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> Greenpeace maintains it only had six employees visit the protest camps, and that all worked for Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace Internationa
by foolfoolz 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo agoUnlike oil companies who would of course never do such a thing.
- b112 7mo agoThe climate can't sue if you lie about it. Companies and people can.
- lkbm 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo agoThe article doesn't mention it, but it could be punitive damages
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo 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 7mo agoAh, good catch. I misread.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo 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 7mo ago[deleted]
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo agoRough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.
- DrBazza 7mo agoMaybe? The judge, and the lawyers involved have the right to reject jurors that might prejudice a trail.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoYes, but that's a lot easier to manage in a county that doesn't have only 30k people in it.
- DannyBee 7mo 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 7mo agoLawyers don't have unlimited removals though.
- shrubby 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo agoDirect action is literally their policy
- cucumber3732842 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo agoIt may well not exist any more under the financial burden of this sentence.
- tlb 7mo agoInternational orgs usually need a company incorporated in every country they're working in. You need it to pay employees, for instance.
- mullingitover 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.