Finding Out
What the Greenpeace verdict means for the professional protest industry.
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”— Isoroku Yamamoto
As any international business traveler can attest, understanding local rules and customs is essential—especially in conservative cultures. While some leeway may be granted to foreign visitors, ignorance of the law is rarely a convincing excuse, and it's best to avoid needing one in the first place. Foreign jails are far less comfortable than foreign hotels, and if you find yourself in contact with your home embassy while abroad, chances are something has gone terribly wrong.
Consider Singapore, where spitting in public is illegal and possession of even a small amount of an illicit drug can carry a death sentence. Or Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is largely banned and adultery is a capital offense (public beheading is the preferred method of execution, in case you were wondering). Shoplifting while overseas is also a bad idea, as one never knows which countries still impose hand amputation for even petty theft. Why chance it? Landing in Kuala Lumpur is not the same as landing in Toronto, no matter how familiar the baggage claim area might seem.
What is true between countries also holds across different states of the US: what is permissible in California might not be in, say, North Dakota. The Peace Garden State has voted for Republican candidates in 15 consecutive presidential elections, most recently backing Donald Trump by more than 36%. Of the 94 seats in the North Dakota House of Representatives, Republicans currently hold 82—a percentage surpassed only by their dominance in the state Senate, where they occupy 42 of 47 seats. Unsurprisingly, the oil and gas sector enjoys strong support, having accounted for half of the state’s annual tax collections since 2008.
North Dakota would thus seem a suboptimal place to launch a campaign of “militant direct action” against a proposed oil pipeline—one marked by allegations of trespassing on private property, destroying construction equipment, and assaulting employees and contractors. Using improvised explosive devices to attack police would also seem unwise, as would deploying hacked information to threaten officers and their families. Killing the livestock of local farmers and ranchers as part of an intimidation operation could land you in a spot of bother—just as using Facebook to instruct others on how to murder security guards might. Alas, it seems not everyone is guided by prudence:
“The environmental lobby Greenpeace is finally getting its just desserts 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 sought to get the pipeline’s financiers to pull out of the project by erroneously claiming the company’s ‘personnel deliberately desecrated documented burial grounds and other culturally important sites,’ among other falsehoods. Energy Transfer said this malicious campaign delayed the pipeline’s construction and increased its costs by hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The satisfaction of a well-earned comeuppance notwithstanding, the verdict against Greenpeace is sure to have far-reaching consequences for years to come—well beyond what most energy analysts are currently modeling. In our view, the shockwaves from the events in the Morton County courthouse are still in the early stages of propagation. If we’re right, there will be significant winners and losers. Let’s partition between them and anticipate how things might unfold from here.