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Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case
- oxqbldpxo 8mo agoDrive less, if possible.
- foolfoolz 8mo ago> 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?
- lkbm 8mo agoThey 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.
- jacquesm 8mo agoUnlike oil companies who would of course never do such a thing.
- b112 8mo agoThe climate can't sue if you lie about it. Companies and people can.
- lkbm 8mo agoThey sure do. They've also been sued for it, too, because it's bad. It's also bad for Greenpeace to do it.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThere is absolutely no way the damage is that large and this seems to be mostly a revenge action by a community in which Greenpeace - or any other environmental organization - would never get a fair trial to begin with.
- terminalshort 8mo agoThe article doesn't mention it, but it could be punitive damages
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago> 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".
- lkbm 8mo agoAh, good catch. I misread.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo agoOr 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.)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- GuinansEyebrows 8mo agothis 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.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo agoRegardless of what you think of pipelines, under the current system they have the protection of the law. Courts are judging based on what the law says, not on the sense of "justice" that you seem to be operating on. As you yourself said, they may not intersect.
- GuinansEyebrows 8mo agokind of an insulting position to assume i (or anyone else you might be educating) don't know that courts ostensibly rule on law/precedent. i'm specifically responding to your use of the word "justice" and how those two do not always align - it's a lack of precise definition, or a disagreement in terms. this is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon that exists, especially when you consider the lengths the fossil fuel industry has gone to hide and misdirect evidence of the negative environmental impacts of their business model.
- bjourne 8mo agoDoes 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?
- shagie 8mo agoI'm not a lawyer. 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.
- DrBazza 8mo agoThe claims were for defamation and incitement: > 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.
- ceejayoz 8mo agoRough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.
- DrBazza 8mo agoMaybe? The judge, and the lawyers involved have the right to reject jurors that might prejudice a trail.
- ceejayoz 8mo agoYes, but that's a lot easier to manage in a county that doesn't have only 30k people in it.
- DannyBee 8mo agoThey applied for change of venue 3 times, lost all 3 times, and appealed it to the north dakota supreme court, and lost there too. Overall, they could not make the showing necessary. I read the motions and responses, and was not particularly impressed with their arguments for change of venue.
- hrimfaxi 8mo agoLawyers don't have unlimited removals though.
- shrubby 8mo agoSLAPP as in Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. To keep the dissenting voices quiet and to scare other groups from protesting. Modus operandi for many industries.
- shrubby 8mo agohttps://www.the-case.eu/latest/number-of-slapps-in-europe-continues-to-rise/ https://www.the-case.eu/latest/number-of-slapps-in-europe-co...
- terminalshort 8mo agoA SLAPP is a frivolous lawsuit that the plaintiff has no chance of winning. In this case they won a judgment, so it's the opposite of that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo agoThat's not technically what a SLAPP is. The reason it is called a strategic lawsuit is frequently that it will cost the defendant so much to defend themselves that they opt to settle rather than risk that cost. Even if the plaintiff is unlikely to win, it is rarely a "no chance" situation, and with judge/district shopping, it is quite possible for large corporations to move further from "no chance" than an individual or non-profit might.
- some_random 8mo agoThat 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.
- southerntofu 8mo agoWell it is very hard to believe they're guilty, at least to me. Too bad the news report does not provide any actual information about the case and the evidence (actual journalism beyond clickbaity headlines). In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm. As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.
- thecrash 8mo agoSome 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.
- rayiner 8mo agoThe 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-to-oil-pipeline-machinery/10350340 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.
- hotstickyballs 8mo agoDirect action is literally their policy
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoAnd in this case the jury found them on the hook to pay for the results. I'm not sure what they were expecting. Direct action agains an oil pipeline in ND is gonna go over about as well as direct action tourism in Florida. If by some miracle you get a judge sympathetic to your cause you won't get a jury that is. The local people want this industry, generally speaking.
