Greenpeace USA owes hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to the oil pipeline company Energy Transfer and is facing bankruptcy. It wreaked havoc with Energy Transfer’s operation on the Keystone pipeline and thought it could get away with it like it had a thousand times before. Now, it is time to neuter this cat. Hell, it’s time to neuter all the cats and set the environmental movement back on its heels so that it never recovers. I have one fear though. Corporate executives are weak. They go soft and settle. Will Energy Transfer follow suit?

Politico’s E&E News reported:

There had been ‘discussion and an opening for settlement’ in that case, Willem van Rijn, who served as Greenpeace USA’s chief operating officer until April 2024, said last year in an interview.

[Former Greenpeace USA’s Executive Director] Ebony Twilley Martin urged the group to ‘settle for a minor amount of money so that we could fight another day,’ van Rijn said. The ‘board not only disagreed, the board vehemently disagreed with the direction she was willing to take,’ he said, calling the board’s response a ‘serious overreach’ to ‘muzzle’ its leader.

So, there was discussion and an opening for a settlement in the case, but the Greenpeace board torpedoed it. They want to go down fighting and so they will. This is just how cocky one can get when one has never been seriously opposed. If by misfortune one of their members had been harpooned while trying to save a whale, they might be a little more cautious today.

I am intently watching events unfold in this case, but so are environmental groups. They know what bad actors they have been, but they thought their Gandhi-like image would save them — apparently not in the minds of midwestern juries.

Greenpeace states the following on its website, 

This case could establish dangerous new legal precedents that could hold any participant at protests responsible for the actions of others at those protests, chilling free speech in the U.S. and beyond…Simply put, our entire movement’s future could be in jeopardy.

They’re getting all free speech-y now, saying they’re not responsible for the actions of a few bad apples. Well, leaving aside the fact that most of them are bad apples, if you are out riding with your drinking buddies and one of them decides to rob a liquor store, you are going to share some responsibility for his actions.

Greenpeace now says it must go on a diet and streamline its operations. Greenpeace Inc.’s revenue was about $40 million in fiscal 2023, according to its most recent publicly available tax filing. The affiliated Greenpeace Fund reported revenue of about $22 million in fiscal 2023. $62 million buys a lot of sushi (no whales or dolphins please). What do they do with all that money? I am not accusing them of stashing it away in mansions that they purchased. Former Greenpeace USA Executive Director, Ebony Twilley Martin, is not as brazen as BLM founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, but I would hazard to guess that some of that $62 million found its way toward funding corporate retreats in the Virgin Islands.

It seems like the SS Greenpeace is harpooned at last.

Image generated by ChatGPT.