The Huge Greenpeace Verdict Should Put Anti-Tesla Activists on Notice

Last week Greenpeace lost a case in court that could potentially put an end to the US branch of the organization. Greenpeace had been sued by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline after protests which Greenpeace supported cost the company months of delays and hundreds of millions of dollars. Those delays and losses weren’t accidental, they were strategic. The whole effort to stop the construction of the pipeline was aimed at making it so difficult and costly that the company would finally give up.

Instead, the pipeline was completed and ETP sued over the losses to the tune of $667 million:

The environmental lobby Greenpeace is finally getting its just deserts after a North Dakota jury on Wednesday ordered it to pay $667 million in damages for its thuggish campaign last decade to block the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Pipeline company Energy Transfer LP provided compelling evidence during a three-week trial that Greenpeace defamed the company and abetted vandals. Its organizers trained protesters and even brought lockboxes they used to chain themselves to construction equipment. Protesters lobbed human feces and burning logs at security officers and vandalized construction equipment.

Greenpeace plans to appeal and is upset that their attempts to move the trial to a different jurisdiction were rejected three times. Instead, the trial was held near where the events happened which resulted in several people who work for the oil and gas industry being on the jury. But for now, the verdict really has stunned the environmental group and their allies. This is many times their annual US budget.

In an interview, the group’s interim executive director, Sushma Raman, seemed to be counting on a change in the political tone to save them.

Well, in two years, I think we might have a reinvigorated protest movement, which is what might be, you know, what Big Oil might fear. But I do think that we may be in a different place in two years in terms of the mood in the country, galvanization around politics, around engagement and democracy.

We see these swings forward and back routinely in the history of this country and in places around the world. And so it’s a little hard to predict at that time, but I see our work happening in the courtroom … as well as in the court of public opinion, engaging with media, engaging with other advocacy groups and so on. And we could anticipate that that work will continue.

They could be right, but of course a change in tone won’t change the makeup of the Supreme Court, which is where this case could end up.

Greenpeace claims that all it did was provide some supplies and training, all actions covered by the first amendment. However, the Standing Rock camp went far beyond noisy protest to acts of vandalism, attacks on police and defamation caused by false claims made about ETP to banking institutions. None of those things are covered by the First Amendment. 

And yet, you may have noticed that the disruption at Standing Rock looks a lot like other similar left-wing protests we’ve seen in recent years.

In a City Journal article about the case, I noted similarities between the anti-pipeline protests near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation and other mass actions, including Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the anti-Israel demonstrations that erupted around the United States after the October 7 attacks. Making an analogy to hybrid warfare, I described these as “hybrid protests,” in which masses of peaceful demonstrators are joined by smaller groups of trained agitators who tip the events toward violence. As Park MacDougald has reported, these loose networks of troublemakers are often financially supported “by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups.”

Energy Transfer’s suit against Greenpeace represents the first major success in exposing and penalizing the putatively legitimate nonprofits that funnel money and material support to the lawbreakers embedding themselves in these hybrid protests. If the enormous verdict survives the inevitable appeals, it will be a major shot across the bows of progressive organizations that quietly foment political mayhem while maintaining plausible deniability.

These sorts of hybrid protests have been everywhere in the past decade. Even before the No-DAPL protests we had the Occupy movement. We had the protests against Trump’s first inauguration, which resulted in arson and vandalism in several cities. We had the long string of nightly riots in Portland and elsewhere, supposedly over Black Lives Matter. We’ve had the protests, arson and vandalism attempting to stop the Atlanta Police Training Center. We’ve had group’s stopping traffic in the streets or gluing themselves to famous works of art. And more recently we’ve had protests/building takeovers across the country in support of Palestine/Hamas. Those protests had elements of both Occupy and Standing Rock.

Which brings me to Tesla. Right now the other topics seem to have been forgotten as the left has made taking down Elon Musk and Tesla their number one objective. Already we’ve seen a string of arsons and vandalism across the country on top of a layer of more traditional protests at dealerships. We’ve seen the head of a major teacher’s union calling for divestment from Tesla and the head of a left-wing pollical group (the Lincoln Project) calling for killing Tesla as a way to punish Musk. Sometimes the calls to violence are subtle and sometimes they are not, but it all has the same circus atmosphere of these other protests.

The Greenpeace case took 8 years to make its way to a verdict. That’s a long time but even so the $667 million judgment should put other left-wing activists on notice that they won’t always get away with illegal activity under cover of legal protest and speech.

To put it simply, if you want to protest Tesla peacefully that is constitutionally protected activity. If you want to takeover buildings, battle with police, vandalize cars or set them on fire, these are not constitutionally protected activities. It may take a while, but any groups supporting this activity are now on notice that they can be held accountable for taking part in hybrid protests.