The scene outside the county courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota, where a jury held Greenpeace liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages over its support of sometimes violent protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
A North Dakota jury on Wednesday found environmental activist group Greenpeace liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for its activities related to protests of construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Dallas-based Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace over the sometimes violent protests that delayed construction of the pipeline by five months, costing the company lost profits and shareholder value.
A trial over the civil lawsuit began in February and concluded Wednesday, on the second day of deliberations.
Energy Transfer subsidiary Dakota Access LLC installed the roughly 1,200-mile pipeline running from North Dakota to Illinois in 2016 and 2017. In April 2016, a small group of Sioux set up Sacred Stone Camp, a camp to protest the installation of the pipeline under the river on unceded treaty land for fear that the pipeline could leak and contaminate the river and water supply. They also said the pipeline would disrupt sacred burial grounds and other culturally relevant sites.
With funding and other support from environmental activist group Greenpeace and others, the protest grew and eventually attracted international media attention, especially when clashes with law enforcement became violent. Over 100,000 people descended on rural North Dakota in less than a year, many from other states and possibly some from abroad, according to local residents.
Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace, blaming it for the escalation of the protests that delayed completion of the project by five months. The company says the delay cost them lost profits and shareholder value. It sued Greenpeace for $300 million.
Greenpeace maintained its primary involvement in the protests was sending indigenous nonviolent direct action trainers, camping supplies and a biodiesel-powered solar truck to the site and that the lawsuit against it was an attack on First Amendment rights.
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Joint statement: Premier Smith, Minister Jean respond to Build Canada Now letter
Premier Danielle Smith and Minister of Energy and Minerals Brian Jean issued the following statement on industry group “Build Canada Now” calling on federal party leaders to call an energy crisis and prioritize energy projects:
“Alberta’s energy sector has long been the economic engine of Canada and has never been more critical to Canadian sovereignty and prosperity.
“During the last decade of Liberal-NDP government, multiple destructive energy policies have resulted in more than $280 billion dollars in projects being delayed, cancelled or shut in by the proponents. These are projects that would have created tens of thousands of jobs, generated hundreds of billions in government revenues, secured energy security for Eastern Canada and made our nation less dependent on the United States.
“Ottawa’s elected eco-extremists have done everything they can to keep our oil and gas in the ground – that has to change now.
“We wholeheartedly support the call by Canada’s energy business leaders to find a new way of getting major projects built. Over the last couple of months, we have seen the discussion around our oil and gas shifting across the country, and these industry leaders have captured this spirit perfectly in their letter to the federal party leaders.
“The world is desperately looking for predictable, affordable and accessible energy. Alberta has one of the largest oil and gas deposits on the planet, including by far the largest of any free and democratic nation. Our recently released study on Alberta’s oil and gas reserves found 1.36 quadrillion cubic feet of gas and 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, of which more than 130 trillion cubic feet of gas and 167 billion barrels of oil are recoverable with today’s technology.
“To leave this treasured resource in the ground would be an outright betrayal of current and future generations of Canadians. And yet, that has been the mantra of the Liberal-NDP government for the last decade.
“The new prime minister needs to call an election immediately so the next government can begin to undo the tremendous damage the previous federal government has done to this country, and most especially, to Alberta.”
The Biden administration deliberately buried a final draft version of a study that would have undermined its January 2024 decision to pause approvals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, according to four Department of Energy (DOE) sources.
Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and former President Joe Biden announced the LNG freeze in January 2024, stating that it would remain in place until the DOE could conduct a fresh study of the climate and economic impacts of LNG export growth. The Biden DOE finalized a draft of the study in 2023 and subsequently buried it because the initial version’s findings would have contradicted the administration’s rationale for the LNG freeze, according to four sources inside the Trump DOE granted anonymity by the Daily Caller News Foundation to freely discuss a sensitive matter.
“The Energy Department has learned that former Secretary Granholm and the Biden White House intentionally buried a lot of data and released a skewed study to discredit the benefits of American LNG,” one DOE source told the DCNF. “They were prioritizing their own political ambitions over the interests of the American people, and the administration intentionally deceived the American public to advance an agenda that harmed American energy security, the environment and American lives.”
The Biden DOE had essentially completed the final draft version of the LNG impacts study by the end of September 2023, and that version was ready to be presented to top Biden officials shortly thereafter, Trump DOE sources told the DCNF. That particular iteration of the study, DOE sources told the DCNF, found that increasing U.S. LNG exports would actually bring about a reduction in global emissions relative to other scenarios.
That particular finding is at odds with Granholm’s analysis of the final version of the study released to the public in December 2024, in which she argued that any increase in LNG exports will result in higher global greenhouse gas emissions.
At the end of September 2023, a Biden administration official left a comment on the final draft version that instructed others to halt work on it until further notice, despite other language in the document stating that the final version was to be published sometime around the end of September 2023, Trump DOE sources told the DCNF. That version of the study was never released publicly, and the Biden DOE considered it to be a “working document” given that the agency subsequently categorized it as part of an internal deliberative process, according to DOE sources.
Additionally, the Biden DOE appears to have deleted numerous pages that appeared in the September 2023 draft version from what became the final version of the report released to the public at the end of 2024, the Trump DOE sources told the DCNF.
While the September 2023 and December 2024 versions of the paper bear the same name, the final version released to the public did not include a specific type of analysis of LNG exports known as the consideration of market effects, Trump DOE sources told the DCNF. That particular analysis — included in the buried September 2023 version of the study, but not the final product — found that U.S. LNG exports would bring down global emissions by displacing more polluting sources of energy abroad, and its absence from the December 2024 version allowed the Biden DOE to skew the final report’s findings against increasing LNG exports.
The evidence showing that the Biden administration buried the initial, politically inconvenient version of the study and misled the American public in the process will soon be transmitted to Congress and to the public, DOE sources told the DCNF.
Granholm and Biden each made statements after the pause was announced implying that the administration was freezing LNG export approvals to pursue answers that Trump DOE sources say had already been found, and that Biden officials chose to ignore. Specifically, both Biden and Granholm suggested that increased LNG exports would be a net negative for the global climate, with Granholm definitively saying as much after the final study was released to the public in December 2024.
“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment. This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time,” Biden said in a statement the day the pause was announced. “While MAGA Republicans willfully deny the urgency of the climate crisis, condemning the American people to a dangerous future, my Administration will not be complacent. We will not cede to special interests.”
Notably, House Speaker Mike Johnson recalled to The Free Press in January 2025 that Biden “genuinely didn’t know what he had signed” when he asked the president about the decision to freeze LNG approvals in January 2024, with the Republican adding that he left that meeting with the impression that Biden was not actually running the country in practice.
The DOE stated that it would “initiate” a review to determine whether increasing LNG exports is in the public interest in its statement on Jan. 26, 2024, the day the pause was announced.
Granholm claimed that the final version of the study released to the public in December 2024 demonstrates that “in every scenario, increases in LNG exports would lead to increases in global net emissions,” and that “a business-as-usual approach is neither sustainable nor advisable.” When the pause was first announced in January 2024, Granholm said in a statement that the review “will ensure that DOE remains a responsible actor using the most up-to-date economic and environmental analyses.”
“At the time Granholm said that, they were literally hiding from the public the most up-to-date economic and environmental analyses available because it contradicted the very ban that they were trying to institute. They knew the facts well before they created a report that cherry picked the data,” a Trump DOE source told the DCNF. “When you look at what they hid and what they were saying at the same time, it becomes very clear that they weren’t interested in following the science to make decisions in the best interest of the American people. They were interested in making decisions that benefited them politically, and manipulating the science by whatever means necessary.”
