Charles Rotter
A North Dakota judge on Monday denied Greenpeace’s request for a new trial in the lawsuit brought by Energy Transfer, the Dallas company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. That leaves the $345 million judgment against Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace Fund Inc. and Greenpeace International standing, and Greenpeace says it will now take the case to the North Dakota Supreme Court.
The case goes back to the 2016 and 2017 protests against the pipeline and its Missouri River crossing upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. In March 2025 a Morton County jury in Mandan found the three Greenpeace entities liable and awarded Energy Transfer about $667 million, for defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and more. We covered the verdict the day it came in. Southwest Judicial District Judge James Gion cut the award to $345 million last October, and on February 27 he entered the final judgment.
Greenpeace’s motion for a new trial argued that the jury pool was biased, that Energy Transfer was allowed to put inaccurate and irrelevant evidence in front of the jury, and that the instructions and verdict form were flawed. Its lawyers wanted a retrial in Cass County, in Fargo. According to the North Dakota Monitor, Gion didn’t find the arguments persuasive, noted that every juror had sworn under oath to be impartial, and wrote that a second trial in Fargo “could lead to years of delay” for other cases there. The claimed legal errors, he said, are best left to the appeal.
Greenpeace’s own statement on the ruling runs to roughly the length of a closing argument. It calls the case “one of the biggest and most flawed trials in North Dakota’s history,” cites a pre-trial survey that it says found 97% of local residents could not be impartial, and calls the lawsuit “an attempt to rewrite the actual history of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests,” according to Greenpeace USA. Kristin Casper, general counsel for Greenpeace International, said:
Since the district court refuses to right the wrongs committed at trial, we will next appeal the many wrongly decided and unresolved errors in the case to the North Dakota Supreme Court.
Energy Transfer’s statement was shorter: the order “confirms what a North Dakota jury unanimously found after a full trial: Greenpeace is responsible for the harm it caused.”
The other front has already narrowed. Greenpeace International went to a Dutch court in 2025, accusing Energy Transfer of weaponizing the U.S. legal system against it. After a North Dakota Supreme Court decision in May, Gion in August ordered Greenpeace International to withdraw any claims in the Netherlands arguing that the North Dakota suit lacks a legal foundation, and barred it from seeking money there to offset the Morton County verdict.
This story reached us through WUWT commenter strativarius, who sent in a Morning Star report that Greenpeace International “was ordered to pay more than $660 million (£509m) in damages to a pipeline company by a US court on Wednesday,” with the observation that only the Communist daily was covering it. That Morning Star piece turns out to date from March 2025, when the verdict was widely reported. Monday’s ruling is a different matter. So far I’ve found it in the North Dakota Monitor, a short item from Dakota News Network, and Greenpeace’s own press releases. An organization that said before the verdict that a large award could bankrupt it lost its last chance to undo that award at the trial court, and most of the national press hasn’t noticed yet.
The next stop is Bismarck, where the North Dakota Supreme Court will hear the appeal.
H/T strativarius
Featured image: Dakota Access Pipeline construction in North Dakota, August 2016. Photo: Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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