BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345 million in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline from nearly a decade ago, a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.
In court papers filed Tuesday, Judge James Gion said he would sign an order requiring several Greenpeace entities to pay the judgment to pipeline company Energy Transfer. He set that amount at $345 million last year in a decision that reduced a jury’s damages by about half, but his latest filing didn’t specify a final amount.
The long-awaited order is expected to launch an appeal process in the North Dakota Supreme Court from both sides.
Last year, a nine-person jury found Netherlands-based Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA and funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc. liable for defamation and other claims brought by Dallas-based Energy Transfer and subsidiary Dakota Access.
The jury found Greenpeace USA liable on all counts, including conspiracy, trespass, nuisance and tortious interference. The other two entities were found liable for some of the claims.
The lawsuit stems from the pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017, when thousands of people demonstrated and camped near the project’s Missouri River crossing upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation. The tribe has long opposed the pipeline as a threat to its water supply.
Damages totaled $666.9 million, divided in different amounts among the three Greenpeace organizations before the judge reduced the judgment. Greenpeace USA’s share of that judgment was $404 million.
Energy Transfer previously said it intends to appeal the reduced damages, calling the original jury findings and damages “lawful and just.” The Associated Press emailed the company for comment on the judge’s Tuesday action.
In a financial filing made late last year, Greenpeace USA said it doesn’t have the money to pay the $404 million ordered by the jury “or to continue normal operations if the judgment is enforced.” The group said it had cash and cash equivalents of $1.4 million and total assets of $23 million as of Dec. 31, 2024.
Greenpeace declined to comment on the judge’s Tuesday filing, but Greenpeace USA interim general counsel Marco Simons reiterated that the organization couldn’t afford the judgment.
“As mid-sized nonprofits, it has always been clear that we would not have the ability to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages,” Simons said Wednesday.
Simons added that the case is far from over and expressed optimism about the group’s planned appeal.
“These claims never should have reached a jury, and there are many possible legal grounds for appeal – including a lack of evidence to support key findings and valid concerns about the possibility of ensuring fairness,” Simons said.
Greenpeace has said the lawsuit is meant to use the courts to silence activists and critics and chill First Amendment rights. The pipeline company has said the lawsuit is about Greenpeace not following the law, not free speech.
At trial, an attorney for Energy Transfer said Greenpeace orchestrated plans to stop the pipeline’s construction, including organizing protesters, sending blockade supplies and making untrue statements about the project.
Attorneys for the Greenpeace entities said there was no evidence to the company’s claims and that Greenpeace employees had little or no involvement in the protests and the organizations had nothing to do with Energy Transfer’s delays in construction or refinancing.
A group of environmental and rights organisations said Thursday that they were suing the Finnish government for violating the country’s climate legislation by not taking adequate action to hit climate targets.
The six organisations noted in a statement that Finland in 2022 had adopted “one of the strongest net zero climate targets among industrialised nations, committing to become climate neutral by 2035 and reach net negative emissions thereafter.”
In their lawsuit filed to Finland’s Supreme Administrative Court, the groups argue that the “lack of adequate climate action” by Finland’s right-wing government is violating the country’s Climate Act.
“Our government is failing to enact solutions, cancelling agreed actions and refusing to revise Finland’s outdated climate plan for land use and forestry”, Greenpeace Senior Policy Advisor Kaisa Kosonen said.
“This constitutes a violation of the Climate Act, so it’s our duty as NGOs to take legal action”, she said.
According to the organisations, Finland is not on track to meet its emission reduction targets, primarily as a result of excessive logging and a lack of efforts to curb emissions from the agricultural and transport sectors.
The groups said the case builds on an earlier ruling by a Finnish court and a recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) which found that Switzerland violated the human rights of a group of elderly women by not doing enough to combat global warming.
“Governments’ inaction on climate change endangers the realisation of many human rights, such as the rights to life and health and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment”, Elina Mikola, climate and environment advisor at Amnesty Finland, said.
The lawsuit was filed August 2 by the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, Greenpeace Norden, Amnesty International Finland, Grandparents for Climate, the Finnish Nature League and the Finnish Sami Youth.
Finland’s first climate trial ended last year with the Supreme Administrative Court eventually dismissing a complaint against the Finnish state over insufficient climate action.
