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Fossil fuel companies and trade groups are using essential pipeline safety legislation to further criminalize pipeline protests.

Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews.

*This story is being co-published with The Lever.

At the urging of their fossil fuel donors, lawmakers are quietly working to massively expand criminal penalties against people who protest pipelines as part of negotiations over essential new federal pipeline safety regulations.

Congress is negotiating the pipeline safety legislation, a reauthorization of the Pipeline Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration program, in the wake of disastrous carbon dioxide pipeline leaks that have endangered nearby communities, stumped emergency responders, and left residents with health issues for years to come. In total, 124 new oil, gas, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide pipelines have been announced or are in the preconstruction or construction phase in the U.S., according to data from fossil fuel infrastructure tracker Oil and Gas Watch.

The federal penalty for damaging or destroying interstate pipelines is already a felony charge mandating up to 20 years in prison. But the industry’s proposed additions, described in executives’ congressional testimony and policy briefs posted online, would widen the definition of and punishment for “attacks” on pipelines using vague language that could implicate a far broader set of activities used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. Such language has already begun to make its way into the legislative effort to reauthorize the pipeline safety administration as Congress decides the agency’s funding and legislative mandates for the next few years.

According to a policy brief on “2023 Pipeline Safety Reauthorization Legislative Priorities” published last year by the American Petroleum Institute — a major trade group representing oil and gas companies — new pipeline safety legislation should “fill gaps in current law” with “additional measures covering disruption of service and attacks on construction sites.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, approved in March, would add “impairing the operation of” interstate pipelines, “damaging or destroying such a facility under construction,” and even “attempting or conspiring” to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

It’s unclear what “impairing the operation of” a pipeline could entail. If interpreted broadly, climate advocates say such provisions could send activists to prison for exercising their free speech rights.

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s chair, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash..), has received nearly $289,000 from the oil and gas industry for the 2024 election cycle and is currently number 12 on a list of the top 20 recipients from the industry this year. Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who is also on the committee, is the top recipient on that list, having received more than $579,000.

The expanded criminal-penalty language in the pipeline safety agency’s reauthorization bill comes on the heels of another committee’s version of the legislation, which would also increase penalties for pipeline disruptions.

The pipeline safety agency’s reauthorization accompanies new safety rules now being considered as a long-awaited federal agency response to a devastating carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the village of Satartia, Mississippi, which sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with “zombie-like” conditions in 2020. That disaster, along with a leak at an Exxon-owned carbon dioxide pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, this April, has rekindled concerns over the risks that pipelines can pose to public health and safety.

As The Lever and ExxonKnews reported in April, Big Oil is lobbying to limit the scope of those rules in order to expedite the construction of carbon capture and storage infrastructure, since it stands to benefit from the work thanks to incentives passed under the Biden administration.

Now, advocates fear, the industry is trying to capitalize on the effort to increase pipeline safety protections in order to criminalize the actions of those who speak out against its plans to build more pipeline infrastructure.

“What rights do these corporations have to come through our communities and wreak havoc and not be held accountable for anything they do?” said Anne White Hat, a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe who helped lead Indigenous resistance to the Bayou Bridge oil pipeline in Louisiana. By criminalizing protest, she said, “they are able to work with impunity.”

In written testimony from a January hearing by the committee overseeing the pipeline safety program reauthorization, American Petroleum Institute lobbyists commended the reauthorization bill for “strengthen[ing] protections for pipeline infrastructure by criminalizing activities that impair the operation or construction of facilities, or cause damage that could result in harm to people, the environment and the pipeline itself.”

The American Petroleum Institute donated $7,500 to Rodgers, and thousands more to other Energy and Commerce Committee members including Reps Pfluger, Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Marc Veasey (D-Texas), and Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), this year. The lawmakers' offices and the American Petroleum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Tim Donaghy, senior research specialist at the environmental activist group Greenpeace, said his organization is concerned that “vague and flawed language that increases criminal penalties could be abused to crack down on peaceful, constitutionally-protected protest,” which has “long been instrumental to climate, environmental justice, and civil rights victories in the United States and globally.”

Pipeline protests can look like sit-ins, banner drops, marches, a Willie Nelson concert, or planting sacred corn in the path of construction.

“Are they talking about people in a region where they don’t want the pipeline coming through their property doing a sit-in or something like that?” Donaghy asked. “Would that be considered an attack on a construction site by a prosecutor who wanted to stretch the definition a little bit?”

“A Game Of Safety Theater”

Advocates say the move is meant to cut off any remaining avenues for dissent. In recent years, fossil fuel companies have pushed for bills to criminalize pipeline protests at the state level; worked with police, private security firms, and the FBI to surveil and crack down on activists; and even filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits against protesters accusing them of defamation and conspiracy.

Mark Hefflinger, communications and digital director at Bold Nebraska, an advocacy group that works with Tribal Nations, farmers, and ranchers to protect land and water rights, said the industry’s response to public outcry about the real safety concerns caused by fossil fuel infrastructure has been to play “a game of safety theater.” That means using “fear tactics” to paint protesters as dangerous criminals, making it easier for them to rush their projects through construction without community consent.

“I think these companies are looking to stack the deck as much as they can,” he said. “Having seen these projects first hand, it’s very distressing and alarming.”

It’s not the first time the fossil fuel industry has tried to pass anti-protest policies through Pipeline Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration reauthorization bills. In 2019, the Association of Oil Pipelines — a lobbying group now known as the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association — provided similar proposed language to legislators that was reportedly considered by members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Those provisions didn’t pass, but the effort has reemerged. Since 2020, oil, gas, and utility trade associations and companies, including the American Gas Association, Black Hills, CMS Energy, and Puget Sound Energy, have disclosed lobbying on both “Attacks and Physical Threats to Pipeline Infrastructure” and the Pipeline Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration reauthorization bills.

In a March 2023 hearing of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the CEO of the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, Andrew Black, testified that “Congress should close [the] loophole in criminal penalties for pipeline attacks that are dangerous but do not result in damage.” The group gave $2,500 to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), this year. Graves’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

That committee’s draft bill, approved in December, would add a prison sentence of up to 10 years for “causing a defect in or disrupting operation of pipeline infrastructure” by manipulating valves or otherwise physically damaging the pipeline. The bill would also add “carbon dioxide facilit[ies]” to infrastructure whose damage or destruction could result in a 20-year prison sentence.

“Current federal pipeline safety law does not penalize violent attacks on pipeline construction sites or dangerous but not damaging tampering with operating pipeline equipment, such as valve turning,” said John Stoody, vice president of government and public relations at the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, in an email. “LEPA supports 1^st amendment rights to protest, but opposes dangerous or violent activities that can harm protesters and the surrounding public.”

The House is now working to reconcile reauthorization bills from the two committees before passing draft legislation to the Senate.

“It’s a little frustrating to see the industry focus on this particular issue as a cause of failures when nearly all failures on pipelines are preventable failures under the operators’ control,” said Bill Caram, executive director of advocacy group Pipeline Safety Trust. While he emphasized that his organization does not support any activity that could compromise the integrity of a pipeline and endanger communities, including valve turning, Caram noted that “damaging equipment is already illegal, so I’m not sure what the need is.”

A Larger Strategy To Silence Critics

The industry has backed a legislative push to punish and silence its critics since major resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline from 2011 through 2014 and to the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017 united communities across political and cultural divides and spurred an indigenous-led movement of water protectors.

“They moved to pass these bills to basically prevent it from happening again,” Donaghy said.

Since 2017, oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, Koch Industries, and Enbridge have spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign donations to state legislators to push laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure. Those laws now apply to about 60 percent of all U.S. oil and gas operations, a report from Greenpeace found. Much of the legislation, primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called “critical infrastructure.”

Anne White Hat found herself facing up to 10 years in prison after she was arrested for two counts of felony trespassing in September 2018 under one such law, which had just taken effect in Louisiana following pressure from oil and gas lobbyists.

She was one of four Native women who founded a resistance camp called L’eau Est La Vie, which was organizing nonviolent direct actions in protest of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline — a now-operating 163-mile pipeline owned by Energy Transfer that transports crude oil throughout the state. The protests ranged from a rendition of “Crawfish the Musical” on the construction site to protesters locking themselves to pipeline equipment to tree sits in the centuries-old cypresses the company planned to tear down.

The Bayou Bridge pipeline is the tail end of the Dakota Access route — White Hat had already joined her relatives to participate in the resistance camp at Standing Rock in North Dakota. “I felt like it was a righteous cause, not to let them comfortably continue to threaten the waters of Indigenous First Nations,” she said. “I was inspired from the work up North and just couldn’t let them continue down here unanswered and unchecked.”

White Hat had just finished leading a prayer ceremony when she was arrested at a boat ramp miles from the pipeline construction site. She was hauled into a sheriff deputy’s car with two other women and driven through tall sugar cane fields on the way to jail.

“It was terrifying,” said White Hat. “We’re way out in the middle of nowhere. I was like, ‘Is this the point where I actually disappear?’”

Investigative journalist Karen Savage was arrested that day, too — her second arrest under felony trespass charges as she reported on the Bayou Bridge protests. She was one of the only reporters to travel to the Atchafalaya Basin swamp, where the pipeline was being constructed.

By the time the water protectors got to the swamp, Savage said, they “had done everything — they went to public meetings, they had petitions, they wrote letters, they tried to meet with the governor — they did everything they tell you in school, to participate and use your civil obligation in your community.” Despite their best efforts in one of the most oil- and gas-friendly states in the country, said Savage, “nobody was listening.”

As Savage’s reporting revealed, the off-duty Louisiana law enforcement who began violently arresting protesters after the new law was enforced were working side jobs for the pipeline company.

“I would’ve similarly documented whatever the sheriff’s deputies and Energy Transfer had planned that day — had I not been handcuffed in the back of a deputy’s squad car,” Savage wrote about her arrest.

While Energy Transfer paid local officials to arrest protesters, it was quietly breaking the law itself. Energy Transfer was later found guilty of trespassing on private property by working on land it didn’t have permission to build on, but it was allowed to continue construction with only a $450 fine. The sixteen water protectors who were arrested and charged with felonies under the state’s new law had permission from some landowners to protest — and were even asked to help them defend their land.

In 2021, a local district attorney dropped the water protectors’ charges, along with Savage’s.

Like the proposed measures oil companies are now pushing at the federal level, Louisiana’s state law was “so vaguely written that [officials] have no idea when they should arrest somebody or when someone is trespassing,” Savage said. “With everything so loosely open to individual interpretation, it just really really opens people up to abuses of their First Amendment rights.”

In 2019, Savage, White Hat, other water protectors, and two advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the sheriff, district attorney, and state attorney general, arguing Louisiana’s critical infrastructure law violates their First Amendment rights. That lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. district judge in March; litigants who were directly affected by the law, including Savage and White Hat, have appealed the district court’s decision.

White Hat said she never intended to get arrested, and essentially stopped protesting after it happened.

“I have children to take care of,” she said. “I couldn’t risk it.”

“The Writing On the Wall”

According to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, more than 300 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 45 states since 2017, and 21 states have passed such bills into law.

Since then, pipeline protests have seen massive waves of arrests; during the construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline between December 2020 and September 2021, more than a thousand people in Minnesota were arrested for protest. Some were charged with felonies — like a 54-year-old protesterwho blockaded an Enbridge pump station and was convicted with felony obstruction in 2023. Like Energy Transfer, Enbridge paid Minnesota police millions of dollars to respond to the protests.

The resistance to pipeline infrastructure continues nonetheless. Just last week, Indigenous campaigners led a rally outside the White House calling on the President and Army Corps of Engineers to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline, which carries 600,000 barrels of oil per day and still lacks a permit to cross land beneath Lake Oahe, where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe gets its drinking water.

Protestors are also still fighting construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is being built from northwest West Virginia to southern Virginia and was greenlit through the passage of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. But one of the states it runs through, West Virginia — home base of coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has long championed the pipeline — is considering a bill that would classify trespassing on fossil fuel infrastructure as an act of terrorism.

“Over the last several years, a historic level of protest and demonstration has taken place across the country, including protests against pipeline construction,” said Vera Eidelman, Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, in an email. “Rather than add tools to the government’s tool kit for silencing dissent” that would “only make it harder, costlier, and more dangerous to protest,” she wrote, “legislators should be making an effort to listen to protester’s voices, even if, and perhaps especially when, they disagree with them.”

Now, as the oil and gas industry plans a new influx of carbon dioxide pipelines for carbon capture and storage, a controversial experiment that would allow it to continue burning fossil fuels under the guise of climate solutions, advocates could be silenced when the stakes are at their highest.

