https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/25/greenpeace-good-riddance/
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A recent North Dakota court ruling could bankrupt Greenpeace. America should be so lucky. Greenpeace is neither “green” nor about “peace.” Instead, it has adopted the red of environmental extremism and an aggressive, confrontational posture against all opposing its radical agenda.
Recently, a North Dakota jury determined that Greenpeace (including its affiliates (Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA, and Greenpeace Fund Inc.) must pay $660 million in damages for protesting and attempting to stop pipeline construction by Dallas-based Energy Transfer. The pipeline company had accused Greenpeace of “defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts.”
Greenpeace USA was found liable on all counts, while the other entities were held liable for some. The almost-$700 million in damages will be apportioned among the Greenpeace entities.
According to an AP story, “Greenpeace said earlier that a large award to the pipeline company would threaten to bankrupt the environmental group.” How big a dent a $660 million verdict would put in the enviro’s budget can be gleaned from the fact that in 2023, Greenpeace USA had approximately $40 million in revenue and $38 million in expenses.
The North Dakota case goes back to the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. A CBS News story on the protests stated: “…violence erupted between police, security guards and protestors several times, culminating in tear gas and water cannons being used against protestors. The camps were cleared in February of 2017. More than 140 people were arrested at the Standing Rock protests.”
Trey Cox, an attorney for Energy Transfer, alleged that Greenpeace paid outsiders to come into the area and protest, sent blockade supplies, organized or led protester training, and made untrue statements about the project to stop it.”
Greenpeace denied the charges. The North Dakota jury of nine disagreed.
The charges and verdict all belie the warm and fuzzy image of Greenpeace activists putting themselves in harm’s way between harpoons and whales. However, they are part and parcel of radical environmentalism: Red and militant.
For today’s radical environmental left, there can be no development. At least not for people because people are, after all, the Earth’s biggest problem. Beyond the Luddites of old, today’s environmentalists want us to become yesterday’s people—albeit with fewer of us, preferably.
It is telling that in a PBS story with a photo of North Dakota protestors, one is holding a sign that reads “Leave The Oil In The Ground.”
President Joe Biden’s radical anti-fossil fuel efforts (banning fossil fuels in federal buildings, curtailing offshore oil and gas drilling, targeting home appliances, forcing the adoption of electric vehicles, etc.) and the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on green initiatives under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (a misnaming that Mr. Biden himself admitted) are mere steps toward leftist utopias like the multi-trillion dollar socialist slush fund of the Green New Deal.
Co-founder and now ex-Greenpeace member Patrick Moore details his journey into Greenpeace’s heart of darkness: “Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is antiscience, antibusiness, and downright antihuman.” As Mr. Moore writes: “my Greenpeace colleagues became more extreme and intolerant of dissenting opinions from within.”
Greenpeace activists immediately sought to mischaracterize the North Dakota verdict as a censorship of free speech. What else could they say when caught red-handed in the cookie jar? There is nothing in the verdict that in any way inhibits honest (i.e., telling the truth) free speech. There is everything in the verdict about what happens—and should have long ago—about those who commit acts of violence, harassment, and property destruction.
