant to just exhaust the resources of the "dissenting voices". They won this suit and honestly it's not hard to believe that Greenpeace is guilty to some degree even if proving it is.
They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
> how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
Alternative possibility: they were actually guilty. Seems likely. The idea that Greenpeace was intentionally spreading misinformation doesn't require a big leap of faith.
> They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
I think that's not what the article is saying, although I read it that way too at first. Greenpeace USA, the organization whose six employees were on the ground, was found liable for "almost all claims"; it's only Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund, their sibling organizations, who were found not to be "responsible for the alleged on-the-ground harms committed by protesters".
Or maybe, just maybe, they actually did unreasonably damage the pipeline company's reputation, in a way that is outside the legally-recognized bounds of free speech. Maybe justice actually was done.
(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)
Does your theory pass the sniff test? How reasonable is it to believe that Greenpeace's "defamation" cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars? Why is $345 the correct three-digit number of millions for the reputation damage Greenpeace caused?
this is only possible if you can somehow square a pipeline company's activities as intersecting with the arc of justice. as it stands, they're actively hastening the degradation of land, water, wildlife, human life and surrounding climates everywhere they operate.
No, their lawyers did a fairly decent job of demonstrating that Greenpeace wasn't coordinating the radical protestors that were showing up to the protests, anymore than MAGA was coordinating all of the violent shootings by right-wingers last year.
They were never going to win the trial. More than half of the jury pool had ties to the pipeline industry. They were always going to find against Greenpeace, and they went to fairly extreme lengths to ignore the evidence presented to come up with a ridiculous damage award far in excess of the company's actual damages (even accounting for a punitive damage markup).
Will they win on appeal? Maybe pre-Trump they had a chance, but right-wing judges no longer feel bound by the law, reason, or equity.
Some of the jurors had financial ties Energy Transfer, the district is heavily conservative and economically dependent on the oil industry. The deck was massively stacked against Greenpeace at trial.
Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement.
But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.
Sounds like it's time for GreenPeace USA to follow the chemical industries example - do a corporate reorg, put all the liabilities in specific subsidiary and then declare bankrupacy for that subsidiary.
I assume that is the point of having a Greenpeace USA -- to shield Greenpeace International and other Greenpeace organizations from liability. And it seems to have mostly worked.
Looking at the history ( back in the 1970s )- it appears to be in part the reverse - when Greenpeace USA was created, the original greenpeace, based in Vancouver, had a quarter of a million debt - and there was a bit of a fight over it.
It’s only illegal if they don’t get away with it. Most get away with it in corporate America. If bad actors are going to push the bounds of the legal framework, good actors should as well when the rules don’t matter. “Fuck you sue me.” Operate from a position of being judgement proof. Laws are not objective, it’s all interpretative dance.
If you are going to break the law under capitalism, you must do it sustainably. Facebook, Apple, et al have shown that the latency of judicial pipeline usually means a billion dollar in fines comes after several billion in profits. You profit from the lag between the crime and the consequence.
I don't think social justice has that same profit pipeline, but I am not sure. There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows.
Break the law, make $1B of illegal money, then get dragged to court and pay a $200M fine - while you keep most of the profit and your market position you illegally gained.
Bonus: Shield all managers from personal accountability, best in a way that they got their bonus and salary and moved on a long time ago before the verdict hits.
Best: Not get to court, but make an $100M outside court settlement.
They just need to do what oil & gas (and other "dirty" industries) do to avoid reputcussions: form lots of shell companies to shield the parent. It becomes a hydra of corporations kinda like terrorist cells.
In the social justice context, "cell" is a better fit than "company". Some are Antifa Ost, Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, and Rose City Antifa. If Greenpeace had organized like this, their liability would likely be far lower, but so would their organizing effectiveness.
The expected response from both companies and social groups is to deny the affiliation. The overall strategy is transpartisan because it is effective.