“We are scraping together pennies to be able to hold a public meeting, get people to the legislature, or get people into the offices of our elected Congress people,” said Jane Patton, a Louisiana-based campaign manager at nonprofit advocacy group the Center for International Environmental Law who is fighting carbon capture plans in the state. “Yet these industries that have a ton of money are able to get this access and have their questions answered and their request fulfilled.”

Hefflinger, of Bold Nebraska, said the industry is “doing their best to try and make the standards as low as possible for operation and safety — and because of regulatory capture, it becomes a foregone conclusion.”

“You start to lose opportunities to make your voice heard in the ‘proper’ channels,” he said.

In April, the Supreme Court effectively abolished the right to organize a mass protest in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi — three states facing a massive influx of new oil and gas infrastructure, including carbon dioxide pipelines. More than 900 miles of Exxon’s newly acquired network of Denbury carbon dioxide pipelines runs through those three states.

Still, the industry will have a steep road to climb as the projects face major resistance in states nationwide — even before construction begins. In October, Texas-based Navigator CO2 Ventures canceled its plans for a 1,300-mile carbon dioxide pipeline that would have run across five midwestern states after coordinated opposition from landowners and environmentalists. The cancellation, said Hefflinger, was a “gigantic wake-up call” for the industry.

Now, said Hefflinger, they’re doubling down to silence dissent because “they’re seeing the writing on the wall.”

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over the past few years requests for respectful speech and factual information have been recast as attacks on free speech just as efforts funded by some of the country's largest corporate interests have begun to genuinely erode citizens' First Amendment rights.

If your book contract gets canceled because you help white supremacists break into the Capitol? That's an attack on free speech. A university decides not to host your talk after receiving thousands of complaints from students? Violation of the First Amendment! But the First Amendment never guaranteed reach, nor did it promise us that Americans can say whatever we like without risk of being embarrassed or mocked, trolled or even canceled. What it did promise was that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It seems like a whole lot of conservatives have misplaced their pocket Constitutions, because while they talk about being "forced" (by whom?) to use a person's preferred pronouns as an infringement on free speech, Republican state governments have been rapidly criminalizing protest. While they wring their hands about the chilling of free speech on campus because this or that talk gets canceled, states are passing book bans and universities are getting rid of their entire history departmentslest anyone utter the words "critical race theory." Harassment of those who study disinformation is way up the past year because the word has been recast as censorship. This week, for example, Rep Jim Jordan was demanding emails and meetings with leading disinformation researchers, the latest in a flurry of records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits designed to harass academics who study disinformation. Jordan and his allies are being helped in their crusade by anti-climate-action activists like Michael Shellenberger, who have their own reasons for wanting to muddy the water on what constitutes disinformation, especially as social media platforms fall under increasing pressure to tamp down on the spread of outright falsehoods. In his March testimony to the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Shellenberger—who has moved in his career from PR guy for big green groups to "firebrand" co-founder of ecomodernist thinktank the Breakthrough Institute to champion for nuclear energy to climate skeptic, gubernatorial candidate, solver of the homelessness problem (spoiler alert: he didn't solve it) and now, finally, "journalist" who claims to have broken the Twitter Files story—Shellenberger wrote:

:{:{"}::{The censorship-industrial complex pressures social media platforms to}:

censor content relating to climate change and energy. I speak from experience as someone who has been attacked by an ongoing censor-and-discredit campaign that has been waged against me since I wrote a viral article in June 2020 to announce the publication of my book, Apocalypse Never. In response to my article, multiple think tanks quickly and falsely claimed to have “debunked” its contents. Those fake debunkings became the basis for Facebook to censor my posts, even ones that don’t have to do with climate change, to this day."}:

There's a lot to unpack here. First off, it seems pretty clear that Shellenberger's move to rebrand himself as a journalist is not just about trying sit at the cool kids table—he's trying to secure what he perceives to be the greater First Amendment rights of the press. I'm sure he's probably trying to use it to get access to various public records, emails, etc for free as well (anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request, but if you're not a journalist you might be charged; even if you are a journalist it's likely you'll pay a fee to receive records, but it's generally less). Then, let's talk about how Facebook has always censored ads and sponsored posts related to climate change, for a start, as "political." I don't recall Shellenberger ever having anything to say about that. As for the debunking of his book. I started to make detailed, footnoted corrections of his book and stopped about halfway through because I had more than 50 pages worth of corrections, so it's hard to believe that all of the many debunkings of his work are false. But according to Shellenberger, it is censorship to call something inaccurate. Who's to say what's "information" or "disinformation" after all? The truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Except...we have long-standing systems for coming to collective understandings of truth. The peer-review process, for example, runs academic work through multiple rounds of review before it can be published in an academic journal. And one peer-reviewed study does not a truth make! That study needs to be challenged and replicated. Lots of other studies need to deliver the same or at least very similar results for something to venture into the domain of "fact."

These fragile men perceive any criticism of them as censorship, yet see nothing wrong with coordinated harassment campaigns against academics whose work they don't happen to like. But it's not just ridiculous and hypocritical, it's also dangerous. One of the key steps on the path to authoritarianism is to shake people's faith in experts, to blur the lines around fact, to make reality seem surreal.

The choose-your-own-truth direction that America has taken in recent years shares a lot in common with the beliefs of early colonialists there, who were by and large Calvinists, a particular type of Puritan that scoffed at the need for priests and bishops and embraced instead the idea that each individual should interpret the Bible for themselves.

As the manufactured "culture war" rages on, it provides cover for America's bend toward authoritarianism. Citizens are being jailed for peaceful protest. At Cop City,protestors were arrested—and even killed—and all:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{ 42 were charged with domestic terrorism for sitting in trees. Organizers who arranged bail funds for the arrested protestors werearrested themselves and charged with money laundering and charity fraud. All those who have been arrested in conjunction with the protest are still waiting to see whether racketeering (RICO)charges will be leveled against them for organizing a protest. Yes, those are the laws created to deal with the mob, being applied to protest.

Meanwhile, the Altanta City Council approved the facility despite countless hours of public comment in opposition to it.

Critical infrastructure laws have now been passed in 20 states, with more proposing them all the time. Domestic terrorism charges, which carry a sentencing enhancement that can land people in jail for a decade or more, have become frighteningly common for peaceful, non-violent protests. Climate protestors who put water soluble finger paint on a display case at the National Gallery were charged last week with conspiring to commit an offense against the United States. It's the most straightforward and flagrant violation of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." Anyone who's genuinely concerned about free speech as opposed to securing their own right to comfort or to expand their control of others should be very worried about it.

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alec crit infra2017 ltr to state legis?

https://www.scribd.com/document/371677094/ALEC-letter

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https://theintercept.com/**2022/09/**16/fossil-fuel-industry-climate-free-speech/

REPS. JAMIE RASKIN, D-Md., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., probably didn’t plan for their committee hearings to run at the exact same time this week, but the hearings sure were talking to each other.

In her Committee on Natural Resources hearing, Porter highlighted the role PR firms play in blocking climate policy. Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, and his selected witness, Amy Cooke, CEO of the conservative John Locke Foundation, expressed concern that preventing companies and their hired PR firms from spreading misinformation about climate change would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, chaired by Raskin, focused on free speech attacks against environmentalists, digging into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to curb citizens’ speech rights via strategic litigation and laws that criminalize protest. Taken together, the two are a perfect illustration of the industry’s First Amendment strategy: expand free speech for corporations, curb it for citizens.

raskin’s free speech hearing focused on two key tactics: the increased filing of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs— defamation suits aimed at penalizing citizens or citizen groups for exercising their First Amendment rights — and the proliferation of so-called critical infrastructure bills, which pile on fines and criminal sentences for those caught trespassing or vandalizing near pipelines, power plants, railroads, or other infrastructure. These anti-protest bills were a direct industry backlash to the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017. Starting with a law passed in Oklahoma in 2017, they proliferated with the help of the industry group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts and disseminates pro-corporate model legislation for adoption by state governments. Seventeen states now have critical infrastructure laws on the books, with several more considering proposals.

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“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace and a witness at Raskin’s hearing. “They’re tactics used by the same corporate actors to quash dissent. They’re pushing legislation to silence us, to criminalize our critiques through anti-protest bills. And they’re also filing SLAPP suits to silence dissent.”

Greenpeace has dealt with both. Greenpeace USA activists were arrested in 2019 under Texas’s felony critical infrastructure law for unfurling banners on a bridge, which temporarily blocked shipping. The goal of the action was to highlight the connection between the oil industry and climate change.

Greenpeace is engaged in active litigation in a couple of SLAPP suits too. In one, Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, sued the organization for its role in the Standing Rock protests. The suit was initially filed in federal court and invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, orRICO, a law designed to prosecute organized crime. “Energy Transfer was alleging that our advocacy work to uplift Indigenous voices at Standing Rock constituted organized crime,” Padmanabha said.

Because RICO allows for damages to be tripled if a defendant is found guilty, Greenpeace faced a $1 billion fine. Losing that suit would have had a truly chilling effect on free speech. A federal judge threw out the case, but Energy Transfer filed again in North Dakota (minus the RICO charge), a state that doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law on the books.

“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin.”

Anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants a quick way to get SLAPP suits dismissed, minimizing the time and money spent on meritless cases. Currently, 31 states and the District of Columbia have adopted anti-SLAPP statutes, which makes it fairly easy for corporate entities to go venue shopping for a court in a state without such a law. To address that gap, Raskin proposed new legislation this week to create federal anti-SLAPP protection. While some players in the fossil fuel industry may oppose Raskin’s bill, others have actually sought to avail themselves of anti-SLAPP protections. Exxon Mobil, for example, in its final attempt to thwart the fraud case against it in Massachusetts, argued that the suit was a SLAPP.

The oil company’s attorney Justin Anderson maintained that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s fraud complaint against Exxon was not valid because the company’s public statements on climate policy should be considered political opinion (“petitioning activity,” in legal parlance), not misleading advertising — even when Exxon falsely claimed that climate change wasn’t real and overstated the company’s investments in low-carbon technology.

When one judge asked why Exxon would file an anti-SLAPP complaint rather than make a First Amendment argument in court, Anderson made clear that the point was to avoid discovery, when the corporation would be asked to hand over files and make its executives available for depositions. “The anti-SLAPP statute provides a mechanism to have a case that is brought against someone for petitioning activity dismissed at the outset before burdensome discovery is imposed on the party,” he argued.

The “petitioning activity” argument is one that the industry and its allies have trotted out repeatedly, both in court and in congressional hearings like those held this week. It’s a broad interpretation of free speech rights for corporations, the very sort of protection these same companies are opposed to extending to individuals. In his testimony before Raskin’s subcommittee, Daren Bakst, a senior research fellow on environmental policy and regulation for the Heritage Foundation, said, “The chilling effects are states bringing lawsuits against people for their speech.” It’s hard to tell because he said “people,” but he meant oil companies. Which he made clear by immediately referencing “what municipalities are doing, the government is doing against these fossil fuel companies. And I also see that Massachusetts is doing.”

This view of an oil company as a person who is being silenced for simply sharing their views on climate policy is the basic argument oil companies are making in dozens of cases across the country. These cases, brought by both municipalities and states, hinge either on fraud or nuisance claims and effectively ask that fossil fuel companies pay up for delaying action on climate, which increased both the impacts of the climate crisis and the price of adapting to a warming world. In all of them, the corporate defendants make some version of a free speech argument. They maintain that their public speech about global warming differed from their internal knowledge because their public statements were “petitioning speech,” related to their political views and desires and thus, protected. The industry has been building the foundation for such an argument for about as long as it has known about climate change — since the late 1960s.

“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws.”

}:

The argument arose out of a situation not unlike the one playing out today, with war driving up prices at the pump and oil companies desperate to control public perception.

According to documents from Mobil’s corporate archive at the University of Texas at Austin, the company’s longtime PR whiz Herbert Schmertz and then-CEO, Rawleigh Warner, came up with an idea to help wrestle back control of the narrative. Using Mobil’s PR and advertising budget, they would create “idea advertising” to push the company’s take on key issues of the day and create the sense of Mobil as a citizen with a distinct personality.

They ran weekly :{advertorial:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:s in the New York Times as well as regular placements in a wide range of other publications, from the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal to Time and Fortune. Then Schmertz proposed TV and radio too. Why not?

In the early 1970s, Mobil took their TV and radio advertorials to all the big broadcast stations and only one, NBC, agreed to run them. CBS and ABC said they preferred to have their journalists cover energy issues. For Schmertz and Warner, it was a battle they had to win. What if the newspapers, or PBS, started to rethink playing nice with Mobil? In a media blitz, the two blasted CBS and ABC from every angle, in their NYT spot, on radio and TV programs, at events. Warner went to various business clubs to talk about the importance of protecting corporate free speech. Schmertz testified before Congress in 1978, urging First Amendment protection for Mobil’s ads and arguing that there was no difference between Mobil advertorials and New York Times editorials, because after all the Times was a business too.

