Greenpeace Owes an Oil Pipeline Company More Than Half a Billion Dollars

Pipeline company Energy Transfer sued the environmental advocacy non-profit for its role in the 2016 and 2017 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, alleging that they helped turn peaceful protests violent and disruptive to the company’s business. The jury, made up of people who live right around where the Standing Rock protests upended things for years, agreed, awarding far more than the initial claims the company made.

Greenpeace has said it will appeal the decision, though if forced to actually pay it would likely end the group’s American operations entirely. It has called the lawsuit frivolous, an example of a “meritless” strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, designed to chill the right to protest and wield power through the oil industry’s endlessly deep pockets.

“This case should alarm everyone, no matter their political inclinations,” said Sushma Raman, the interim executive director of Greenpeace Inc. and Greenpeace Fund, in a statement. (The lawsuit technically named three entities, those two based in Washington as well as Greenpeace International, the umbrella organization based in Amsterdam. Last month Greenpeace International filed a countersuit in the Netherlands against Energy Transfer in what it said was the first test of a new European Union anti-SLAPP Directive.) “It’s part of a renewed push by corporations to weaponize our courts to silence dissent. We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech.”

Lawyers for Energy Transfer — which estimates it will earn more than $16 billion in 2025 — has somehow-without-irony called the jury verdict a “powerful affirmation” of the First Amendment, according to the New York Times. An actual, prominent First Amendment lawyer, Martin Garbus, called it “the worst First Amendment case decision I have ever seen.”