How Greenpeace Lost a $667 Million Trial — But Saved Its Soul

The environmental group sticking to its principles should serve as model for activism under the second Trump administration

Last month, a North Dakota jury found the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace liable for its role in the 2016 Standing Rock protests, awarding fossil fuel giant Energy Transfer $667 million in damages.

It was the latest turn in a nine-year legal odyssey that started with Energy Transfer alleging Greenpeace secretly orchestrated the protests through a campaign of “misinformation” and “eco-terrorism,” and ended, for now, with North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer saying, “This is what justice looks like in America.”

This is what justice looks like in America — a show trial filled with billionaire fantasy grievances against an imaginary enemy — and it is deeply unfair. 

Greenpeace contended that its support for the water protectors at Standing Rock was in line with its values — over 50 years of non-violent activism — and none of the evidence Energy Transfer presented contradicted that.

None of the evidence at trial showed Greenpeace staff involved in violence or property destruction, or how tweets or email blasts from Greenpeace caused permitting delays or financial divestment. It was a vibes-based decision, and the Greenpeace vibes in North Dakota are, to put it mildly, bad.

But that’s not the whole story.

This wasn’t just a ritualistic killing of a non-profit. It was a test of values, of strategy, and of solidarity for an organization faced with existential risk brought on by the oligarchy.

In a moment where many large legacy institutions like Columbia University, The Washington Post, and various high-profile law firms are recalculating risk and rationalizing complicity with the aspiring autocrats, Greenpeace chose to stand by its allies.

Greenpeace didn’t cave to settlement offers that would have required it to betray Indigenous communities and equivocate about the Dakota Access Pipeline‘s impact. Even during the trial, when things were looking bleak, the organization didn’t shift blame onto smaller partners to save itself. In the end, Greenpeace stayed true to its values. These include the movement’s Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing — which emphasize inclusivity, bottom-up organizing, and mutual solidarity — as well as Greenpeace USA’s own Indigenous Peoples’ Policy, a commitment to respecting the leadership and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples.

Greenpeace lost a trial, but it kept its soul.

Greenpeace as an ally organization has not gotten everything right over the years — not by a long shot. Critics have called out its “Big Green” top-down tendencies, and in particular Greenpeace’s love of the limelight, which can often overshadow local organizing, or even take credit for it.

But one thing Greenpeace in the U.S. has consistently brought to the table in the past two decades is an institutional commitment to duty of care — a promise that if you join Greenpeace in taking a risk in the name of justice, the organization will do its best to share responsibility.

At its core, duty of care in organizations like Greenpeace is a comprehensive commitment to the physical, legal, and emotional well-being of activists and community partners. It’s not simply about sharing petitions and raising awareness but about creating a holistic safety net that protects those who take risks for a larger cause.

Duty of care is fundamentally about creating a culture of group responsibility. It transforms activism from individual heroics to a collective movement where no one is left behind. 

This duty means making hard, high-stakes decisions in alignment with the values and safety of the broader movement, even when there’s a chance those decisions might mean more legal or financial risk. Or even the end of the organization itself.

Throughout the nine years of this lawsuit, Greenpeace maintained its ethic of care, supporting its own activists in the field, as well as partners, providing legal protection and reputational hits when necessary. As part of the larger concept of duty of care, Greenpeace plans for risk, avoids it whenever possible, and shares it when it can’t be avoided. This duty of care includes not passing consequences on to more vulnerable partners, even when, in this case, it meant potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.

Greenpeace understood that standing with Standing Rock meant being accountable for what could follow, even if what followed was legal harassment, internal conflict, and potential bankruptcy. That’s what solidarity actually looks like: showing up even when showing up means risking it all.

This isn’t just a principled choice — it’s a movement strategy. Solidarity and duty of care build the connective tissue that lets movements survive legal repression, state violence, and corporate disinformation. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism and corporate lawfare, these values are more than noble. They are necessary.

Which brings us back to this case.

For nine years, Energy Transfer’s strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, drained Greenpeace’s time, money, morale, and momentum. It created internal fractures and chilled bold action. And yet, even as things got legally terrifying and rumors swirled about potential off-ramps, Greenpeace refused to sell out its partners.

The most crucial moment came when, at some point before the case went to trial, Energy Transfer floated the idea of a settlement.

The details are hazy, and no one on either side will confirm the specifics, but the gist was that for substantially less than $667 million, Energy Transfer would be willing to drop the suit if Greenpeace would do some version of the following: agree with Energy Transfer’s version of what is and what is not tribal land with cultural significance; publicly admit some of the water protectors were responsible for the violence at Standing Rock; and state on the record that core pieces of the Dakota Access Pipeline were safe, or, at least, that it hadn’t up until that point leaked into the water supply.

In the end, there was no settlement. The case went to trial. And Greenpeace lost.

While there will likely be an appeal, Greenpeace doesn’t have anything close to the $667 million the jury asked them to pay.

Of course, the case was never about the money. Energy Transfer’s market cap, even now, is $55 billion. What’s another $667 million to them? This SLAPP suit was about wasting time, sowing division, exacerbating any tensions between internal and external factions, and isolating targets. It was about making solidarity scary.

Which is what happened.

The Energy Transfer SLAPP consumed Greenpeace’s time, resources, and energy for nearly a decade. As the suit moved through the legal system, Greenpeace burrowed deeper and deeper into a bunker mentality. Fear and second-guessing crept in. Staff morale plummeted. Greenpeace’s traditional tactics — canvassing outside grocery stores, bird-dogging centrist Democrats, stunting outside corporate HQs — failed to find purchase. Public financial documents showed that from 2017 to 2023, Greenpeace started taking bigger and bigger swings to seem relevant — but nothing got the same kind of attention as saving the whales, the Arctic, or the rainforest did. After years of lean operations and tight financial control, Greenpeace’s liabilities more than tripled. Meanwhile, the right-wing interests increasingly and effectively defined activist organizations in the public’s imagination not as grassroots communities but as elite bureaucracies — arms of a Georgetown-to-Berkeley nonprofit-industrial complex, a cartel of coastal postgraduate resistors with 401ks and slick PR consultants, paid protestors disconnected from everyday struggles.

The lawsuit marched on, seemingly still just a nuisance case that would eventually die of its own accord, until in 2024 it suddenly seemed like it would actually go to trial. Staffers had to turn their phones and Slack chats over to lawyers. They were deposed. A culture of internal distrust and risk aversion turned solidarity into, at times, every activist for themselves.

That’s the real danger: not the money, but the precedent — that standing in solidarity can bankrupt you, that risk-sharing is a liability that it’s smarter to duck, deflect, or disavow. But Greenpeace didn’t.

We don’t yet know how Greenpeace will survive this verdict. The damages are absurd — more symbolic than collectible. But this SLAPP suit worked as intended. It isolated Greenpeace, sowed distrust, and scared others into silence. Still, the solidarity held. Which matters as much, if not more, than the money. Because movements need institutions willing to bear weight. They need organizations that won’t flinch when the state or corporate power comes knocking. They need infrastructure that doesn’t evaporate at the first sign of real risk.

In that way, Greenpeace has modeled a kind of resistance we will need more of in the next four years, at least. And even if this moment marks the end of Greenpeace U.S. as we’ve known it, let it also be the beginning of a broader commitment across the movement: that duty of care is not just a bullet point in a Google doc. It’s a principle. It’s a strategy. And it’s the heart of solidarity.

Cover photo:  Dakota Access Pipeline water protectors faced-off with various law enforcement agencies on the day the camp was slated to be raided.