Mobil helped rally support and funding for the first big Supreme Court case on the matter, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the precursor to Citizens United. The court ruled that corporations could spend whatever money they wanted to influence politics, overruling a Massachusetts statute that said otherwise. “If the restricted view of corporate speech taken by the Massachusetts court were accepted,” Justice Lewis A. Powell wrote, “government would have the power to deprive society of the views of corporations.”

How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content

“I don’t think people really appreciate how big of a deal that was in shifting the rules of speech in the public space,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle said. “Now, suddenly, corporations could use their budgets — which are enormous, you know, much larger than individuals — to advocate their position in the public space. … It allowed for a systematic distortion of the public space that gives corporations basically a loudspeaker to amplify their voice above everybody else’s.”

The 2010 Citizens United ruling, of course, intensified that dynamic. Whereas Bellotti allowed corporations to publicly campaign for particular ballot initiatives or candidates, Citizens United allowed political speech of any sort without disclosure of who was paying, who was actually speaking. Oil companies have been working to broaden corporate free speech rights even more in recent years, as their arguments in climate litigation and before Congress show.

“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws,” said Brulle, who has co-authored briefs in some of these cases.

Robert Kerr, who’s researched Mobil’s role in the corporate free speech movement for years, said to side with the oil companies’ arguments in these cases, the Supreme Court would have to turn its back on about a century’s worth of legal precedent. “It’s really deeply established even by some of the members of the current Supreme Court that the First Amendment will never protect expression that is fraud,” he said. “The worry now is that with this court there seems to be a majority that wants to say yes to almost any question the corporate interests raise.”

It makes sense then, that the industry and its allies would be working hard to rebrand climate denialism as simply a difference of opinion, to put some distance between greenwashing and fraud, to collectively gasp about the “chilling effect” (a phrase that came up so often in minority witness testimony this week that it’s hard to believe someone somewhere wasn’t disseminating talking points) that tackling misinformation might have on free speech. The fact that those efforts are happening alongside coordinated attempts to criminalize protest is more of the same: corporations drowning out the public.

icn 5 21

protesting in front of a private residence in Florida could soon land someone 60 days in jail and a fine of up to $500 under a bill signed into law Monday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.While the new law is in reaction to demonstrations over abortion rights, it reflects a larger effort by Republican lawmakers to limit the ways Americans are allowed to protest, which could have broad and lasting consequences for the climate movement.

The legislation, which takes effect in October, makes it a second-degree misdemeanor to protest with the intention of harassing or disturbing someone in their home. It’s the latest effort to crack down on protesters by DeSantis, who pointed to recent demonstrations outside of the homes of Supreme Court justices living in Virginia as justification for the law.

Those demonstrations came earlier this month after the leak of a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito overturning 50 years of abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade touched off a political firestorm. “Sending unruly mobs to private residences, like we have seen with the angry crowds in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, is inappropriate,” DeSantis said in a statement Monday. “This bill will provide protection to those living in residential communities and I am glad to sign it into law.”

Florida’s legislation is similar to a growing number of “anti-protest” laws being enacted by Republican legislatures across the country in recent years that impose harsh new penalties on demonstrators, including Indigenous and climate activists who are protesting fossil fuel pipelines and power plants.

Social justice and environmental advocates have increasingly turned to protest and civil disobedience as a way to call for change in response to a spate of high-profile police killings of unarmed Black people and a lack of government action on climate change. Since 2017, at least 38 states have enacted such laws, according to the Informational Center for Not-For-Profit Law. Many impose harsh penalties on protesters, including making it a felony to trespass on property where “critical infrastructure,” such as fossil fuel pipelines and power plants, are operating, ICN’s oil and gas reporter Nicholas Kusnetz reported last year.

Those bills emerged after a pair of stinging losses for the pipeline industry. Activists had used civil disobedience and mass arrests to draw attention to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access projects, and the Obama administration eventually blocked both. States’ critical infrastructure legislation raised the stakes for protesters by increasing penalties for acts like blocking access to a construction site, in many cases converting the offenses from misdemeanors to felonies. Some laws allow prosecutors to seek 10 times the original fines for any groups found to be “conspirators,” prompting concerns from civil liberties advocates and environmental groups, who fear they could be roped into trials and face steep fines for having joined with broader coalitions that include an element of civil disobedience.

Left unchallenged, some legal experts say these laws could jeopardize climate protests in particular, just as more and more environmental advocates grow frustrated by political roadblocks to climate action and turn to public demonstrations and civil disobedience out of desperation. The Biden administration has pledged to enact sweeping climate reforms, but many of those have stalled as Republicans and right-leaning Democrats continue to raise hurdles.

Last fall, demonstrations amassed around the houseboat of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat who has impeded much of President Biden’s climate agenda. In October, nearly 50 people were arrested for protesting outside the office of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, another centrist Democrat who has blocked much of Biden’s environmental efforts. And last month, more than 1,000 scientists from around the world staged demonstrations to decry a lack of action to address global warming, including several U.S. researchers who were arrested for locking their bodies to private property.

Florida’s new law should be especially concerning for climate activists, considering DeSantis’ popularity in the Republican party and his past attempts to limit free speech on progressive issues.DeSantis, who is seen as a possible contender with Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, signed an “anti-riot” protest law in 2021 that granted civil immunity to drivers who hit protesters blocking roadways. That law was later blocked by a federal judge, who said the bill was vague, overbroad and criminalizes “vast swaths of core First Amendment speech.”

“While there may be some Floridians who welcome the chilling effect that this law has on the Plaintiffs in this case,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote in his ruling, “depending on who is in power, next time it could be their ox being gored.”

Today’s Indicator

421.68 parts per million

That’s the level of daily carbon dioxide concentration that was recently detected at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, marking the highest level of atmospheric CO2 researchers have ever observed at the lab since measurements began in 1956.

3 22 aha analysis: ukraine watershed: GOP/Rt has always used national security (strict ft/macho) to beat up of Dems (soft on communism, crime etc) [tho gubmint waste fraud and abuse is never committed by pentagon or military no bid contractor corps that are huge dark $ donors], and national debt bogeyman never a problem with military spending, 2021 gave $20B more than they asked FOR?]]

gop likes to conflate national security with oil supply [tho heaven forbid we would ever go to war in Gulf twice for oil; cheney secret energy task force of FF ceos requested maps of Iranian oilfields]; US military is greatest user of oil/polluter in world aviva chomsky 3 22];

Occupy network morphed into DAPL etc Water Protectors pipeline resistance, which was effective {Fusion/Feds backed off when veterans started to show up to have their backs after the battle of Backwater Bridge] so early and major Trump donor ETP kelcy needed better tool to beat up/suppress activist, so eco-terror gets resurrected and amped up as Critical Infrastructure = nat'l security [so non-violent hippies and native Am now domestic terrorists]; also good for Press Suppression [and activist suppression thru LEGAL like make DAPL folks come back to appear in ct [mult times ?] a year later just to be postponed?]; initial try to make it OK to run over protestors stymied for a while by HH in Charlottesville [PBUH] but eventually passed in mult states?

Putin is the biggest FF CEO of all, and a fascist [originally "corporatism" under Il Dulce // Il Donald]]; ukraine invasion blamed on Greta and Biden green policy BBB; GOP EPW BS Sea Change [CRC] resurrected 3rd time that Greens took Putin $, tho debunked years ago [NottheEPA is Berman Dr Evil, also Legal/Legislative Suppression]

the old mantra was "energy independence" from unstable or even hostile oil states, but morphed into "energy dominance" during frack fight/trump era? now morphing again to energy security at least in concept with Ukraine invasion, lead to a watershed: do we recognize that war gives us one more good reason, as it we needed one, to phase out FF or do we double down/drill baby drill? API is pushing hard for latter, FOX repeating endlessly [bonus gives them cover from Putin boosting?]

300 pp bk mention koch network

“Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered”: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy Nancy MacLean

...The program offers a case study in corporate propaganda. In its bid to convince listeners that the American way of life depends on the free market – and that any move toward social democracy presents a threat – the show dramatizes argumentative and rhetorical procedures that continue to shape American political culture.

Chapter 5 by Nancy MacLean examines an important source of the strategic disinformation now rife in American public life: the Koch network of extreme right donors, allied organizations, and academic grantees. She argues that these architects of the radical transformation of our institutions and legal system have adopted the tactic of disinformation in the knowledge that the hard-core libertarian agenda was extremely unpopular, and therefore required stealth to succeed.

The chapter tells the story of how Charles Koch and his inner circle, having determined in the 1970s that changes significant enough to enable a “constitutional revolution” (in the words of the political economist James McGill Buchanan) would be needed to protect capitalism from democracy, then went about experimenting to make this a reality. In the 1980s, they first incubated ideas for misleading the public to move their agenda forward, as shown by the strategy for Social Security privatization that Buchanan recommended to Koch’s Cato Institute, and by the operations of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the network’s first astroturf – or fake grassroots – organizing effort.

Subsequent practices of active disinformation by this network, for a project that could not succeed by persuasion and organizing alone, become more comprehensible when understood as driven by a mix of messianic dogma and self-interest. Later cases include tobacco “scholarship” for hire by Buchanan’s colleagues at George Mason University to deter the public health campaign against smoking; climate science denial to stop action on global warming; promotion of the myth of mass voter fraud to leverage racism to restrict the electorate; assurances of the benefits of an Article V Constitutional Convention, restricted to a few pre-announced changes; and the use of concocted memes of violent mobs requiring restraint, in order to win passage of new legislation to criminalize protest, particularly against the fossil fuel industry.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/1F4751119C7C4693E514C249E0F0F997/9781108843058AR.pdf/The_Disinformation_Age.pdf?event-type=FTLA

drilled

fines boost $150,000 but 10x for orfanizing (not even on site) 1.5 mil$

treas state...front montana

witchita regional CoC = koch

BP, exxon, API, trade groups; koch reg to lobby ark and alabama

https://drillednews.com/another-line-3-battleground-free-speech/

We’ve covered the ongoing, fossil fuel-backed push to criminalize protest before. In 2017, Oklahoma passed the first of these bills, specifically citing the Standing Rock protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.Then American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers (AFPM), the trade group for refineries and petrochemical facilities, crafted sample legislation based on the Oklahoma bill, and pushed the American Legal Exchange Council (ALEC) to adopt it. In 2020 , the Covid-19 pandemic slowed things down a bit, but in 2021 things are speeding up. In January, Ohio passed a bill that’s been debated for years, bringing the total number of states with so-called “critical infrastructure laws” in place to 14.

What’s defined as critical infrastructure varies a bit from state to state, but pipelines are always included; penalties range, too, but across the board these laws increase both the criminal and financial penalties of protest, potentially landing protestors in jail for years with fines up to $150,000. It’s worth noting that all of these states have trespassing and property damage laws already, it’s not as though those things have been going unpunished; the new laws merely make the consequences much tougher. They also add penalties for organizers and organizing entities. In Montana, for example, a proposed bill would fine organizations up to a million dollars for being involved in protest.

All of which comes into play in Minnesota, where the fight against Line 3 is underway. There are currently six bills under consideration in the state, packaged into four legislative packages.If any of them pass, not only could protestors be facing stiffer penalties but also the organizations involved, most of them led by Native women, could find themselves slapped with large fines too.

In this interview, researcher Connor Gibson walks us through the origin of these laws, why they’re picking up steam, and what to expect this year.

[audio]

Connor Gibson: There’s only one state this year that really has a high profile pipeline protest going on, that’s Minnesota.

PBS News Hour: 30 years ago this week, the line three pipeline in northern Minnesota ruptured, spilling one point seven million gallons of crude oil into a frozen river near Grand Rapids, Minnesota. If the river had not been frozen, the oil could have seeped into the Mississippi River and contaminated drinking water for millions. Downstream protests have been ongoing to stop construction, rerouting a section of the line three pipeline, which could impact indigenous communities and local waterways.

Amy Westervelt: Hello and welcome to Drilled, I’m Amy Westervelt. You might have heard recently about the Line 3 pipeline project in Minnesota. Some people are calling it the next Standing Rock because it’s been at the center of protests for years, particularly from indigenous tribes in the area. Activist and author Winona LaDuke has been involved in that fight for seven years. Here she is talking to PBS news about it earlier this month.

Winona LaDuke: I’m a grandmother, you know, and we’re standing out there. I have six charges against me for this pipeline. And there’s a bunch of us that are facing charges for, you know, trying to be a water protector.