- RickJWagner 8mo agoThat’s very true. The frozen plains of North Dakota aren’t worth much without oil. With oil, they provide good paying jobs to people who otherwise won’t have them. I lived in the next state south for many years. Oil is definitely popular with the people of North Dakota.
- whywhywhywhy 8mo ago> Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International Why is something like this allowed to exist... Stacking entities and funneling wealth around in the guise of a noble cause.
- esafak 8mo agoIt may well not exist any more under the financial burden of this sentence.
- tlb 8mo agoInternational orgs usually need a company incorporated in every country they're working in. You need it to pay employees, for instance.
- mullingitover 8mo agoYou're going to lose it when you discover that stacking entities and funneling wealth around happens as routinely as eating lunch, and it's the noble cause part that's the outlier here.
- FireBeyond 8mo agoYou know that 99% of companies with revenues above say $1B do exactly this, just in the guise of often less noble causes? Fun fact, Monster Cables owns no patents or IP (or effectively none), it just licenses them all from the "wholly independent, arms-length" Monster Cables Bermuda, Inc. entity.
- kristjansson 8mo agoWe need David Macaulay to add a book on corporate structures to his repertoire. Any organization operating at anywhere close to household-name scale is a collection of cooperating legal entities.
- nitwit005 8mo agoCountries usually require you to create a local corporation, non-profit, or similar, if you have any revenue or donations. The local entity is what will file the tax paperwork.
- gamblor956 8mo agoNo, 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.
- QuadmasterXLII 8mo agoNorth Dakota jury breaking things to please Daddy T. On a larger scale, jury trials for defamation are a ticking time bomb catastrophe, long term incompatible with free speech. Source: was on a defamation jury and it was an utter clown fiesta and pretty close to ended my remaining faith in the US legal system and the population as a whole.
- nradov 8mo agoJury trials for defamation have been a thing since forever and haven't caused a catastrophe yet. Jury trials occasionally get things wrong as a matter of law, which is why we have an appeals process.
- direwolf20 8mo ago[flagged]
- oofbey 8mo agoI 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.
- DrBazza 8mo ago> 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.
- valec 8mo agowon't someone think of the property??!?
- verdverm 8mo agoprosperity comes from property, just add sí /s
- terminalshort 8mo ago
- hermannj314 8mo agoIf 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.
- threethirtytwo 8mo ago>There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows. Makes sense. Because society is evil, therefore our society allows evil.
- beambot 8mo agoThey 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.
- delichon 8mo ago[flagged]
- mastax 8mo agoReally? Could you point at one of these shell companies?
- delichon 8mo agoIn 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.
- unixuser7104 8mo agoAs one of the few developers based in North Dakota, I was NOT expecting to see ND at the top of hacker news this morning. I lived very close to the protests. I won't comment on the politics but, 2016-2017 was very impactful on the community here.
- seydor 8mo agoGreg Hirsch got paid
- nickorlow 8mo agoCan't make a tomelette...
- trimethylpurine 8mo agoIt 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.
- morkalork 8mo agoThat's a hell of a cynnical conspiracy but then again, people like Jill Stein exist.
- trimethylpurine 8mo agoThis is funny. I didn't know who Jill Stein is, so I asked an LLM about how she is relevant. Instead of explaining how she might be involved in evil conspiracies, it thinks that Jill Stein is relevant because, "like a charged college kid," she was apparently at this Greenpeace protest! Hilarious.
- realreality 8mo agoShe ran for President in 2024. Where were you?
- trimethylpurine 8mo agoI regularly can't remember who that one person is in that one movie either. I think part of being bad with names is that you don't actually care. That may offend some people, but hopefully less so if they consider that I think my name is just as unimportant as the next guy's.
- 8mo ago
- DrScientist 8mo agoSounds 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.
- jonas21 8mo agoI 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.
