> 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.
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.
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 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.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels.
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 one of the Ecuadorian judges 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".