PBS News Hour: LaDuke and others have been part of this seven year fight opposing the project throughout the state and federal review processes.

Winona LaDuke: It is the largest tar sands pipeline in the world. This pipeline is the equivalent of 50 new coal fired power plants. So, you know, if you’re trying to save the planet, this is not the way to do it.

Amy Westervelt: I couldn’t get to Minnesota myself. I’m not vaccinated yet, so I don’t want to impose myself on the community. Plus I have kids. But also this is one of those stories where I want to hear from local, and particularly Native journalists. I did want to see, though, whether the evolving Line 3 story dovetailed at all with something else I’ve been tracking: fossil fuel-backed anti-protest bills. I’ve written about this a few times. A bunch of other journalists have done some great reporting on it as well. There’s some good stuff in Huff Post and The Intercept. I’ll drop some links in the show notes for those of you who want to read more.

These bills have been passed in 14 states now and proposed in about half the states in the country. They differ a little bit from state to state, but in general they increase the fines and jail time associated with trespassing dramatically. They often bump trespassing up from a misdemeanor to a felony. And they seem to be specifically targeting organizers and the organizations they work with, with steep penalties for organizing or training activists who then trespass. So even if the organizer isn’t there at the protest, they can still be charged.

And it turns out there are six—six—anti-protest bills making their way through the Minnesota state legislature right now. Some of them are bundled together, so it amounts to four different legislative packages. But still, that’s a lot. And it’s important because on top of cracking down on pipeline protests, there’s growing concern that these bills will be used to quell other sorts of protests, too. And remember, Minnesota was ground zero for last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests in the days after police murdered George Floyd.

To talk about Minnesota’s proposals, where these laws came from in general and how they’re moving through the country right now, I asked researcher Connor Gibson to join me. He’s been keeping tabs on these bills really since they started to pick up steam in the wake of the Standing Rock protests. That conversation coming up right after this quick break.

Amy Westervelt: It seems like all of a sudden the pace has picked up again, but I don’t know if that’s just like a feeling or if that’s actually what happened. So I’m curious to see what you’ve seen on that front.

Connor Gibson: Yes, it is the case that the fossil fuel infrastructure, anti protest bills are currently gaining steam in the 2021 legislative sessions of many states. I think the main difference between this year and last year is last year the pandemic really just messed up the strategy. We still saw plenty of bills and laws passed in twenty twenty. But I think it’s it was reduced by the impact of the pandemic, the confusion and cancelations and delays that caused the state legislature. So I suspect what we’re seeing in twenty twenty one is a lot of what companies intended to do last year. They just weren’t able to do as much as quickly as they would have liked. But that said, bills still passed into law during the pandemic in West Virginia and Kentucky. And this year we’re seeing more states continue the trend, including some states that failed to pass bills last year, like Illinois, like Alabama. And there’s only one state this year that really has high profile pipeline protests going on, that’s Minnesota, with the Line 3 revamp being done by Enbridge and being hastened along by many other players in the oil industry, so that makes the situation a little bit more relevant and urgent in Minnesota than in other states. I can’t tell you why Arkansas cares so much; its big pipeline resistance kind of happened a couple of years ago with the Diamond Pipeline, right.

Amy Westervelt: Connor, did that come into play in Oklahoma, too? Is it the same pipeline, the Diamond pipeline?

Connor Gibson: I want to say yes.

Amy Westervelt: Yep, it was. I checked. So in early 2017, local newspapers in Arkansas and Oklahoma were reporting that tribes, mostly in Oklahoma, did not approve of the Diamond Pipeline and that several Indigenous activists plan to protest it. There was a lot of hand-wringing about whether this would be the “next Standing Rock.” I’m noticing a theme here. In February 2017,Oklahoma Representative Scott Biggs proposed the anti protest billthat the rest would be based on. Here’s a bit of tape from that session. The person you’ll hear pushing Biggs for answers is Representative Cory Williams.

Rep Scott Biggs: This issue has definitely risen to the level of concern here in Oklahoma, giving our state status as an oil producer, energy producer and what’s going on in other states. So we took what happened or what bill we passed last year with the critical infrastructure bill regarding flying drones over refineries or Cushing or places like that. And we’ve now expanded that to provide some greater protection for those those critical infrastructures that are necessary for the state to operate. So the proposed committee sub basically lines out. Trespassing helps defines what critical infrastructure is and provides for some enhanced penalties for damage caused by trespassing.

Rep Cory Williams: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. When I was looking through some of the definitions on this, and I am. A lot of them I can see, but a couple of them, I thought, well, that’s pretty open ended if we wanted to prosecute it just as railroad tracks. That’s that’s pretty open ended thing to consider to be critical infrastructure that would have this enhanced penalty along with it. I mean, I understand like a power generation facility and substations and things like that. I guess my question is twofold. Do you think that in a couple of these definitions might be a little bit open ended and allow some abusive prosecution? And then secondly, can you tell can you elaborate more on you said that this has risen to the level of a need. Can you describe the incident that there are incidents that have brought to the forefront?

Rep Scott Biggs: Answer your questions, number one. Absolutely not. I do not believe the prosecutors are abusive in their discretion and their role and their function to protect the state. I know you disagree with me on that. And we have for four years. But no, they’re not abusive in their discretion. No, I do not disagree, you know, agree with you that these definitions are open ended. I believe that if you have an issue with the rail industry, I’m pretty sure the rail industry could demonstrate how they’re vital to Oklahoma. You know, there in Cushing, just south of your district, is extremely vital. The oil gas industry for all the rail pumping in this crude oil, because the pipelines have been protesting, the pipelines have been built. So now they’re using rail to move that oil, to move those products into our state.

Amy Westervelt: The Oklahoma bill was pointed to as the one that all the other bills were modeled after, but not without some help from the fossil fuel industry. In fact, industry reps were there the day Oklahoma’s bill was introduced. Ready to answer questions

Rep Cory Williams: in your last response, I didn’t actually hear you elaborate on the incidents. It was it just the pipeline incident or I don’t think they did damage to property, but obviously There,

I’m pretty sure they did a whole lot of damage to property in North Dakota.

Is that.

Yes, please join if you want to learn more. We actually have a meeting here at four o’clock today with some individuals from North Dakota that are here to talk to us, talk to the industry about what they’re having to deal with, the aftermath of those protesters up there as four o’clock and McBryde as sponsoring that open meeting to the public. But, yes, that is the main reason behind this.

Amy Westervelt: So there’s a bit of background on the origins of these bills. Now back to my conversation with Connor for more.

Amy Westervelt: OK, so actually maybe I’ll have you back up a little bit and give folks a brief sort of history of these bills that, you know, they sort of started to appear with the Oklahoma bill shortly after Standing Rock, and very much were a reaction to that protest.

Connor Gibson: Sure thing. I’m actually going to take us way back in time toSeptember 11th, 2001, terrible day in world history when the World Trade Centers went down and the Pentagon was attacked and the country was in a state of fear and confusion and very much ready to accept some draconian government restrictions in the name of our national security and not having to live through anything like that. Again, there were some industries that were starting to have this kind of conversation and the first more coherent discussion that I saw about critical infrastructure. And upping penalties for people that are trespassing on it or near it or certainly damaging any of the equipment, those conversations, as far as I can tell, were starting to happen in two thousand three, two thousand four. There was a law that was passed in Louisiana, Act one fifty seven, that set in motion the idea that there would be heightened penalties for trespassing on critical infrastructure sites. I don’t think oil pipelines were included efforts in that Louisiana law. They added that in twenty fifteen.

But at that point, some companies, including oil companies, started talking about this. And there is a group that’s similar to ALEC, but not nearly as captured and partizan called the Council of State Governments. It is a bipartisan consortium of state legislators. They do produce some model legislation in a way that’s similar to ALEC. But in addition to working in ways that are much more broad than Alec does a bunch of different kinds of legislative trainings and working groups on various issues, the Council of State Governments produced a a report that was financed by BP and others that embellished upon some of this. And then I couldn’t really tell you what happens between twenty six 2006] and twenty fifteen. As far as my research went, there didn’t seem to be any major events, but twenty fifteen. And this is before standing rock and before the Dakota Access Pipeline was being hotly protested, Louisiana started updating that critical infrastructure law that it had passed in 2004.

Amy Westervelt: Interesting.

Connor Gibson: And. It wasn’t until 2017 the end of the year, December, that the American Legislative Exchange Council ended up creating a model bill, which is just to say that there were some states starting to field test different avenues with which to restrict oil and gas. Protesters specifically including Alabama, including Michigan, including Washington, they just hadn’t taken coherent shape in terms of this play that we’re seeing now where it’s felony level penalties for people who are committing nonviolent acts of trespass, coupled with compounded fines and jail sentences, often for organizations or individuals who are found to be affiliated with those protesters. They don’t have to have trespass themselves. They don’t have to have damaged anything themselves. If they’re affiliated with somebody that did they wind up being charged in the first state to pass both of those things in a pretty clear and coherent way with Oklahoma in 2017. And that’s usually where the story starts in terms of people that are following and talking about the issue.

But I do think it’s important to know that it didn’t just explode randomly or not so randomly, but in reaction to standing rock, there was activity happening in a lot of these states leading up to that point. And in twenty seventeen things really became codified into the strategy that we’ve seen. It was later that year the American Legislative Exchange Council passed its model bill internally within itself at a meeting in December of that year. And there’s really there was some excellent reporting that was done that actually has really helped inform and understand how this trend took off. There was a letter that was written to the legislators who participated in that specific ALEC meeting in December 2017.

They had not yet approved this critical infrastructure felony law template law yet. And the American Chemistry Council, which is chemical manufacturers, lobbyists, and the Edison Electric Institute, which is electric utility lobbyists and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which is the refinery companies, in addition to Marathon Petroleum and the American Gas Association, which is gas utility companies, they all signed a letter to ALEC’s legislatorsand said, please make a model bill out of this, do it at this meeting, do it in the next few days. And they listed a bunch of reasons justifying why a law was needed. One of the examples used was the valve turners, a nonviolent protest that occurred in order to stop the development of the Keystone XL pipeline and and the the valve turners example was the only example that was used by these lobbyists to justify these laws that didn’t have to do actually with oil industry, ex employees or people suffering from serious incidents of mental illness, committing acts of sabotage against U.S. infrastructure. So much like we’re seeing with the Capitol riots, where George Floyd gets murdered by police, a bunch of time goes by. Republicans theorize about ways to punish the people who are reacting in outrage to the murder of black and brown people in this country by police officers. Then the Capitol riots happen. A bunch of white supremacists stormed the Capitol and now we’re going to be passing riot laws to go after Black people, essentially for the sins committed by white nationalists.

This trend in the oil and gas industry struck me as starkly similar there, justifying going after environmental protesters who are largely nonviolent, committing acts of civil disobedience in order to stop the fossil fuel buildout and blaming them with behavior that actually was had nothing to do with environmental activism.Some of the tribal groups in Montana who protested the bill that is currently making its way through that legislature a terrible, terrible bill, maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, max, fines of one point five million dollars. If you linked to somebody who was arrested under those offenses, it’s an individual protester in Montana would be subject to a max fine of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is atrocious. That is way bigger than most of these states. The penalties in these states, which are draconian enough, tends to cap around like twenty or twenty five thousand dollars. Montana has upping it to one hundred and fifty thousand, but times ten if you are found to be a supporter of a protester arrested. And of course, Keystone XL cuts through at least one of the reservations in Montana. And I believe that’s the Flathead Tribal Reservation, the LAS. The bill was protested in committee by a lot of different indigenous peoples from different tribal nations and different native organizations, non-profits in Montana, and they were all concerned not only about the ongoing fight over Keystone XL, but just once the laws on the books, who knows what it will be used to punish people for in regard to any future infrastructure project that qualified for critical infrastructure.

Amy Westervelt: And it’s quite broad, right? The definition of critical infrastructure.

Connor Gibson: Yes. And I would have to look at Montana’s definitions again, because all of the states are a little bit different. But roughly following the trend that was set forth by the state of Oklahoma and by the American Legislative Exchange Council is model bill. It includes utility infrastructure, electric transmission lines. It includes pipelines of all kinds. That includes water infrastructure. Some of them include dams. The Louisiana levees was attempted to be added to the definitions last year, which failed gas compressor stations, refineries, export terminals. Pretty much everything you can think of that is dirty energy infrastructure qualifies as critical under this bill. Right.