It would be very easy for an energy company to make hundreds of thousands of donations through "private supporters" to Greenpeace so as to cause problems for their competitors without liability, including defamation, and violent protests. They could be profiting by encouraging angry kids to go ruin their lives, and there would be no consequences for the executives behind it all. In fact, if this were actually happening, then in this story they would have just gotten back half of their marketing budget, which they can recycle for another violent campaign against this or any other competing energy company. And college kids around the world would help to supplement that marketing budget by donating to what they think is an environmental cause.
I think climate change is a massive and real problem. And that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels quickly. But I would actually be very happy to see Greenpeace fold as a result of this. I think they’ve been on the wrong side of many important issues, including this one.
I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels. And thus does relatively little to change our path to sustainable energy. But it does a lot geopolitically. Having more local oil means the trigger-happy US government is less likely to start wars to ensure access to oil. Heck even the Iran conflict this week stems back to the 1953 CIA-instituted coup which was half motivated by protecting access to oil.
Hot take: decarbonization is a policy issue that should be pursued primarily through incentives to increase production and quality of clean alternatives. Not by throttling supply of oil. Look at the electrical grid. Solar and wind are just cheaper than fossil fuels now which means the decarbonization is economically inevitable.
I have some inside knowledge here. When I was in college, I was very idealistic. I was in a special Greenpeace program where they took college students and trained them to become environmental activists. Picture a semester-long, hands-on training course.
You actually fully go out into the field to run campaigns and meet everyone from the President of Greenpeace to the front-end activist hanging banners and whatnot.
I actually liked the President and DC lobbyist folks more than the weridos out and about dropping banners and doing the extreme stuff.
I walked away being kind of turned off from the Organization and realized a lot of these folks were not pragmatic and more dogmatic than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful and had a blast, but I dropped out of college and became a software engineer instead of an activist.
It's already too late. We passed the point of no return. There was a blip where every outlet was saying that the point of no return was like 6 months away than nothing.. We shot right past it.
Strange take. What does that mean? Give up because we can’t do anything - “it’s already too late”? So burn all the oil because YOLO?
Or maybe those people drawing hard lines in the sand were exaggerating to drive urgency and get attention? Sometimes people whose stated goals you agree with say and do things which are wrong.
Also I never mentioned just give up. I just said it’s already too late. That’s reality. What you do next is your choice. But don’t put words in my mouth.
> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power
I think the nuclear industry didn't do itself any favors. And the oil companies didn't want it to succeed either and did its best to hobble it. The environmental groups are a convenient patsy to take the blame for the outcome. If Greenpeace is so powerful why hasn't it been able to end whaling or the oil industry?
This case is not important because of Greenpeace, it's important because of the implications for free speech in the US. They are not being bankrupted because they took the wrong stance on nuclear, they're being bankrupted for supposed defamation and incitement against a major energy corporation.
This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.
> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.
Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.
Yes I will think of the property because private property rights are critical and I 100% support private property owners using violence to defend their property from vandals and thieves.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels.
This is ignoring the issue of tribal sovereignty and water rights which is where most of the issue lies imo. No one is trying to ruin the economy, they simply want untainted natural resources on their own property.
If this pipeline was going through disneyland, i don't think you'd hear popular arguments about disney trying to ruin the oil economy.
This is a complete load of shit. Oil is trucked back and forth over those roads all day and night, and that has a much higher leakage rate than a pipeline. NIMBYs never come out and say they just don't want something built. They always have some bullshit excuse like this.
I think that’s half right. We are absolutely horrendous to natives around here. But that’s not why Greenpeace got involved, nor why most of the left cares about this issue.
If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.
But restricting supply raises prices and naturally encourages sustainable energy. That kind of change is self reinforcing. Government incentives disappear at the change of every administration.
No, restricting supply when it exists just turns people paying the higher prices against you. When the supply restrictions are in fundamentals it can work for you. When supply restrictions are on something few people care about it can work for you. However the majority of people (particularly in ND) drive and feel the cost of gas - often they feel these costs even more than they really affect the budget because they are visible every time you buy it in ways the things that have a larger effect on their budget are not.
If you want to encourage sustainable energy you need to make that your focus. Make it cheaper. Ignore oil and fight laws that make it harder to build sustainable energy. ND has great wind potential (they get 40% of their electric from wind already), but it could be better (they have a small population - which means they can export wind energy to Minnesota or if we build transmission lines even farther).
