A nine-person jury found Greenpeace responsible last week for inciting illegal behavior against the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline by using anti-pipeline protesters to block construction, awarding Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline builder, $660 million.
Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company, accused three Greenpeace entities — Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund — of colluding to promote acts including trespassing, violence and vandalism by anti-pipeline protesters in 2016 and 2017, claiming Greenpeace used a “misinformation campaign.”
The company also alleged Greenpeace published defamatory statements about the pipeline to hurt the company’s reputation and get banks to pull their financial support for the project.
Greenpeace denied the allegations and maintained that Energy Transfer filed the lawsuit to harm the environmental movement claiming that concerns raised by the lawsuit against Greenpeace could have a chilling effect on free speech and other activist groups.
Greenpeace was formed in 1970 by Canadian and American environmental activists to protest the United States testing of nuclear weapons in the Aleutian Islands. However, the group expanded its focus on environmental issues in general by initiating localized protests believing that human greed and ignorance are responsible for environmental destruction.
Greenpeace claims the pipeline was scheduled to be built through land owned by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in rural North Dakota, a claim Energy Transfer denied. The Tribe claimed the pipeline was a threat to its water and sovereignty.
This caused other Indigenous groups, along with thousands of protestors to camp for months near where the pipeline was set to cross underneath the Missouri River.
Trey Cox, lead attorney for Energy Transfer, accused Greenpeace of using a “vulnerable population” to further its anti-fossil fuel agenda.
Energy Transfer attributed between $265 million and $340 million in damages to Greenpeace and said they should be awarded the same amount in punitive damages to dissuade Greenpeace and other organizations from acting in a similar way in the future.
Energy Transfer claimed that all three Greenpeace defendants worked in concert to send supplies to the protests, share intel with protesters, and pay Native activists to conduct training in the camps to encourage demonstrators to break the law.
They showed photos of construction equipment with broken windows, anti-pipeline messages written in graffiti, gas tanks filled with sand, and photos of vehicles on fire.
The suit alleged that Greenpeace maliciously circulated nine defamatory statements to harm the company that successfully persuaded some banks to withdraw their financial support for the project.
Greenpeace said this judgement could bankrupt them and said they would appeal the decision.
Read more on this story in Just the News here.