Amy Westervelt: Right. I do wonder how much some of these laws could be used to tamp down on various other types of protests like the Black Lives Matter protests, some new research done, and I’m not sure if it’s out there yet or not around some groups that have been looking at what Gibson Dunn has done in response, both to indigenous tribes in Ecuador suing Chevron and to the standing rock protests against their client energy transfer partners and using RICO. I definitely hear echoes of in these in these anti protest laws, especially the recent ones where they’re going after the quote unquote organizers there.

Connor Gibson: It…the plot thickens, Amy, because in the bill that’s currently being considered in Kansas and it has already passed the Senate in Kansas, it actually has a hearing in the House tomorrow, which is March 17th. That bill includes a RICO provision and what I believe is the first overlap between corporations using racketeering, anti mafia laws to go after their critics or attorneys representing plaintiffs that inconvenience them or whatever it might be, an anti protest, the fossil fuel anti protest laws specifically, I believe RICO is also starting to creep into the broader trend of riot redefinition and protesting laws where you find the lowest common the common denominator way to accuse somebody of rioting and then you get to charge them with very, very serious felonies. And if some of these states succeed, potentially racketeering implication, as well as if civil disobedience is organized crime.

Amy Westervelt: In very simple terms, that is the attempt that’s underway: it’s to redefine civil disobedience as organized crime. And people should know that the RICO laws were created to to deal with the mob.

Connor Gibson: Yeah, I’m sorry. Just like the more extreme. And I don’t even want to use that word because there’s no explosions or violence or threats involved. But like an activist cutting a fence or throwing a carpet over the razor wire and trespassing or even shutting off a pipeline valve, I’m sorry. That’s not like walking into somebody’s store and breaking their kneecaps for not paying their dues that month or even nearly as threatening about that.

Amy Westervelt: Do you have a count of how many states have enacted these laws and then how many are sort of in play right now?

Connor Gibson: I do. OK, there are a total of 14 states that have so far passed the fossil fuel infrastructure, anti protest bills since twenty seventeen. The most recent one was in two thousand twenty one. But the the fight actually started years previous, and that’s Ohio. They just passed a law in January. That bill carried over from the previous year. After that, we’ve seen bills pop up in Minnesota for a grand total of six bills. I don’t know, they’re just really disorganized or what. Some of them are concurrent. So it’s really it’s basically four legislative packages in Minnesota in the form of six bills.

Amy Westervelt: That’s really interesting to me in the context of the Line 3 protests right now. Is there any sense that like the number of proposals or the movement on them recently is connected to some sort of reaction to that protest?

Connor Gibson: That’s a great question. I’m going to say my gut tells me yes, because in 2018 there was only one bill. In 2019 there were two bills. And I believe they were they might have been concurrent. And then 2020 there were also two bills. And then suddenly this year are six. There’s also there’s a little bit of difference between some of them. Some of the bills are more focused on the felonies for the individuals, including the loophole that you’re trespassing on a fossil fuel infrastructure facility with the intent to impede or inhibit or and another bill with the intent to disrupt the operation. I’m going to go ahead and say a aggressive prosecutor would slap me with a felony charge if I was sitting in front of a road because that would impede or inhibit the operation of the facility or disrupt the operation. So that’s like that’s where the loophole is. You’re right. They frame this as if it’s about property damage, as if it’s about violence. Guess what? All of that’s already illegal everywhere it has been. Right. All of this nation’s recent history and all of the state’s recent history. You can’t hurt people. You can’t blow stuff up. You can’t damage property, you can’t trespass. There are laws on the books to deal with those things. So what these bills really aimed to change, then the mills to the Minnesota bills illustrated well is that there is a loophole put in there that if you’re disrupting or interrupting the facility in some minor way, you’re on the hook for the same level felony offense that is normally reserved for somebody who is abusing or hurting another human being.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a good way to put it. And an important thing for people to understand that it’s not like in the absence of these bills, there has just been a blanket permissiveness for trespassing and property rights.

Activists protesting you know, the people at Standing Rock in addition to getting blasted by the cops, water cannons and freezing cold temperatures and attacked by dogs and having their arms blown off by concussion grenades and stuff like that, like the people who are arrested, like trespassing in those situations. They do without having to get charged with things. And they do end up having to fight that out in court. And I know that for skeptics of like kind of protest culture and this like perhaps what’s seen as a really self-righteous liberalism to stand up for what’s right, that really irks some people. But I don’t think they think about how the people who engage in acts of civil disobedience really have a lot of shit to deal with after that happens. Or I’ll use myself as an example. Right. Like people are annoyed that somebody like me, this college educated white kid like goes and protest the Keystone XL pipeline in 2011 at the White House, which I did, there was a mass civil disobedience. We all got arrested. We went to jail.

We didn’t have to go to a cell. We just had to pay our hundred dollars and forfeit and we got to leave, you know, but in many of these situations, that is not what happens. You go to jail, you get held, you get out, you have to talk with lawyers. You have to show up for court hearings. Several months to several years of your life is potentially disrupted. Even if you don’t end up going to prison or paying thousands of dollars in fines, you would lose a lot of time and you lose a lot of money in order to take that principled stand. So it’s not just a bunch of spoiled kids that don’t have to deal with any consequence. And they’re really abusing, you know, major loopholes in our legal system. They are accepting those consequences. Right. Or the kind of higher calling and saying no more fossil fuel infrastructure is not OK. More oil spills are not OK, more disruption to the sovereignty of indigenous nations. Treaties we have violated over and over and over again is not OK.

Amy Westervelt: [00:27:22] OK, so you were saying there’s Minnesota, there’s four different legislative packages that are kind of in play in Minnesota.

Connor Gibson: Right. And they’re all aimed in differing ways that felonies for individual violators as well as going after people affiliated with them as well. So you don’t even necessarily have to commit the crimes. And this is so if you’re a Sierra Club or a Greenpeace or any other organization, maybe the American Civil Liberties Union and you’re you’ve been on email threads with these activists, it raises the question, are you liable for the crimes they commit? Like a fool I met could go do something like spray paint, a piece of equipment. And, you know, that just strikes me as exceptionally unfair that I can possibly held be held to account for that thing that I didn’t give permission to be affiliated with and I wouldn’t have recommended and yadda, yadda. So that’s a big problem with in Kansas. There is a similar bill, as I believe I said earlier, that is part. Out of one of the legislative chambers and it has a hearing tomorrow, there are some groups locally opposing it, Kansas Interfaith Action as testified against the bill, the Kansas Sierra Club has testified against the bill and showing up against them, of course, is the American fuel and petrochemical manufacturers, as well as the Wichita Regional Chamber. I’m going to go ahead and guess much means Koch Industries and Cessna. I don’t know who else in Wichita is a particularly large company. And I’m going to go ahead and guess that Cessna doesn’t care about this law. And the lobbyist did mention we’ve heard a lot from our members about this one. And I was like, yeah, I bet I can tell you which one.

Of the other bills, there’s one in Montana. That law is being supported again by trade associations that represent many of the usual suspects, TransCanada, Enbridge, Exxon Mobil. It’s the but it’s being done through groups that are not quite so, obviously. So in Montana, one of the groups that is supporting the anti protest law is called the Treasure State Resource Association of Montana State Resource Association, it turns out, represents oil and gas companies, among among others. I saw the American Chemistry Council is in there. Enbridge and Exxon Mobil are members in Montana Petroleum Association, also supporting the bill in Montana. And I believe it’s pretty much the same oil companies that are the members of the Montana Petroleum Association as well. The other states that are considering bills, Alabama and Arkansas. In Alabama, that bill has not yet moved. Arkansas’s bill has passed in the House and it’s working its way through the Senate. I could not tell you in either of those states who is advocating for it. If those states disclose that information, I haven’t been able to find it. They certainly don’t disclose it. And lobbying registrations, although I can’t say that Coke is registered to lobby in both of those states. I noticed.

And then the the kind of outlier, the state that I’m afraid will take a little too much interest for some of the wrong reasons is Illinois because a Democrat is sponsoring the bill in Illinois, and that has been the situation in Illinois since the beginning. So in Illinois as well as Wisconsin, there has been a. A different strategy than has been used in most other states, and that is the oil industry appeals to local trade unions, to the messaging in their hands. This is exactly what happened in Wisconsin. I’m not sure about Illinois. The American Petroleum Institute put messaging and talking points into the hands of the local trade unions who then lobbied Democrats in the legislature and championed the law that passed in Wisconsin and Illinois.

I suspect the trend is similar because just in the last 36 hours, in addition to Enbridge and the American Petroleum Institute and some Illinois based lobbying organizations, there are a lot of trade unions that have just signed on in support of the bill in Illinois. They’re supposed to be hearing today. And I heard that this bill was taken out of the calendar for discussion. I don’t I don’t know why I don’t have more details, but, yeah, it means I have no idea what direction the bill is heading towards. I don’t know if that indicates some sort of conflict or stall or if it’s just a there was some procedural reason why they delayed. But I would keep my eyes out for Illinois. They tried to pass a law in twenty nineteen. It went through one of the legislative chambers, but not the other. And and I’m sure they’re going to try and fight like hell again this year to get a law on the books, because this is a third year in the row that they’ve they’ve tried pushing bills in Illinois.

Amy Westervelt: Hmm. That’s interesting.

Okay thank you so much for spending spending this time with me.

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https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2021/06/30/iowa-activist-jessica-reznicek-sentenced-dakota-access-pipeline-sabotage-catholic-workers/7808907002/

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Iowa climate activist sentenced to eight years in federal prison for Dakota Access pipeline sabotage

Philip Joens

Des Moines Register

One of two central Iowa women responsible for millions of dollars in damage to the Dakota Access pipeline was sentenced in federal court Wednesday to eight years in prison.

Climate activists Jessica Reznicek, 39, and Ruby Montoya, 31, were indicted on nine federal charges each in September 2019, including charges for damaging an energy facility, use of fire in the commission of a felony, and malicious use of fire. Reznicek and Montoya both pleaded guilty to a single count of damaging an energy facility. The remaining charges were dismissed.

In July 2017 the women claimed credit for a series of acts of sabotage, including burning pipeline construction equipment at a Buena Vista County worksite in November 2016 and using oxyacetylene cutting torches or gasoline-soaked rags to damage other pipeline sites around the state between March and May 2017. At the time of their admission, they were affiliated with the Des Moines Catholic Workers' social justice movement.

Why Jessica Reznicek says she damaged the DAPL

In court Wednesday, Reznicek said she committed the acts against the pipeline because she was concerned it would spill and further contaminate drinking water in Iowa.

Ruby Montoya, left, and Jessica Reznicek.]

"The toxins we enter into our waterways here in Iowa enter into the Mississippi (River) which enters into the Gulf (of Mexico)," Reznicek said during sentencing Wednesday. "Going to this extreme was out of character for me."

Montoya will be sentenced July 30.

The Des Moines Catholic Worker community was founded in 1976 in response to the Gospel call for compassionate action like that characterized by the Sermon on the Mount. Catholic Workers are not all Catholics and they are not controlled by the bishop of the Des Moines Roman Catholic Diocese. The Catholic Workers also have no financial ties to the diocese.

In public comments after they damaged the pipeline, which runs from North Dakota to Illinois and began operations in June 2017, Reznicek and Montoya bragged that they got away with it and claimed other people could too, said federal prosecutor Jason Griess.

But in recent years Reznicek said she shied away from the spotlight and gave up her bombastic public persona and advocacy.

"Learning there was a different type of service without activism was life-changing for me," Reznicek said.

More: DAPL protestors to plead guilty to multimillion dollar sabotage]

Sentencing in the Dakota Access pipeline sabotage case

Sentencing guidelines recommended up to 20 years in prison due to Reznicek's criminal history, which included convictions for things like trespassing during her activism.

Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger also concluded that a terrorism sentencing enhancement could apply because Reznicek tried to stop the flow of oil,retaliated for decisions by state and federal governments to approve the project and wanted to prevent the government from approving future projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline.

"Not only the flow of oil, but the government's continued response were targets of this action," Goodgame Ebinger said.

Griess, the prosecutor, argued Reznicek and Montoya put the lives of firefighters and other first responders at risk when they used blow torches to cut into the pipeline without knowing what was inside.In all they set 11 fires,Griess said. Construction workers were also placed at risk when they did not know what they would encounter at work, Griess said.

"It is very difficult to downplay," Griess said. "This is incredibly dangerous conduct."

The sentence needed to be harsh to deter others from acting out like Reznicek and Montoya did, Goodgame Ebinger said. But the judge also took pity on Reznicek. The terrorism adjustment made the sentencing guidelines far higher than if that and her criminal history had not been considered, Goodgame Ebinger said.

The judge also said that the work Reznicek was doing now with the Catholic Workers — Reznicek's lawyer, Melanie Keiper, said her client's efforts recently were to feed the homeless — was admirable. She also described Reznicek's environmental concerns as, "Laudable though misguided."