- DrScientist 8mo agoLooking 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. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/12/11/TEXT-OMITTED-FROM-SOURCE-The-list-goes-on-A/8162376894800/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/12/11/TEXT-OMITTED-FROM-SO...
- rayiner 8mo agoThat’s specifically illegal under bankruptcy law. It’s called fraudulent transfer.
- DrScientist 8mo agoYet large companies appear to get away with it all the time - for example the so called Texas two step. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy 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.
- reenorap 8mo agoJ&J tried it but was ultimately rejected last year.
- jmyeet 8mo agoWait til you hear about Steven Donziger. 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.
- tokai 8mo agoUS truely is a banana republic.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago> 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-Opinion-3.4.14.pdf 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".
- ttiurani 8mo agoFor 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. https://www.trialmonitors.org/statement-of-independent-trial-monitors-on-verdict-in-greenpeace-trial https://www.trialmonitors.org/statement-of-independent-trial...
- JumpCrisscross 8mo agoAs an outsider, why is this a credible institution over the jury and judge?
- docdeek 8mo agoI can't speak to the institution but the only public statements on their website relate to this particular trial. It could be this is the first ever trial they have monitored in this way; it might also be a group that will only ever monitor this one trial.
- amarant 8mo agoIn other words Greenpeace is trying to muddy the waters and hide their guilt by painting themselves as the victims of injustice? How very original..
- some_random 8mo agoYeah we're dealing with a mud fight between two highly resourced adversaries who are practiced in bullshit underhanded tactics and influence operations.
- indubioprorubik 8mo agoNah, its one source of funding. The oil giants pump there money in bonkers oppossition- one Greta Thunberg glueing herself to a public street does more damage to that cause then the whole of counter propaganda ever could. And it prevents the debate about resonable measures like free public transport.
- calibas 8mo agoIf I boycott a company, am I legally responsible for any lost profit that happens as a result?
- lkbm 8mo agoOf course not, but that's completely unrelated to what's happening here.
- arduanika 8mo agoDepends. Did you incite crimes?
- some_random 8mo agoNo, but if you get your friends to torch their warehouse you are
- voxic11 8mo agoNo but if you defame them and that causes others to boycott then you could be legally responsible.
- some_random 8mo agoSo they almost certainly are guilty, but the damages seem exorbitant
- grogenaut 8mo agoDepends. What's the overhead of delaying construction, replacing pipes and valves etc. lost revenue ( like car rental)?
- zug_zug 8mo agoHard to believe you’re downvoted in an organic way…
- some_random 8mo agoIt's alright, the American Oil Company bots and the Russian Oil Company bots are just fighting it out
- strathmeyer 8mo ago[dead]
- johntb86 8mo agoDoes anyone know what assets Greenpeace USA has? I imagine Greenpeace international will set up Greenpeace USA 2.0, all the volunteers/employees will move over, and the original will just go bankrupt.
- zug_zug 8mo agoI find it hard to believe these people did 345 million in damage.
- Schmerika 8mo ago[flagged]
- terminalshort 8mo ago> maybe telling some protesters to engage in direct action against a company leaking oil into their water supply Sounds like you put the maybe in the wrong place. The jury found that they did do that. And you have no evidence whatsoever that they leaked any oil into the water supply.
- whoknowsidont 8mo agoHow dishonest or stupid do you have to be to make this comment?
- terminalshort 8mo agoI think you replied to the wrong comment as this is sounds like it is obviously directed at the person making allegations unsupported by evidence.
- whoknowsidont 8mo agoNope. It's definitely directed at the comment employing troll truisms. Trying to masquerade your motivations with words that mean something is a trick as old as time, but this one is pretty blatant ;). If you're capable of doing it, take a step back and reevaluate yourself. But something tells me you're not.
- Emjayen 8mo agoHN hasn't been burdened with intelligent discussion for many years now. One only needs a cursory scan of the top posts to recognize this; ~80% of discussion revolves around braindead slop peddlers.