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Hundreds of climate activists breached a runway Saturday at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to try to stop private jets from taking off, in the latest demonstration by protesters aimed at drawing attention to the climate crisis.
Greenpeace Netherlands said “more than 500” Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion activists were at the airport, one of Europe’s largest, on Saturday afternoon, in a press release. A spokesperson for the Schiphol security forces could not confirm that figure.
There were about “more than 300” activists, the spokesperson of The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the military force guarding the airport, told CNN.
Robert Kapel, acknowledged it was a “big scale” demonstration but said air traffic was unaffected as the runway was exclusively used for private jets and no flights are scheduled until late Saturday night.
“This morning activists gathered in the forest nearby, carrying flags and banners with slogans such as ‘SOS for the climate’ and ‘Fly no more.’ At the same time another group reached the airport from the opposite direction with bicycles,” Greenpeace said.
Images from Greenpeace show groups of dozens of demonstrators sitting down on the tarmac by multiple planes on the runway. Further images show demonstrations inside the terminal.
More than 100 arrests “and counting” have been made so far, Kapel said. He added that he thinks all arrests will have been made by 10 p.m. (local time), which is when he said the first flight is scheduled to take off. Security forces have blocked off the area and made it inaccessible from other parts of the airport, he commented.
Protesters “plan to keep air traffic from the private jet terminal grounded for as long as possible,” Dewi Zloch, spokesperson of Greenpeace Netherlands, said in a statement.
She continued: “The airport should be reducing its flight movements, but instead it’s building a brand-new terminal. The wealthy elite is using more private jets than ever, which is the most polluting way to fly. This is typical of the aviation industry, which doesn’t seem to see that it is putting people at risk by aggravating the climate crisis. This has to stop. We want fewer flights, more trains, and a ban on unnecessary short-haul flights and private jets.”
Greenpeace warned authorities there would be some kind of action at Schiphol weeks in advance, Zloch, who was on the scene, told CNN. They did not disclose the exact location, she added.
Schiphol Airport CEO Ruud Sondag said activists should “feel welcome, but let’s keep things civil.”
He was responding to a previous letter from Greenpeace and stated his objective was to achieve “emissions-free airports by 2030 and net climate-neutral aviation by 2050”.
“However, this is only possible if we all work together”, Sondag said in a statement published Friday.
“Coming together for our environment, the government, and for society, clear laws, regulations, and proper permits are a necessity. We need clarity on that soon,” he added.
Elsewhere in Europe, two climate activists were arrested in Madrid in Spain after they each glued one of their hands to the frames of two Goya paintings in the Prado Museum on Saturday.
There was no apparent damage to the paintings, but the suspects are being charged with public disorder and damages, the Spanish National Police press office for Madrid told CNN.
The suspects, two Spanish women, wrote “+1,5C” on the wall between the artworks, which were Goya’s masterpieces “Las Majas,” according to the police.
Futuro Vegetal, a Spanish activist group, tweeted a video on the museum protest. The group is taking responsibility for the incident.
They described themselves as a “collective of civil disobedience and direct action in the fight against the Climate Crisis through the adoption of a food growing system based on plants.”
“Last week the UN recognized the impossibility of keeping ourselves below the limit of the increase, of the Paris Accord, of 1.5 degrees (C) temperature, with respect to pre-industrial levels,” Futuro Vegetal wrote in its tweet.
Security guards at the Prado quickly alerted the National Police, which has a unit dedicated to protecting the perimeter of the famed museum, and officers made the arrests in just minutes, the Police press office said.
The Paris Agreement, which was adopted by 196 parties at the United Nations’ COP 21 in December 2015, aimed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The protest comes just a day before the COP27 climate conference is due to start in Egypt.
This is an opinion editorial by Daniel Batten, a Bitcoin ESG analyst, climate tech investor, author and environmental campaigner.
Growing up in the ’70s, our local council tried to put a rubbish tip into our coastal New Zealand community. The whole community came together — not just to fight a common enemy (and win), but to discover the power of what is possible as part of a grassroots movement, which is impossible alone. In years to come most of that community, including myself, would go on to become voices for humanitarian and climate justice.
Starting young, my first environmental action at age four. From Thursday Magazine, 1974.