Philip Joens covers breaking news for The Des Moines Register. He can be reached at 515-443-3347 at pjoens@registermedia.com or on Twitter @Philip_Joens.

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heated email 3/30/20

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Even in the midst of an earth-shattering pandemic, things haven’t been all bad for Big Oil.

Sure, oil prices are currently the lowest they’ve been in decades. But the renewable energy industry is taking an even bigger hit, with analysts predicting a “decimated” outlook for the next two years. That’s simply not the case for fossil fuels.

Unlike renewables, fossil fuels are expected to benefit slightly from the $2 trillion economic relief package Congress passed last week. As Emily Holden reported in the Guardian, the COVID-19 relief legislation “will dole out billions to struggling airlines and offer low-interest loans that fossil fuel companies could compete for—without requiring any action to stem the climate crisis.”

And though Democrats bragged that they “eliminated a $3 billion bailout for Big Oil” from getting passed, Earther reports there’s still a $4.5 trillion corporate bailout mechanism in the bill that would allow Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to grant large payouts to the fossil fuel industry. A bailout, in other words, is still on the table.

Pair all of that with the plastics industry’s recent success in halting state bans on single-use plastic bags—which are, of course, made out of petroleum—and it’s not hard to see how the fossil fuel industry could come out of the COVID-19 pandemic with a few decent wins.

The biggest win the fossil fuel industry could receive during the coronavirus crisis, however, would not be the temporary decimation of the renewable industry; or the resurgence of single-use plastic bags; or even a large corporate bailout.

Indeed, the biggest win the fossil fuel industry could achieve would be the ability to silence their most effective political opponents—climate activists—by threatening them with hefty financial penalties, felonies, and prison time for protesting their operations.

Believe it or not, the COVID-19 crisis is providing Big Oil with an opportunity to do just that.

Criminalizing climate protests during a pandemic

Since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on March 11, three states have passed anti-protest laws specifically aimed at preventing climate activists from practicing civil disobedience.

Known as “critical infrastructure bills,” these laws impose harsh criminal penalties and steep fines on activists who attempt to physically block the construction of oil and gas pipelines or other so-called “critical” fossil fuel infrastructure. Such acts have become increasingly popular—and effective—since the Standing Rock Sioux protests against the Dakota Access pipeline captured the world’s attention in 2016.

HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman has the scoop:

First came Kentucky. On March 16, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) signed legislation that ― while removing some of the original bill’s more extreme proposals ― designated “natural gas or petroleum pipelines” as “key infrastructure assets” and made “tampering with, impeding, or inhibiting operations of a key infrastructure asset” a “criminal mischief in the first degree.”

Two days later, it was South Dakota.On March 18, Gov. Kristi Noem (R) signed a bill that expanded the definition of “critical infrastructure” to include virtually any oil, gas or utility equipment, and raised the charges for causing “substantial interruption or impairment” of such facilities to felonies. Five days later, on March 23, the governor approved a second measure defining a felony “riot” as “intentional use of force or violence by three or more persons” that causes “any damage to property.”

On Wednesday, West Virginia followed suit. Gov. Jim Justice (R) greenlighted legislation assigning the same critical infrastructure status to a wide range of oil, gas and pipeline facilities, slapping fines as high as $20,000 on anyone found guilty of causing “damage, destruction, vandalization, defacing or tampering” that totals $2,500 or more.

The anti-protest laws signed in the last two weeks came as many state legislatures across the country suspended or postponed their sessions due to the spread of coronavirus. They also came as climate activists across the country were encouraged to stay home, and move their protest activities online.

[greta twt graf]

this caused some activists to suspect that the timing wasn’t a matter of coincidence. “While we are all paying attention to COVID-19 and the congressional stimulus packages, state legislatures are quietly passing fossil-fuel backed anti-protest laws,” Connor Gibson, a Greenpeace USA researcher who has been tracking the bills, said in a statement.

These laws indeed appear to be fossil-fuel backed, as each share similarities with model legislation promoted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. Though fossil fuel companies like Exxon, Shell, and BP have dropped their ALEC memberships in recent years, the group remains funded by fossil fuel industry giant Koch Industries. These laws are also broadly supported by fossil fuel industry players, who say harsher fines and criminal penalties on climate protesters are necessary to ensure infrastructure security.

Groups like the ACLU, however, are challenging many of the anti-protest laws, arguing they exist solely to halt free speech activity. After all, climate protestors practicing civil disobedience can still be charged with trespass and vandalism in states without “critical infrastructure” laws. But states with “critical infrastructure” laws sharply increase those penalties when the civil disobedience involves fossil fuel projects. In Oklahoma, for example, activists who protest pipelines can be hit with a $100,000 fine and 10 years in prison.

At least 11 states now have such “critical infrastructure” on the books, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law.

(Image source: International Center for Not-for-Profit Law)

Similar bills may continue to progress as the COVID-19 crisis continues. As Kaufman reported last week, “The Alabama state Senate passed its own version on March 12, just before the officials, alarmed at the spread of the new virus, postponed legislative hearings until April. Similar legislation is active in at least five other states ― Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio and Pennsylvania ― but has not progressed in the past month.”

This would be a huge blow for climate activists, because much of the movement’s success in the last four years has been due to peaceful civil disobedience. Indeed, civil disobedience is quickly becoming the dominant climate activism strategy across the world, advocated for by Greta Thunberg and Jane Fonda.

“The most effective way to change society in a rapid way is through mass, nonviolent civil disobedience,” longtime British climate activist Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told Vox back in January. “We need lots of people going to their capital city and blocking the roads until the government substantially bends to the demands or collapses.”

Of course, no one is allowed to do that now because of COVID-19. And if the fossil fuel industry gets its way, no one will be allowed to do it afterward, either.

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https://hightowerlowdown.org/article/new-corporate-protection-laws-are-stomping-on-our-most-basic-rights/

New corporate-protection laws are stomping on our most basic rights

as British playwright and political agitator George Bernard Shaw noted, “You don’t make progress by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well-hammered yourself.”

That certainly has been true of US progressives. We never could advance our people’s “small-d” democratic goals by idly hoping the established powers will do it for us. After all, they’re the ones doing it to us–imposing plutocratic rule to increase their fortunes at our expense. Rather, it is audacious American rebels who’ve incrementally advanced our democratic possibilities by defying the repressive laws of the authoritarian order.

In fact, Protest is us! And it ain’t beanbag. The history of US democracy is the story of fed-up, gutsy people engaged in wave after wave of confrontation with haughty corporate, political, and social powers that forcibly suppress our democratic will. Because of that suppression, effective public protest is not for the meek. By its nature, it is disobedient, passionate, aggressive, disruptive, and sometimes bloody. That’s the price of progress.

Indeed, there would be no USA if outraged colonials had merely sent missives to King George saying, Please stop doing these bad things to us. Consider a historic protest we now celebrate as a glorious, seminal moment in our opposition to British autocracy: the Boston Tea Party. In 1773, Sam Adams and an audacious band of Massachusetts rebels clambered aboard three British East India Company trading ships moored in Boston Harbor. Rebelling against an English decree giving that corporation monopoly power over tea imports to America, Adams and other “Sons of Liberty” illegally trespassed on the corporate property, seized its cargo of 342 chests of tea, and hurled them into the harbor.

It was an act of constructive destruction and iconic defiance of plutocratic authority, which rallied public support and helped spark the American Revolution. Most significantly, it set an ethical standard for legitimate protest in our country that for generations since has guided abolitionists, suffragists, unionists, populists, immigrants, feminists, environmentalists, and other democracy activists. Protest is fully ingrained in the American character.

Suspending the right to protest

["Two wrongs don't make a right, but three left turns do." --Jim Hightower]

Add to America’s panorama of momentous protests another dramatic action: On September 12, 2019, a team of bold environmental advocates literally put their lives on the line to confront the global crisis of industrially induced climate change. You might not have heard about it, for their protest was barely noticed by the purveyors of mass media, who were busy chasing the latest nonsensical tweets of the artful dodger in the White House. Yet it certainly ranks as a captivating, and still unfolding, story of principled dissent.

The action involved 22 Greenpeace USA activists from 13 states and the District of Columbia. Using static lines attached to a huge bridge, 11 of the activists suspended themselves 150 feet above the Houston Ship Channel and shut down Big Oil’s largest US outlet for climate-destroying petrochemicals. The dangling protesters closed the channel, halting oil tankers owned by the likes of the Exxon and Shell et al. that move 700,000 barrels of oil every day from the second-largest refinery complex in the US. Some 18 hours passed before, as reported by KHOU-TV news, an over-the-top cluster of police power–including riot-clad sheriff officers, FBI agents, members of the Coast Guard, local fire departments, and the Texas Department of Transportation–was able to arrest the activists.

There is an even deeper story, however, for the action brought to light an especially devious effort by establishment autocrats to repress our people’s fundamental freedom to dissent against corporate abuse. Soon after their arrests, the intrepid climate defenders found themselves suspended in an even more precarious way: Their First Amendment freedoms of speech and assembly were subverted by a new, little-known law passed at the behest of the very same corporate powers they had dared to protest.

ALEC attacks

Unbeknownst to the general public (and still largely undiscovered by national media), oil giants and other multinational corporations have quietly colluded with the legislators and governors they’ve purchased. Together, they’ve rammed through a series of autocratic state laws criminalizing our right to protest at sites they imperiously designated “critical infrastructure.” Encompassed in the sweeping lockdown inherent in this often-specious designation are public demonstrations that the sneaky new laws defined as “criminal interference.” In fact, the thing they interfere with is the hallowed pursuit of profits by myriad corporate scoundrels including frackers, mine operators, pipeline builders, chemical plants, refineries, electrical utilities, TV facilities, and factory farms. (Yes, a corporate hog factory is now designated “critical infrastructure”!)

Legalized thuggery

It’s bad enough that corporate giants can buy laws that suppress our democratic rights, but now they’re doubling down on their assertion of autocratic authority by literally renting public police forces to rough up and arrest protesters.

You could’ve seen corporatized policein action last fall in Louisiana. Earlier that year, Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had pushed Pelican State lawmakers to enact ALEC’s corporate infrastructure protections scheme. Turning protest into a felony crime was of urgent interest to ETP, for it had planned to ram a huge crude-oil pipeline through the fragile ecosystem of Atchafalaya Basin, over objections by environmentalists and residents.

Sure enough, when protest happened, St. Martin Parish sheriff’s officers moved in to attack, pepper spray, and choke the demonstrators. But, in fact, they weren’t actually functioning as public authorities. Yes, they came from the sheriff’s office, but they were among 58 deputies who’d been leased out to Energy Transfer Partners to enforce corporate law. They wore official law-enforcement uniforms, used taxpayer-issued weapons and tech equipment, presented themselves as public officers of the law, and arrested and jailed legitimate protestors in the name of the state. But, far from serving as agents of The People, these corrupted officers (a fourth of the sheriff’s entire force of deputies) were paid and directed by the corporation. They were taking ETP payments and perverting their public responsibilities into the private enforcement interests of the pipeline profiteer.

As rebels showed at the founding of our nation, when corporate powers autocratically twist the law to subvert the people’s basic rights, they can expect righteous revolution from the majorities they oppress.

The new laws punish such protest harshly. The Greenpeace activists, along with 20 others also arrested, now face felony charges, years in prison, and a permanent criminal record for violating Texas law by “interrupting” Big Oil’s operations–peacefully, for a few hours. So rather than protecting our fragile environment and Constitutional rights, America’s power elites are fabricating “property right” laws to protect corporate profiteers … from us!

These protest prohibitions have already been enacted by corporate-hugging politicos in Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas–and they’re presently being pushed in Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with more expected in state legislatures during the 2020 sessions.When did We The People–in those states or anywhere else–vote to outlaw peaceful public protest against corporate excesses? When did we demand that lawmakers make it a felony crime for you and me to assemble at corporate sites to object boisterously, creatively, and effectively against profiteers who’re running roughshod over our values, livelihoods, environment, and … well, our lives? Of course, the answer is: Never. This is lawmaking by sneak attack, with craven, for-sale governors and legislators repressing The People’s rights without informing us, much less seeking our consent. King George III would be proud.

Who initiated these anti-democratic laws? Corporate lobbyists, that’s who.They’ve been working through ALEC, the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council that convenes closed-door tete-a-tete sessions conjoining its corporate members in a nationwide network of whorish state lawmakers willing to turn tricks for them. In January 2018, one of ALEC’s mating sessions produced a model bill called the “Critical Infrastructure Protection Act,” which would effectively sledgehammer peaceful protestors accused of corporate wrongdoing as though they were terrorists. Suddenly, virtually identical versions of ALEC’s pre-fab bill were introduced by its bawdy house legislators across the country.

