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This week marks the official kickoff of a long-brewing, high-stakes trial that could change the American environmental movement forever—and crush Americans’ First Amendment rights.
In a North Dakota district court, Texas pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners is accusing the international environmental organization Greenpeace of single-handedly organizing a disruptive and raucous protest of its most controversial project: the Dakota Access Pipeline. If successful, Energy Transfer’s $300 million lawsuit may end up bankrupting the advocacy group as a whole, both domestically and internationally.
As construction began in the mid-2010s, the pipeline threatened sacred sites and a key water source (Lake Oahe) for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their cross–Dakota border reservation. Opposition to the DAPL then flared up in a series of monthslong direct-action protests that attracted worldwide attention and solidarity from environmentalists, climate change activists, and celebrities who personally came to the Standing Rock Reservation. Local police and National Guard members deployed increasingly brutal tactics to suppress the protesters, fueling more public sympathy with the Sioux Tribe’s cause and leading the Army Corps of Engineers, in December of 2016, to forbid the DAPL from extending its pipe underneath the Missouri River.
That victory was brief. When Donald Trump took office in early 2017, he rolled back the Obama administration’s Missouri River order, allowing the pipeline to complete construction and go into operation. (Subsequent legal challenges failed to stop the DAPL.)
Energy Transfer still went on a lawsuit offensive, filing federal RICO charges against Greenpeace and other environmental nonprofits in the summer of 2017. The initial accusations—that Greenpeace “employ[ed] a pattern of criminal activity and a campaign of misinformation” to encourage banks to sever ties with the company, causing “enormous harm to people and property along the pipeline’s route”—were dismissed by a North Dakota federal court in February 2019.
Energy Transfer refiled the non-RICO cases in state court just one week later and soon narrowed the scope of its charges, which lie at the center of today’s court battle. Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace Fund, and Greenpeace International are alleged to have damaged Energy Transfer’s business by defaming it, engaged in tortious interference by campaigning for banks to boycott Energy Transfer and its projects, and trespassed illegally on the disputed property. The deliberation over these accusations is set to take five weeks and wrap up by March 27.
Even in refined form, these charges are more than a tad suspicious. Anyone who observed and reported on the DAPL movement in real time knows the primary organizers and protesters were Standing Rock Sioux leaders, against whom Energy Transfer had already brought myriad unsuccessful charges. Greenpeace representatives numbered just a few among the many Americans and international activists who supported the Native Americans.
As Greenpeace USA national campaigns director Rolf Skar told me, the only noted action that his group took to support the campaign for financial institutions to divest from Energy Transfer was co-signing an open letter to the relevant banks in 2016—alongside hundreds of other signatories. As for the money, with the exception of a 2020 COVID-era crash that hit the entire fossil-fuel industry, Energy Transfer’s annual revenues have steadily grown since 2016. Meanwhile, the Dakota Access Pipeline itself keeps flowing—and leaking.
Energy Transfer CEO Kelcy Warren, a regular Donald Trump donor since 2016, has not been shy about his intentions with Greenpeace. In a 2017 interview with North Dakota’s Valley News Live, Warren declared his “primary objective” with the RICO suit was “to send a message” to other environmentalists. In another interview that same year, with CNBC, Warren claimed outright that he was trying to “cease funding” for Greenpeace. In 2021, when DAPL protester Jessica Reznicek was sentenced to prison and deemed a “domestic terrorist” for damaging some pipeline equipment (without harming other humans), Warren referred to her as “somebody who needs to be removed from the gene pool.”
While some Greenpeace representatives showed up at Standing Rock in 2016, no one from the group has been directly affiliated with actions like Reznicek’s. “The most concerning thing is the idea that any participation in a protest means that you’re held liable for the actions of other people, even if you’re not associated with them or if they’re never identified,” said Skar. So, even though Greenpeace wasn’t accused of breaking DAPL construction equipment, Energy Transfers is “still trying to make us responsible for those alleged actions.”
(In a statement it emailed to all news organizations, including Slate, Energy Transfers countered that “Our lawsuit against Greenpeace is about them not following the law. It is not about free speech as they are trying to claim.”)