Fast forward to October 2022: I would never have imagined I would be part of a community of environmentalists defending the environment against Greenpeace USA.
A period of intensive data analysis six months earlier had led me to the inescapable conclusion that Bitcoin was a net positive to the environment, but powerful forces were at work to hoodwink the world’s environmentally-minded through a seemingly orchestrated misinformation campaign. The misinformation was strong enough that I initially fell for it myself.
“Bitcoin uses too much energy,” has become the new “immigrants are taking our jobs”: the incantation of vested interests and the hoodwinked who, wittingly or unwittingly, stoke the fires of populism with sound bites over sound analysis.
What we are seeing is not new.
We saw the tobacco industry influence medical opinion for many years about the safety of smoking. We saw the print media criticize the environmental credentials of the internet, predicting it would cause coal factories to fire up worldwide. Today, it’s unsurprising that central banks that want their central bank digital currencies (CDBCs) to be the future of digital currency, not Bitcoin (which disintermediates central banks), should happily fan the fires of doubt about Bitcoin using environmental credentials as its attack vector.
In this historical context, it is no surprise that Ripple’s executive chair Chris Larsen, among others, paid $5 million to launch a Greenpeace USA campaign attacking Bitcoin’s energy use. And Ripple is not just another altcoin, it is launching its own CDBC pilot project. CBDCs and Bitcoin represent fundamentally-competing visions for our digital currency future.
Nor should we be surprised that seemingly no mainstream journalist has publicly questioned either Larsen or Greenpeace about an evident conflict of interest.
But despite the money, the compassionate pass from mainstream media and a well-trained in-house media team that did its best to neuro-associate Bitcoin with stock video footage of climate catastrophe, Greenpeace USA’s campaign did not go well.
The “Change The Code” campaign actually energized and galvanized strong environmentalist voices within the Bitcoin community including Troy Cross, Margot Paez, Adam Wright and others.
It motivated podcasters such as Bitcoin Archive, Pomp and Crypto Birb who had not previously examined the environmental benefits of Bitcoin to start doing so.
It was also the catalytic moment that took me from being a read-only Twitter user, to becoming one more outspoken voice for the environmental merits of Bitcoin.
Greenpeace USA had the opportunity for a strategic retreat, but it did not take it.
On Greenpeace USA’s Twitter feed, a horde of Bitcoiners weighed in with data and fact, mercilessly counter-attacking Greenpeace’s campaign for what they perceived as its misinformation, ignorance, questionable ethics, lack of science, use of psyop-style messaging and inability to see how thoroughly it had been played by central bankers.
Remarkably few of Greenpeace USA’s own 218,000 followers, nor any other branches of Greenpeace internationally came to its aid. And Greenpeace USA wasn’t just repeatedly ratioed. It was honey badgered. Lyn Alden’s commentary on Troy Cross’ reply to a Greenpeace USA tweet captures the extent of the backfire:
Source: Twitter
No other branch of Greenpeace seems to have retweeted any of the “Change The Code” campaign since September.
Organizers set up a Change The Code Twitter handle which spent many months limping to 1,300 twitter followers — 80% of whom seem to be Bitcoiners based on their profile descriptions.
With the clockwork relentlessness of an oil pumpjack, the account continues to grind out near-daily anti-Bitcoin sound bites, only to see nearly every tweet ratioed by about 20:1 by the community.
It has proven a valuable resource for Bitcoiners. Not only is it very useful to see all the misinformation cataloged in one place but, more importantly, each time a tweet is ratioed, it allows Bitcoiners to educate themselves and others in the community about how to counter Bitcoin misinformation.
Far from turning more people against Bitcoin, the campaign has served only to draw attention to Greenpeace USA’s departure from grassroots funding while providing a forum for Bitcoiners to demonstrate the weakness of the anti-Bitcoin case once mainstream media was no longer there to insulate the attacker from a horde of highly-informed Bitcoiners.
Willy Woo calculated the campaign lost for Greenpeace at a minimum of $7.1 million in subscriptions worldwide. The brand and reputational damage will likely have been much more, and take much longer to recover from.
While outwardly Greenpeace USA will shrug shoulders and say “Well, you always lose some supporters on direct action campaigns, and Bitcoiners are vocal on Twitter,” behind closed doors its executive management will be asking “What went wrong?” in what has been an unprecedented social media catastrophe.