To give cover to this self-serving repression, the corporate crowd has cooked up a public safety hoax. Colluding with the Trump regime, the FBI, unscrupulous media players like Sean Hannity, and ALEC itself, they’ve been running a fear-mongering campaign, claiming with hyperbolic fervor that hordes of eco-radicals are roving the land, intent on destroying America’s corporate infrastructure. This alliance cites–as a prime example of “destructive trespassers” interfering with corporate operations–the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s courageous standoff last year against the Dakota Access Pipelinethat was being shoved through their sacred lands. Never mind that the pipeline corporation was the actual trespasser, the plutocratic screechers insist the poor profiteers must be protected by extraordinary anti-protest measures.

The Koch brothers even wrapped themselves in the cynical claim that they are concerned about “the safety of those exercising their right to demonstrate.” Because the protesters could get hurt, clucked a Koch lobbyist, criminal laws are needed to keep them from protesting. And, as ALEC was shopping its bill from state to state, it issued a bogeyman letter from fossil fuel giants urging lawmakers around the country to curtail the “growing and disturbing trend” of enviro-extremists attacking infrastructure. To buff its case, ALEC listed five such assaults. One involved a mild-mannered guy who merely cranked shut a pipeline valve in North Dakota, temporarily stopping the flow of toxic tar sands oil through the Keystone Pipeline. The other four cases were simply examples of incompetent vandalism by individuals who had mental health issues or were company insiders with workplace grievances.

["The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages." --Jim Hightower]

These corporate protection laws are nothing but fraudulent scare tactics. Their backers say they’re necessary to prevent violence and vandalism. But wait! Stiff laws are already on the books against those crimes. And wait again! Those arrested in September’s Greenpeace protest committed no violence or vandalism.

The Texas hustle

In the last 25 years, the Lone Star State has become a protracted experiment in bad government, with top officials routinely kowtowing to corporate money–the people be damned. Thus, for a clear example of how today’s swarm of anti-democratic “critical infrastructure” laws came to infest our nation, look to Texas.

Note that no gubernatorial or legislative candidates in Texas have run on, or even mentioned, the absurd notion that We The People should be forced to surrender any of our Constitutional rights in deference to corporate supremacy. Nonetheless, shortly after the 2019 legislative session convened–BAM!–two ALEC acolytes, a GOP state senator named Brian Birdwell and a state rep named Chris Paddie, dropped that group’s corporate-written anti-protest bomb on both houses of the Texas Lege.

[?? DO SOMETHING ??

As right-wing state legislatures attempt to shred our Constitutional right to peacefully protest, we citizens have a duty to resist. For more about these anti-democratic trends and how to fight back, check out:

Greenpeace is a leader in the global struggle to reverse climate insanity. One of its projects, Polluter Watch, monitors the latest egregious actions of the fossil fuel industry.

The Justice Collaborative works to “reform the components of our criminal justice system that are costly, counterproductive, and cruel.” Sign up for its info-packed email newsletter at theappeal.org.

The good folks at The Center for Media and Democracy do us all a great service by tracking the insidious corporate dirty work of the American Legislative Exchange Council. CMD’s website, ALEC Exposed, reveals the “model bills” pushed by ALEC to advance corporate interests at the expense of the common good.]

Then came Greg Abbott, the notorious corporate-coddling governor, pushing the bill with a vengeance. And why not? Greg’s top donors are–surprise!–oil and gas corporations that pumped more than $10 million into his 2018 election bid. His 2019 legislative push was made in cahoots with Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Shell, Valero, and other petro-powers that unleashed a lobbying barrage on legislators, successfully pressuring them (and effectively bribing many with the implied promise of future donations) to put corporate interest over the public interest.

The repressive Texas law took effect on September 1, 2019. Just 11 days later it was used to slap harsh felony charges on the Greenpeace protesters and others arrested for “interfering” with the movement of oil tankers. One politician who’s already getting grief from constituents for her despicable rush to lash the petrochemical protesters with severe felony charges is Houston district attorney, Kim Ogg. Elected in 2016 as a “bold” criminal justice reformer, she promised to reduce harsh, unfair sentencing and stop excessive bail for minor offenders.

In this case, Ogg violated both pledges. She grabbed Abbott’s brand-spanking-new “Save Big Oil” law to brand the participants as dangerous criminals. The DA is now demanding that all 31protesters be punished by lengthy state imprisonment for what clearly was a non-violent, peaceful exercise of their rights. She also asked that the court set bail for at least one of the defendants at the unconscionable level of “no lower than $100,000,” citing unsubstantiated “millions of dollars” in losses to the oil economy. Her claim of economic impact is wholly inappropriate to the bail process–intended simply to make sure defendants show up for trial. Rather, it is an outrageous attempt to impose punishment without a trial.

And here’s yet another twist: Early this year, following several oil refinery fires and spills of industry waste into the ship channel, DA Ogg was granted county funding to hire four new prosecutors and four support staffers specifically to handle crimes of environmental pollution. Now she’s prosecuting people who protest the polluters. What might be behind Ogg’s prosecutorial zealotry? Call me cynical, but I’m guessing that $70,000 in campaign cash from major oil industry donors–and her reasonable expectation of more to come for her re-election bid next year–could be persuasive motivators.

This story, however, is far bigger than one wayward DA and one bunch of right-wing state officials cracking down on public dissent. The lesson here is that repressive laws don’t just sit there on the books, they metastasize. Bad actors disseminate and use them to perpetrate enormous harm to good people and to democracy itself. This bad new law–written in the dark by self-serving, destructive corporate elites and hastily enacted by corrupt officials funded by those elites–is rapidly spreading across the country, with little public awareness. Overly ambitious and/or unscrupulous lawmakers and prosecutors everywhere are seizing it to imprison legitimate protesters and chill everyone’s willingness to assert our First Amendment rights. It is a direct assault on democracy by a voracious corporate plutocracy.

Going all in

And yet, I’m betting on democracy–because of the American people’s innate, Sam-Adams-style rebelliousness. I think of champions like Cherri Foytlin down in southwest Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin swamp, along the final leg of the Dakota Access Pipeline that carries oil fracked in North Dakota to a Louisiana refinery and then shipment, primarily, to China. Last year, Foytlin and others tried to stop Energy Transfer Partners–a notorious, out-of-state profiteer–from crisscrossing this beautiful and life-sustaining wetland with the polluting pipeline. She and other activists spent weeks in “sky pod” platforms they had built 35 feet in the air, tied to native cypress trees. Even though the private landowner had OKed the pods, authorities arrested the protesters in August and September for “trespassing.”

It was the first use in the nation of ALEC’s democracy-repressing ban on interfering with “critical infrastructure.”A Dine (Navajo) and Latinx who is part of the Indigenous Women’s Council of L’eau Est La Vie, Foytlin, a could face five years in prison. But don’t think that’s going to intimidate her. As she says, “They think that by upping the punishment they’re going to keep people from protesting. But what will happen is we’re going to do things that are more worth getting the felony [charge]. Because now, if we’re going to jail, then damn it, we’re going to go all in.”

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https://www.propublica.org/article/how-louisiana-lawmakers-stop-residents-efforts-to-fight-big-oil-and-gas

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[Malaika Favorite, daughter of the late environmental advocate Amos Favorite Sr., in Geismar, Louisiana. Geismar tried to incorporate industrial plants into a new city but was blocked from doing so by the Louisiana Legislature. (Sophia Germer/The Times-Picayune and The Advocate)]

POLLUTER’S PARADISE

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How Louisiana Lawmakers Stop Residents’ Efforts to Fight Big Oil and Gas

Louisiana has pioneered ways for other states to discourage environmental protests around “critical infrastructure” projects. Much of it can be traced back to efforts by corporate lobbyists.

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by Sara Sneath, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate Feb. 7, ___

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SERIES:POLLUTER’S PARADISE

Environmental Impact in Louisiana

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This article was produced in partnership with The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, which was a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network in 2019.

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ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

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As the Bayou Bridge Pipeline was under construction in 2018, Anne White Hat ventured deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp in St. Martin Parish to protest it.

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St. Martin is one of 11 parishes crossed by the pipeline, which brings crude oil from Texas to refineries in Louisiana. Though White Hat had permission to be there from some of the more than 100 people who jointly own the tract where she held her protest, she didn’t have permission from all. She was arrested on two felony counts related to trespassing. She posted a $21,000 bond and was released.

Two years later, the district attorney still hasn’t decided whether to proceed with the charges: two counts of unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure. The maximum penalty isfive years in prison, with the possibility of hard labor and a fine of up to $1,000.

“It is intimidating when you’re looking at facing prison in South Louisiana,” she said.

Ironically, a court later found that the pipeline company itself had been trespassing at the time of White Hat’s arrest. The main owner, Energy Transfer Partners, had not obtained easement agreements with all landowners to begin construction, nor had it been granted permission to do so through eminent domain.Its penalty: a $450 fine paid to the landowners.

The judge who set White Hat’s bond at $21,000 was the same judge who imposed Energy Transfer Partners’ fine.“This is yet one more in a long line of examples of how Louisiana laws are first made by oil and gas corporations and then are ignored by the same corporations if they feel like it,” said Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University who is representing White Hat pro bono.

Energy Transfer Partners did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

Louisiana has blazed a trail for other states in discouraging environmental protests by raising the legal stakes for those who trespass on or near “critical” oil and gas infrastructure — which includes refineries, chemical plants and ports. In 2004, it was the first state to make that crime a felony.

Louisiana’s pioneering law can be traced to corporate lobbyists. BP and DuPont were among the energy and chemical companies that produced a 2003 guide disseminated to state officials, arguing that enhanced penalties would discourage attacks by terrorists that could cause economic disruptions.

Two years ago, legislators added oil and gas pipelines to the list of infrastructure deemed critical. In White Hat’s view, the entire suite of laws is anti-democratic. “They’re using the state to protect their corporate interests,” she said.

Residents have repeatedly pushed back against pipelines, proposed plants and existing industry in their backyards. While such opposition is almost never monolithic, it is often overwhelming at the local level. But the state’s elected leaders have historically sided with industry, in some cases passing new laws aimed at quelling opposition.

[A sign marks the area of a pipeline in the Atchafalaya Basin, the same swamp where Anne White Hat protested the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in 2018. (Brett Duke/The Times-Picayune and The Advocate)]

Legislators are trying to reduce local officials’ power to decide whether to exempt industry from local taxes. Years ago, when a local board made up of experts filed an ambitious lawsuit that aimed to hold oil and gas companies accountable for damaging coastal wetlands, state officials undermined it. In another episode, they passed a law that barred communities from using incorporation to collect property taxes from chemical plants. And more than once they have sought to punish student law clinics that represent communities fighting industry.

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This year’s legislative session, which begins in March, will again include bills to restrict local input into industrial tax exemptions.

Some of these efforts are part of a larger, coordinated strategy. The three Louisiana lawmakers who sponsored the trespassing bill were members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a controversial organization that brings lawmakers and corporate lobbyists together to draft “model legislation” that they then shop to other states.

Louisiana’s 2004 trespassing law became just such a template. Fifteen years later, 10 states have similar laws. “Louisiana was a particularly important state,” said Connor Gibson, an investigator with Greenpeace.

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The addition of pipelines to the law two years ago came in response to protests that garnered national attention, notably those at Standing Rock in North Dakota, which became the focal point of indigenous protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “This just protects against those who want to inhibit commerce,” bill sponsor Rep. Major Thibaut said as he introduced the bill in 2018.

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aha after charlottesville had to abandon eco-terror threat for a while, but baaaack 120, why? crit infra big pipeline fights brewing?

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https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-activists-valve-turners-extremists-2644830392.html

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Internal documents from the Department of Homeland Security reveal that non-violent demonstrators targeting the oil industry were classified as "extremists," with some organization members listed alongside known white supremacists, as The Guardian yyy reported.

Five members of Climate Direct Action — Michael Foster, Ken Ward, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Leonard Higgins — have been dubbed the Valve Turners after a coordinated effort on Oct. 11, 2016 tocut through fencing and turn off valves on a pipeline in four states. The pipeline carried crude oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries.

The activists alerted the oil companies of their actions, filmed it and waited patiently for authorities to arrive and arrest them, as The Guardian reported. For a few hours, the oil stopped flowing. Those pipelines carried 15 percent of the daily U.S. oil consumption in 2016.

Chargers for three of them were dropped, but Michael Foster, who turned a valve in North Dakota, spent six months in jail and is now on probation. During his trial, prosecutors compared him to the 9/11 terrorists and the Unabomber, according to Common Dreams.