For a case with such massive stakes over legal culpability in public expression, there won’t be much transparency, besides some independent legal watchdogs acting as trial monitors. As the North Dakota Monitor reported this week: “In an unusual move for North Dakota courts, [the judge] has so far denied media requests for photography or recording inside the courtroom. He also has denied requests to livestream the trial.”
Climate reporter and Drilled Media editor Alleen Brown noted on Bluesky that these restrictions extend even to sheer note-taking on paper, forcing her to rely on notes she penned on her hands. By the time jury selection wrapped Tuesday, she was still able to report that 7 of the 11 jurors selected have ties to the fossil-fuel industry, whether as employees, spouses of employees, or rightsholders to oil and gas deposits.
As eyebrow-raising as this is, it wasn’t unexpected, which was why Greenpeace has tried (and failed) to get the case moved from this jurisdiction. The fossil-fuel industry remains so essential to North Dakota, as a key site for fracking booms and busts, that ex-Gov. Doug Burgum is now the nation’s Interior secretary—and he’s already ripping up environmental regulations in order to benefit the oil industry. (This is the same guy who brokered that infamous meeting last year where Trump requested $1 billion from oil executives for his campaign.) Plus, North Dakota is one of the few U.S. states without legal protections against strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, of which Energy Transfer’s case appears to be a clear example.
To add to all this, the climate blogs DeSmog and ExxonKnews have reported that Energy Transfer’s CEO made a $5 million donation to the Turnout for America super PAC in September. Just two weeks later, that group paid $250,000 to a Chicago-based publisher frequently used by conservative PACs, North CB Corporation, for “media services.” North CB’s only publicly listed director is Brian T. Timpone, who also owns a different media company that produces “pink slime” propaganda outlets masquerading as legitimate newspapers. One such outlet is “Central ND News,” which was packed with pro–Energy Transfer, anti-protest tirades and mailed to Morton County residents in October. Greenpeace’s lawyers requested that the district judge investigate these ties, only to be shot down.
The advantages are clearly weighted toward fossil-fuel interests, which is why the $300 million damages at stake present an existential financial threat to an already overstrapped organization that’s had to undergo several other legal battles. “They know that Greenpeace and other NGOs don’t have $300 million,” Skar said. “This case is asking for money that they know we don’t have, that they don’t need for a pipeline that was already operating and making them money many years ago.” Disagreements between Greenpeace USA’s leadership and its advisory board over how to proceed—namely, whether to settle with Energy Transfer or keep up the risky fight—led to last year’s ouster of the organization’s first Black woman executive director. Her replacement is still acting in an interim capacity.
The best legal card Greenpeace may have in its pocket right now is its ongoing employment of what the New York Times calls “a novel tactic.” Earlier this month, the Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International branch filed an anti-intimidation suit against Energy Transfer in the Dutch capital’s district court, relying on the European Union’s recent legal mandate to restrict the use of SLAPPs in the region’s courts. If successful, the lawsuit could get Greenpeace International extra compensation from Energy Transfer for the time it’s spent defending itself from the oil-and-gas corporation. However, as one Greenpeace insider informed me, there likely won’t be any further movement on this case until April—after the North Dakota suit will probably have been decided.
Meanwhile, grassroots revolts against fossil-fuel exploration are even more fraught than they were in 2016. The prominence of the DAPL protests has inspired at least 19 Republican-dominated states to pass laws forbidding protests of “critical infrastructure”—including oil and gas pipelines. (Challenges to Virginia’s and Louisiana’s laws, the latter of which revolve around a different Energy Transfer pipeline, are currently being heard in court.) And the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has not given up its fight against the DAPL, having filed a new lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers with the claim that the pipeline is operating illegally.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace itself is still suing the Trump administration over its environmental rollbacks and launching public campaigns to draw awareness to the North Dakota case, including an open letter to Energy Transfer that’s been co-signed by hundreds of supporters, including celebrities like Billie Eilish. The fight for the right to protect our waters continues.
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