Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case

I 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.

Based on their "Meet the Committee" page, they look a bit more like they have a dog in this fight beyond simply adjudicating the case.

https://www.trialmonitors.org/meet-the-committee

Plenty of accomplished people there, but as a group "unbiased observers" isn't the first phrase that comes to mind.

related topic -- "Judge shopping" refers to the practice of litigants strategically filing lawsuits in court districts or divisions where they are likely to be assigned to a judge sympathetic to their cause, often exploiting structural quirks in the judiciary

In America, just about anything is more cridble than our "justice" system.

Well, let's not get into this left-right thing because that could go back and forth forever. Especially in the current environment.

eg - "As an outsider, why is [the jury and judge] a credible institution over the monitors?"

We should all just give the legal experts time to look over the records of what happened, and assess why. From there, a consensus will likely emerge as to what happened during and before the trial. And the justice or injustice of the matter will present itself.

But you can't have a judge say one thing and some other single expert say another, and from those pieces of information decide anything of an authoritative nature. Our institutions just don't have that type of credibility any longer. This is the consequence of credibility crises for any society's steward classes.

It was a long slide getting here, decades actually. But I think we are firmly now at the point of the "credibility collapse" portion of the "credibility crisis".

Because sometimes corruption happens.

My non-profit Analyzing the HN Posts (just created today) has verified that this is 100% real.

I've been really fascinated by Donziger for a while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger

It's a great story that documents the shifting winds of legal systems across continents.

My takeaway: there is zero consistency or absolute truth in any legal system.

"Human rights campaigners called Chevron's actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP)"

"Chevron requested that the case be tried in Ecuador and, in 2002, the US court dismissed the plaintiffs case based on forum non conveniens and ruled that Ecuador had jurisdiction. The US court exacted a promise from Chevron that it would accept the decision of the Ecuadorian courts."

"A provincial Ecuadorean court found Chevron guilty in 2011 and awarded the plaintiffs $18 billion in damages. The decision was affirmed by three appellate courts including Ecuador's highest court, the National Court of Justice, although the damages were reduced to $9.5 billion."

But now, *Ecuador must pay Chevron* for damages:

"In 2018, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuador was marked by fraud and corruption and "should not be recognised or enforced by the courts of other States." The amount Ecuador must pay to Chevron to compensate for damages is yet to be determined. The panel also stated that the corruption was limited to one judge, not the entire Ecuadorean legal system."

> they're like 90% left-wing activists

I'm not sure that's an accurate description. Are "Human Rights" inherently left-wing? Is environmental protection inherently left-wing? Is political corruption inherently right wing?

This is of legal experts each with 30+ years of experience in the fields with which this trial is concerned (environmentalism, corruption, humans rights abuses).

> 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.

I don't understand the distinction you're making here. Isn't there being a high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement literally a principle of modern first amendment law (Brandenburg etc)?

> 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.

Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.

> The 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

Decades and centuries from now our descendants will be dealing with the consequences of the destroyed climate and wonder why we punished the only people who tried to do something about it while justifying it by "the laws".

Direct action is literally their policy

Rough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.

A 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.

That 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.

> SLAPP as in Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.

Unfortunately North Dakota is one of the minority of states without anti-SLAPP laws.

https://www.the-case.eu/latest/number-of-slapps-in-europe-co...

Countries 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.

International orgs usually need a company incorporated in every country they're working in. You need it to pay employees, for instance.

You'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.

We 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.

You 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.

It may well not exist any more under the financial burden of this sentence.

Does 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?

this 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.

Unlike oil companies who would of course never do such a thing.

> 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".

Jury 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.

Looking 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-SO...

Yet 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

In my view the best way to get this sort of stuff banned is to start using it yourself.

It’s only illegal if they don’t get away with it. Most get away with it in corporate America. If bad actors are going to push the bounds of the legal framework, good actors should as well when the rules don’t matter. Rule of “Fuck you make me.” To improve odds of success, one could operate from a position of being judgement proof, organizing corporate and legal entities accordingly from a charging perspective. Laws are not objective, it’s all interpretative dance. Know how to dance for the performance you choose to participate in.

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The Harvard educated doctor, magna cum laude, with a long history of fighting for a better America for all Americans.

The Jewish lady who was smeared as a Russian agent because she was at a diplomatic dinner that Putin also attended.

The woman who challenged election results in 2016, only for the response to be to make it harder to question election results (and that certainly never blew-back on all of us).

The lady who was then put under Senate investigation for two years over the so-called collusion with Russia which turned up precisely zero evidence.

Who put up the single best fight against two entrenched pro-genocide parties of anyone else in America's 350 million people.

The 2024 candidate with the highest vote to campaign funds ratio of any candidate by a factor of about ten despite having a tiny fraction of the election coverage.

What exactly are you saying the comparison is here? That Americans tend to cheer for the villains and boo the heroes just because the media tells them to?

This 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.

Mossad is trafficking children to billionaires for blackmail material, and it's just led directly to a war on Iran because the president of the US is in CSAM.

No conspiracy is too cynical. If you can think of it, they can think of it.

I had a similar experience with the US EPA while in undergrad. It was a shorter experience, but it really changed my view of the organization.

I think our society would be better off if everybody did less incitement in their political dialogue. It's become all too common for political discourse to become unhinged. So in that sense, I think this precedent is also fine.

What does setting things on fire have to do with freedom of speech?

won't someone think of the property??!?

I think that’s half right. We are absolutely horrendous to natives around here. But that’s not why Greenpeace got involved, nor why most of the left cares about this issue.

If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.

This is a complete load of shit. Oil is trucked back and forth over those roads all day and night, and that has a much higher leakage rate than a pipeline. NIMBYs never come out and say they just don't want something built. They always have some bullshit excuse like this.

No, restricting supply when it exists just turns people paying the higher prices against you. When the supply restrictions are in fundamentals it can work for you. When supply restrictions are on something few people care about it can work for you. However the majority of people (particularly in ND) drive and feel the cost of gas - often they feel these costs even more than they really affect the budget because they are visible every time you buy it in ways the things that have a larger effect on their budget are not.

If you want to encourage sustainable energy you need to make that your focus. Make it cheaper. Ignore oil and fight laws that make it harder to build sustainable energy. ND has great wind potential (they get 40% of their electric from wind already), but it could be better (they have a small population - which means they can export wind energy to Minnesota or if we build transmission lines even farther).

When you focus on raising oil prices you ensure that your side gets voted out in the next election and your gains are undone. When you focus on building renewable energy you get something that can stay. (Just don't build only on the white house as that can be quickly removed - build everywhere so removal is expensive)

Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set across all supply sources. Restricting its movement from Canada to the US doesn’t actually change the price much at all. It just makes the supply more vulnerable to disruption. That dirty shale oil only comes out of the ground when prices are really high. Otherwise it’s not worth it. If prices are high it will come out of the ground and get burned. The only question is where and who has access to it.

Strange take. What does that mean? Give up because we can’t do anything - “it’s already too late”? So burn all the oil because YOLO?

Or maybe those people drawing hard lines in the sand were exaggerating to drive urgency and get attention? Sometimes people whose stated goals you agree with say and do things which are wrong.