When you focus on raising oil prices you ensure that your side gets voted out in the next election and your gains are undone. When you focus on building renewable energy you get something that can stay. (Just don't build only on the white house as that can be quickly removed - build everywhere so removal is expensive)
Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set across all supply sources. Restricting its movement from Canada to the US doesn’t actually change the price much at all. It just makes the supply more vulnerable to disruption. That dirty shale oil only comes out of the ground when prices are really high. Otherwise it’s not worth it. If prices are high it will come out of the ground and get burned. The only question is where and who has access to it.
Steven is a lawyer who helped Ecuador sue Chevron who was polluting massively. The Ecuadorians won and secured an historic $9.5 billion judgment because it was so egregious. Did that end the matter? No.
Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
As part of all this, Chevron wanted Donziger to hand over all communications and electronic devices associated with the Ecuador prosecution. That is of course attorney-client privilege. But the court agreed and Donziger refused.
But it didn't end there. Chevron (through their law firm) lobbied the Department of Justice to criminally prosecure Donziger for this. The DoJ declined.
But it didn't end there either. Chevron asked the court, and they agreed, to appoint Chevron's own law firm to conduct a private criminal prosecution. You might be asking "what is that?" and you'd be right to be confused. It rarely happens but a civil court can pursue a private criminal prosecution.
Donziger was convicted, disbarred and spent years in home detention over this whole thing. The Appeals Court affirmed all this and the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
So does it surprise me that Greenpeac can get hit by a $345M judgment for hurting the feelings of an oil company? No, no it does not.
> Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
If you're interested in this story, I would encourage you to read the full contents of the ruling in this US case. (https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/Chevron-Ecuador...) It's long but relatively easy reading, and it contains a lot more evidence against Donziger's side of the story than a video of a social gathering. In particular, it seems absolutely unambiguous to me that his team blackmailed the Ecuadorian judge into giving him favorable rulings, implementing the theory repeatedly found in his personal notebooks that "the only way the court will respect us is if they fear us".
> It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense.
https://www.trialmonitors.org/statement-of-independent-trial...
> The jury found Greenpeace USA liable for almost all claims.
how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.
The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.
> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.
It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.
Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...
It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.
Why is something like this allowed to exist... Stacking entities and funneling wealth around in the guise of a noble cause.
To keep the dissenting voices quiet and to scare other groups from protesting.
Modus operandi for many industries.
Unfortunately North Dakota is one of the minority of states without anti-SLAPP laws.
I believe it's a question of "who is found liable" and then "what is the damages" and then the damages are split between those who are found liable.
If it was Greenpeace and {Some Org} that were both found liable, then that could be split 90% {Some Org} and 10% Greenpeace.
However, if only Greenpeace was found liable it would be 100% Greenpeace despite how little interaction they had.
> how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
Alternative possibility: they were actually guilty. Seems likely. The idea that Greenpeace was intentionally spreading misinformation doesn't require a big leap of faith.
Companies and people can.
I think that's not what the article is saying, although I read it that way too at first. Greenpeace USA, the organization whose six employees were on the ground, was found liable for "almost all claims"; it's only Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund, their sibling organizations, who were found not to be "responsible for the alleged on-the-ground harms committed by protesters".
(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)
They were never going to win the trial. More than half of the jury pool had ties to the pipeline industry. They were always going to find against Greenpeace, and they went to fairly extreme lengths to ignore the evidence presented to come up with a ridiculous damage award far in excess of the company's actual damages (even accounting for a punitive damage markup).
Will they win on appeal? Maybe pre-Trump they had a chance, but right-wing judges no longer feel bound by the law, reason, or equity.
Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement. But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/12/11/TEXT-OMITTED-FROM-SO...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy
In my view the best way to get this sort of stuff banned is to start using it yourself.
I lived very close to the protests. I won't comment on the politics but, 2016-2017 was very impactful on the community here.
I don't think social justice has that same profit pipeline, but I am not sure. There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows.
