Daily Caller
Lawsuit Aims To Hold Environmental Group Accountable For Pipeline Protests
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Marchers protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline
The recent spate of anti-Israel demonstrations at college campuses could cause déjà vu for North Dakotans, who endured the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016. Like many of the campus protests, the pipeline protests were funded and fueled by big outside groups that showed little concern for the damaging impacts of their actions.
Now, a lawsuit being heard this summer is designed to hold some of these groups responsible for their actions. Energy Transfer, the owner and operator of the pipeline, is suing Greenpeace and other alleged instigators for $300 million for the damages sustained by the company as a result of these protests. The lawsuit claims that these environmental activists spent months spreading false information about the pipeline project and helped fund out-of-state agitators who attacked law enforcement and damaged property during the protests.
As it relates to the North Dakota controversy, the lawsuit alleges a Greenpeace misinformation campaign began with mass emails falsely claiming that the Dakota Access Pipeline would travel across the sovereign land of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, that it would destroy “sacred Native Lands,” and was being approved without proper environmental reviews.
Energy Transfer says none of the claims made by Greenpeace were accurate. It says the pipeline does not cross any Standing Rock land, and the company had made 140 different modifications to its planned route to avoid potentially impacting any culturally important sites. An independent review by the North Dakota Historic Preservation Office later concluded the pipeline affected no historic properties.
Furthermore, the pipeline was approved after years during which multiple environmental studies and reviews were conducted. Pipelines can actually play an important role in improving environmental outcomes because there is a greater likelihood of spills and leaks from other transportation methods like railroads, trucks and barges.
The lawsuit alleges that lies spread by Greenpeace attracted thousands of protesters to North Dakota who soon formed massive encampments.
Energy Transfer claims Greenpeace also helped provide nearly a half-million dollars and additional training to another group of protesters tasked with using violence to stop or delay the pipeline. Greenpeace allegedly continued to support these activities, even organizing fundraising drives across ten cities to collect supplies for the members of the Red Warrior Society. The lawsuit alleges that, in November 2016, members of the encampment raided Energy Transfer property, then lit fires and attacked police with grenades and flares.
In the aftermath of the protests, the suit alleges Greenpeace and its allies left with millions of dollars raised from the protests and their publicity. Meanwhile, North Dakotans were left with the bill to clean-up the environmental disaster of human waste, trash, and abandoned animals left in the encampments. And while the Dakota Access Pipeline was completed, Energy Transfer claims it lost significant amounts of money due to destroyed equipment, security costs, and project delays.
Energy Transfer’s lawsuit seeks to hold Greenpeace and others accountable for these alleged actions. Protesters and the groups that fund them have rights, but so do the individuals and companies who they unfairly malign and attack. The case could be an important reminder to organizations and protesters that free speech is constitutionally protected, but inciting and funding violent actions is not.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
War Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving forward with a massive shakeup of military leadership, restructuring top commands and moving the U.S. focus away from Europe and the Middle East, according to a report out Monday.
Five sources with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post the Pentagon is set to consolidate U.S. Central Command in the Middle East, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command into a new larger combatant command, the U.S. International Command. Other commands would be similarly consolidated, reducing the total number of combatant commands from 11 to eight. The intended restructuring is designed both to reduce the number of admirals and four star generals and refocus the U.S. military on the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere, according to the sources.
The plan would be one of the most significant changes to the military’s upper echelons in decades, and the move would bring the Pentagon more directly in line with the administration’s refocusing of priorities in the recently released National Security Strategy.
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“As a matter of Department of War policy, we will not comment on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and rumored internal discussions, as well as specifics of architectural discussion or pre-decisional matters,” a War Department official told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Beyond this, any insinuation there is a divide within the Department is completely false – everyone in the Department is working to achieve the same goal under this administration.”
The Post also reports the proposal was crafted under supervision by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, at Hegseth’s request. Caine will also be sharing two alternate proposals on potential restructures.
Hegseth has been looking for ways to reduce the number of four star generals in the Armed Forces, which has roughly the same amount of generals now as during World War II.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Steve Milloy
The Paris Climate Accord was adopted 10 years ago this week. It’s been a decade of disaster that President Donald Trump is rightly trying again to end.
The stated purpose of the agreement was for countries to voluntarily cut emissions to avoid the average global temperature exceeding the (guessed at) pre-industrial temperature by 3.6°F (2°C) and preferably 2.7°F (1.5°C).
Since December 2015, the world spent an estimated $10 trillion trying to achieve the Paris goals. What has been accomplished? Instead of reducing global emissions, they have increased about 12 percent. While the increase in emissions is actually a good thing for the environment and humanity, spending $10 trillion in a failed effort to cut emissions just underscores the agreement’s waste, fraud and abuse.
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But wasting $10 trillion is only the tip of the iceberg.
The effort to cut emissions was largely based on forcing industrial countries to replace their tried-and-true fossil fuel-based energy systems with not-ready-for-prime-time wind, solar and battery-based systems. This forced transition has driven up energy costs and made energy systems less reliable. The result of that has been economy-crippling deindustrialization in former powerhouses of Germany and Britain.
And it gets worse.
European nations imagined they could reduce their carbon footprint by outsourcing their coal and natural gas needs to Russia. That outsourcing enriched Russia and made the European economy dependent on Russia for energy. That vulnerability, in turn, and a weak President Joe Biden encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
The result of that has been more than one million killed and wounded, the mass destruction of Ukraine worth more than $500 billion so far and the inestimable cost of global destabilization. Europe will have to spend hundreds of billions more on defense, and U.S. taxpayers have been forced to spend hundreds of billions on arms for Ukraine. Putin has even raised the specter of using nuclear weapons.
President Barack Obama unconstitutionally tried to impose the Paris agreement on the U.S. as an Executive agreement rather than a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. Although Trump terminated the Executive agreement during his first administration, President Joe Biden rejoined the agreement soon after taking office, pledging to double Obama’s emissions cuts pledge to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Biden’s emissions pledge was an impetus for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that allocated $1.2 trillion in spending for what Trump labeled as the Green New Scam. Although Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced that spending by about $500 billion and he is trying to reduce it further through Executive action, much of that money was used in an effort to buy the 2024 election for Democrats. The rest has been and will be used to wreck our electricity grid with dangerous, national security-compromising wind, solar and battery equipment from Communists China.
Then there’s this. At the Paris climate conference in 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stated quite clearly that emissions cuts by the U.S. and other industrial countries were meaningless and would accomplish nothing since the developing world’s emissions would be increasing.
Finally, there is the climate realism aspect to all this. After the Paris agreement was signed and despite the increase in emissions, the average global temperature declined during the years from 2016 to 2022, per NOAA data.
The super El Nino experienced during 2023-2024 caused a temporary temperature spike. La Nina conditions have now returned the average global temperature to below the 2015-2016 level, per NASA satellite data. The overarching point is that any “global warming” that occurred over the past 40 years is actually associated with the natural El Nino-La Nina cycle, not emissions.
The Paris agreement has been all pain and no gain. Moreover, there was never any need for the agreement in the first place. A big thanks to President Trump for pulling us out again.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
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