So, Why Did The ‘Change The Code’ Campaign Perform Badly?
The first foreboding signs came one year earlier. In the only level playing-field debate on if Bitcoin is a threat to the environment — a predominantly anti-Bitcoin general audience swung 17.9% to become predominantly pro-Bitcoin after just one hour of hearing for the first time not just a central banker’s narrative, but a Bitcoiner’s right of reply, according to a calculation of voters from the user forum on the video itself.
Plus 17.9% is a swing of gargantuan proportions.
The second alarm bell for Greenpeace USA was much closer to home. Greenpeace’s base is 18 to 34 year olds: This age group is twice as likely to think climate change poses a serious threat. What Greenpeace USA seemed not to realize until it was too late was that 18 to 34 year olds are also almost twice as likely to hold bitcoin as the rest of the general population.
The third alarm bell should have been that these 18 to 34 year olds are the least likely to trust mainstream media. Meaning: Greenpeace USA’s base was the least likely to have believed the highly-skewed narrative about Bitcoin propagated through mainstream news channels.
Greenpeace USA completely miscalculated what would happen in forums where the “Bitcoin can be good for the environment” case could not be censored the way it had been throughout mainstream media outlets.
Greenpeace’s direct action campaigns typically target large corporations with something to hide. Greenpeace USA also miscalculated what would happen when it took on a grassroots movement founded on the values of consensus and transparency, which had nothing to hide, and an untold story to tell.
It miscalculated how Bitcoiners would unite together to defend an attack from an environmental goliath that they perceived to have compromised its integrity by taking private money from a conflicted billionaire to fund their campaign.
But it also perhaps miscalculated how unsympathetic its 18-to-34-year-old base would be to its anti-Bitcoin narrative. For when the ratios came thick and fast on Twitter, its base did not defend it.
That vacuum allowed Bitcoin Twitter to do the job that mainstream media once did: hold an organization to account for taking funding from an apparently conflicted source.
What positives can Greenpeace USA take away from this campaign? Well if its intention was to…
Galvanize the Bitcoin environmental movement and create new leaders within it
Provide a forum where Bitcoiners can educate and inform its base about the environmental benefits of Bitcoin
Highlight a tactical error from its executive management team to its supporters
…then its campaign has been a resounding success.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Even before the extra $1 million from Ripple was paid to amplify Greenpeace USA’s message directly after the Ethereum merge, Cross warned the Bitcoin community in July that more pressure would come on Bitcoin post-merge.
It seemed the antagonists of Bitcoin were expecting this to be the turning of the tide, where they triumphantly cried, “Ethereum has proven it can do the right thing for the environment, now it’s Bitcoin’s turn” to a choir of cheerleaders.
They did not expect the reply: “Bitcoin is now the only major cryptocurrency that can become an emission negative network.” Nor did they expect the supporting data, showing that 7 megawatts (MW) of vented-methane-based mining per month is all it takes to make the whole Bitcoin network emission negative by December 2024, a monthly rate already surpassed using flared methane power.
Compiled by the author
As for Bitcioners, we can celebrate this moment. It is not the final battle. Not even close. The opponents of Bitcoin will re-gather stronger. We can expect new missiles of misinformation, new angles of attack vectors through the curatable channels of mainstream media and political influence that have worked for them to date.
But they have also learned that in an open forum where the right of reply cannot be censored, the truth will shine: social media is one stadium where they cannot win.
If Greenpeace USA introspects deeply, it will realize that we are on the same team: Bitcoin is a reflection of its own core values, not just a financial sovereignty movement, but a human rights movement and an environmental movement. It is a movement built on Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of peer-to-peer solidarity, returning power to the people algorithmically through the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, while disintermediating the unelected financial elites who, by virtue of wealth or position, can make decisions that are bad for the people and widen wealth inequality.
Bitcoin cannot fix the environment. Only people can do that. But Bitcoin was created to help the people, and that spirit of its founder lives on in everyone who is behind it.
The environmentalists within the Bitcoin community are growing rapidly, in number and in valor. Just like that coastal community of the ’70s, each attack on what we hold dear serves only to energize and galvanize us, creating new leaders who will go on to become irrepressible voices for humanitarian and climate justice.
This is a guest post by Daniel Batten. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