Break the law, make $1B of illegal money, then get dragged to court and pay a $200M fine - while you keep most of the profit and your market position you illegally gained.
Bonus: Shield all managers from personal accountability, best in a way that they got their bonus and salary and moved on a long time ago before the verdict hits.
Best: Not get to court, but make an $100M outside court settlement.
The expected response from both companies and social groups is to deny the affiliation. The overall strategy is transpartisan because it is effective.
Makes sense. Because society is evil, therefore our society allows evil.
I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels. And thus does relatively little to change our path to sustainable energy. But it does a lot geopolitically. Having more local oil means the trigger-happy US government is less likely to start wars to ensure access to oil. Heck even the Iran conflict this week stems back to the 1953 CIA-instituted coup which was half motivated by protecting access to oil.
Hot take: decarbonization is a policy issue that should be pursued primarily through incentives to increase production and quality of clean alternatives. Not by throttling supply of oil. Look at the electrical grid. Solar and wind are just cheaper than fossil fuels now which means the decarbonization is economically inevitable.
You actually fully go out into the field to run campaigns and meet everyone from the President of Greenpeace to the front-end activist hanging banners and whatnot.
I actually liked the President and DC lobbyist folks more than the weridos out and about dropping banners and doing the extreme stuff.
I walked away being kind of turned off from the Organization and realized a lot of these folks were not pragmatic and more dogmatic than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful and had a blast, but I dropped out of college and became a software engineer instead of an activist.
Or maybe those people drawing hard lines in the sand were exaggerating to drive urgency and get attention? Sometimes people whose stated goals you agree with say and do things which are wrong.
Also I never mentioned just give up. I just said it’s already too late. That’s reality. What you do next is your choice. But don’t put words in my mouth.
I think the nuclear industry didn't do itself any favors. And the oil companies didn't want it to succeed either and did its best to hobble it. The environmental groups are a convenient patsy to take the blame for the outcome. If Greenpeace is so powerful why hasn't it been able to end whaling or the oil industry?
This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.
I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.
Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.
If this pipeline was going through disneyland, i don't think you'd hear popular arguments about disney trying to ruin the oil economy.
If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.
If you want to encourage sustainable energy you need to make that your focus. Make it cheaper. Ignore oil and fight laws that make it harder to build sustainable energy. ND has great wind potential (they get 40% of their electric from wind already), but it could be better (they have a small population - which means they can export wind energy to Minnesota or if we build transmission lines even farther).
When you focus on raising oil prices you ensure that your side gets voted out in the next election and your gains are undone. When you focus on building renewable energy you get something that can stay. (Just don't build only on the white house as that can be quickly removed - build everywhere so removal is expensive)
Steven is a lawyer who helped Ecuador sue Chevron who was polluting massively. The Ecuadorians won and secured an historic $9.5 billion judgment because it was so egregious. Did that end the matter? No.
Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
As part of all this, Chevron wanted Donziger to hand over all communications and electronic devices associated with the Ecuador prosecution. That is of course attorney-client privilege. But the court agreed and Donziger refused.
But it didn't end there. Chevron (through their law firm) lobbied the Department of Justice to criminally prosecure Donziger for this. The DoJ declined.
But it didn't end there either. Chevron asked the court, and they agreed, to appoint Chevron's own law firm to conduct a private criminal prosecution. You might be asking "what is that?" and you'd be right to be confused. It rarely happens but a civil court can pursue a private criminal prosecution.
Donziger was convicted, disbarred and spent years in home detention over this whole thing. The Appeals Court affirmed all this and the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
So does it surprise me that Greenpeac can get hit by a $345M judgment for hurting the feelings of an oil company? No, no it does not.
If you're interested in this story, I would encourage you to read the full contents of the ruling in this US case. (https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/Chevron-Ecuador...) It's long but relatively easy reading, and it contains a lot more evidence against Donziger's side of the story than a video of a social gathering. In particular, it seems absolutely unambiguous to me that his team blackmailed the Ecuadorian judge into giving him favorable rulings, implementing the theory repeatedly found in his personal notebooks that "the only way the court will respect us is if they fear us".