:{:{:{

pix Michael Foster pictured with his partner and fellow activist Sue Lenander shortly after being released from a six month prison sentence. [Shut it Down - Climate Direct Action

More recently, the Department of Homeland Security described the Valve Turners as "suspected environmental rights extremists." The Guardian reported that the document, which evaluated domestic terrorism threats from 2018 to 2020, alsocategorized the group alongside Dylan Roof, the white supremacists who murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina and James Fields, who plowed his car into a group of people protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-activists-valve-turners-extremists-2644830392.html

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Five members of Climate Direct Action — Michael Foster, Ken Ward, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Leonard Higgins — have been dubbed the Valve Turners after a coordinated effort on Oct. 11, 2016 tocut through fencing and turn off valves on a pipeline in four states. The pipeline carried crude oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries.

[pix]

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More recently, the Department of Homeland Security described the Valve Turners as "suspected environmental rights extremists." The Guardian reported that the document, which evaluated domestic terrorism threats from 2018 to 2020, also categorized the group alongside Dylan Roof, the white supremacists who murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina and James Fields, who plowed his car into a group of people protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others.

"Equating mass murder by white supremacists with what Michael and I did is totally obscene," said Sam Jessup, one of the activists named in the documents, in an email to The Guardian. "This whole infrastructure of so-called security has done little more than secure the future of the fossil fuel industry by terrorizing people into silence."

Jessup, 34, was the driver and videographer live-streaming the action in North Dakota while Michael Foster, a former family therapist who lives in Seattle, turned the valve. Foster is the defendant who spent six months in jail.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote an email to The Guardian stating that Homeland Security's framing was "highly misleading because white supremacists are responsible for the bulk of this violence and almost all of the fatalities that result. There is little that environmentalists have engaged in the types of deadly violence that would meet the statutory definition of domestic terrorism, as codified by Congress."

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[pix]

The labeling of environmental groups with extremists is mirrored in Britain as well where the activist group Extinction Rebellion was labeled in a document by Counter Terrorism Policing South East alongside banned far-right organizations like National Action and Islamic terrorist organizations, according to the Telegraph.

Extinction Rebellion, which uses non-violent disruptions to business as usual to call attention to the urgency of the climate crisis had a similar reaction as the Valve Turners. They were shocked and appalled.

"How dare they," said climate change group Extinction Rebellion, as the BBC reported.

A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said, "Teachers, grandparents, nurses have been trying their best with loving non-violence to get politicians and big business to do something about the dire state of our planet. And this is how the establishment responds," according to the BBC.

Speaking about the Homeland Security document, Carl Williams, executive director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, which has defended Dakota Access Pipeline protestors said to The Guardian, "I think there is a strategy that rightwing forces are using to criminalize dissent. This bulletin shows that dirty hand."

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tar sands pipelines activism activists climate action valve turners oil

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/11/15/new-market-coal-mine-critical-minerals-national-security

:{Creating a New Market for Coal in the Push to Mine ‘:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Critical Minerals’ f:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{or National Security:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

no lnx pix twt

Creating a New Market for Coal in the Push to Mine ‘Critical Minerals’ for National Security

Read time:

By Laura Peterson • Friday, November 15, 2019 - 11:20

Duke coal ash pond]

With the backing of the mining industry and anti-regulatory groups, the Trump administration has been seeking to expand mining on public lands and further loosen environmental rules under the banner of weaning the United States off importing minerals deemed “critical” to national security.

This move may have particular implications for the struggling U.S. coal industry and its promoters, which have begun rallying behind efforts to extract some of these so-called “critical minerals” from coal and its by-products.

In 2017, President Trump issued an executive order demanding “recommendations to streamline permitting and review processes” for “critical minerals.” The current government list of critical minerals includes a group of rare earth elements often abundant in the waste materials from mining coal and hardrock minerals like phosphate, as well as in the coal ash produced from burning coal. But while the technology to pull these elements from such mining waste is not yet economically viable and can generate its own toxic pollutants, some see the push for it as a guise for justifying further mining.

“You’ll never make money at it,” said Kevin Ashley, a retired mining engineer and former energy policy advisor. “It’s an academic exercise that allows some people to say, ‘This is why we need to continue mining coal; so we can produce more coal ash.’”

Make Coal Critical Again?...

https://www.prwatch.org/news/**2019/12**/13516/alec-influence-ohio-greases-skids-anti-protest-bill

When anti-protest legislation pushed by oil, gas, and utility interests was introduced in the Ohio state Senatethis year, it met a receptive audience and passed easily on a mostly party-line vote. It has since moved to the state House, where almost one-third of legislators are ALEC members, and will likely pass at the beginning of 2020.

The legislation, SB 33, is modeled after an ALEC proposal, and its corporate backers are big contributors to the Republican party and legislators in Ohio.

ALEC is the corporate bill mill where state legislators and corporations meet behind closed doors to write and advocate for legislation on the environment, criminal justice, health care, and most of the other domestic issues that affect us.

The bill, the "Critical Infrastructure Protection Act," being pushed by ALEC around the country makes it a felony for protestors to trespass on energy company property, such as pipelines, refineries, and power plants.

Prompted by the well-publicized stand-off at the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline in 2016, the industry's full-court press is working. Ten states, using ALEC's template bill, have enacted increased criminal penalties through legislation very much like SB 33.

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has extensively reported on the controversy surrounding this type of legislation, including an article last month on Wisconsin's bill,signed by the new Democratic Governor, Tony Evers.

According to the legislature's Office of Research and Drafting, the Ohio bill "adds a new prohibition under the offense of 'criminal trespass' that expressly prohibits a person, without privilege to do so, from knowingly entering or remaining on a 'critical infrastructure facility.'"

While the offense for an individual protester is a misdemeanor - or a third-degree felony for destroying or tampering with "critical infrastructure" property - the bill would hit any organization found to be "complicit" in the violation with a fine ten times the maximum allowable fine for the protester.

Roxanne Groff, a former county commissioner in Ohio and spokesperson for the Buckeye Environmental Network, testified before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee that,

This bill was created to impose fear upon citizens who have become increasingly aware and vocal about the threats to their health, and their wellbeing as a result of the oil and gas industries’ assault on the land and people of this state by extraction of oil and gas, injection of toxic radioactive waste from this extraction and the infrastructure build outs of pipelines and gas compressor stations....

ALEC's Grip on the Ohio Legislature

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the anti-protest bill was heard, four of the 10 Senators - including the chair, John Ecklund (R) - are ALEC members.

But ALEC's influence over the bill's prospects doesn't stop there.

SB 33, which passed the Ohio Senate 24-8 in May, was introduced by ALEC member Frank Hoagland (R), chair of the state Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, and all 18 ALEC members in the Senate voted for it.

Indeed, the scope of ALEC's influence in the Ohio Legislature is profound.

Eleven of the 13 state Senate committees are chaired by ALEC members.

And three of the top four state Senate GOP leaders are ALEC members - Senate President Larry Obhof, President Pro Tempore Bob Peterson, and Majority Leader Matt Huffman.

The bill is now pending in the House Public Utilities Committee, where the vice-chair and another five of the committee's 14 GOP members are ALEC members.

When the bill gets voted out of committee in the 2020 legislative session, it will be welcomed by three of the four top House leaders who are also ALEC members - Speaker Pro Tempore, Jim Butler, and the Majority Leader, Bill Seitz, who sits on ALEC's board.

Indeed, 23 of 61 of the Ohio state House members belong to ALEC.

Altogether, 41 of the state's 85 GOP legislative members and five of the top eight Republican House and Senate leaders are ALEC members.

CMD lists the Ohio legislative members at alecexposed.org.

Corporate Interests Backing the Bill

Rob Eshenbaugh, a lobbyist with Capitol Advocates in Columbus, led the charge on the anti-protest bill in committee on behalf of a long list of fossil fuel, utility, chemical, transportation, and water corporations and trade associations.

A number of the SB 33 "supporters" listed in Eshenbaugh's testimony are ALEC members, including Columbia Gas of Ohio, CSX Transportation, Dominion Energy Ohio, Duke Energy, and Marathon Petroleum Company

Eshenbaugh was previously a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and his lobbying firm represents two other ALEC corporate backers, Caterpillar, Inc. and PhRMA, the drug industry's trade association.

A CMD analysis of Ohio's campaign finance records shows that Marathon Petroleum has donated $24,000 to Senate President Obhoff since 2010. It also gave $25,000 to Republican party committees. Duke Energy has paid almost $10,000 for GOP golf outings and has donated $28,000 to Senate Majority Leader Huffman during his career. Utility giant Exelon, another ALEC member, has given GOP party committees $12,500 since 2010.

For a more detailed analysis of SB 33, please visit PolluterWatch.

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/2410**2019/**south-dakota-anti-protest-law-riot-boosting-oil-pipeline-penalties-transcanada

7 states have

South Dakota officials have agreed to walk back parts of the state's new anti-protest laws that opponents say were meant to target Native American and environmental advocates who speak out against the proposed Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.

Gov. Kristi Noem and state Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg agreed in a settlement Thursday with Native American and environmental advocates that the state would never enforce portions of the recently passed laws that criminalize "riot boosting"—which it applied, not just to protesters, but to supporters who encourage but never take part in acts of "force or violence" themselves.

The settlement, which makes permanent a temporary ruling issued by a federal judge in September, has immediate implications for opponents of the Keystone pipeline in South Dakota and could challenge the validity of similar laws targeting pipeline and environmental protestors in other states....

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/27/pipeline-safety-legislation/

no lnx docs

oil lOBBYISTS ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE PIPELINE SAFETY LEGISLATION TO FURTHER CRIMINALIZE PIPELINE PROTESTS

Lee Fang, Nick Surgey

September 27 2019

THE OIL AND GAS industry is seeking to harness must-pass federal safety legislation to enact sweeping provisions that would criminalize activism against pipelines. The measures would make it a felony for individuals to tamper with pipeline facilities or obstruct pipeline construction, documents obtained by The Intercept and Documented show.

The provisions expand the scope of criminal liability for those found to be “interfering with the operation” of any pipeline facility, including infrastructure that is under construction, according to a copy of proposed language offered to legislators by industry officials. If passed, those convicted of interfering with pipeline operations could face up to 20 years in prison.

The draft language was provided to legislators by the Association of Oil Pipelines, a lobbying group in Washington, D.C., that represents Koch Industries, Kinder Morgan, TransCanada, Phillips 66, Energy Transfer Partners, Enbridge, Plains All American, and other major oil and gas pipeline interests.

A number of legislators, including Reps. Mike Bost, R-Ill., and Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., have been receptive to AOPL’s efforts toattempt to tuck criminal penalty provisions into the federal pipeline safety reauthorization legislation, which Congress is seeking to pass before the current authorization expires on September 30.

AOPL Proposed Legislative Text

1 page

The legislative gambit is the latest in a two-year effort by oil and gas companies to use enhanced police powers to prevent another wave of protests akin to the demonstrations around the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. In the industry’s view, the strengthened criminal penalties are necessary to prevent potentially dangerous tampering with the operation of pipeline infrastructure, including manipulation of valves or other forms of physical destruction.

In states across the country, similar laws, also crafted directly by oil and gas interests, have been enacted to increase penalties for obstructing pipeline construction or, in some cases, to even create new criminal penalties for those “conspiring” with perpetrators.

Last month, The Intercept obtained a leaked recording revealing a prominent oil and gas lobbyist touting his role in crafting a template version of the criminalization bill used as the basis for nearly every new state-level law designed to penalize pipelines protests.

Now, those efforts appear to be targeting Capitol Hill to amend federal law. In early June, the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation released its own federal pipeline safety legislation, introduced in the Senate, that mirrored industry demands to create criminal penalties of up to 20 years in prison for “inhibiting the operation” of an oil or gas pipeline.

Newly obtained documents show that AOPL has pushed aggressively to also shape two pipeline safety bills moving through Congress in the House of Representatives.

In June, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Rep. Bill Flores, R-Texas, attempted to push forward with criminalization provisions on its pipeline safety bill, H.R. 3432, but were rebuffed by Democrats.

An update on legislation, sent in August to oil and gas lobbyists, notes that the H.R. 3432, failed to include the oil pipeline lobbyist demand for criminalization provisions, in part due to opposition from Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., a senior lawmaker on the committee, along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

AOPL

1 page]

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, meanwhile, has been more receptive to industry concerns. Over the summer, committee leaders circulated a draft of another pipeline safety bill in discussion among lawmakers. AOPL lobbyists noted that Lipinski, a senior lawmaker on the Transportation Committee who is generally regarded as one of the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus, has been “open to legislative action to deter attacks on pipeline facilities and workers.”

AOPL has rallied its corporate members to exert pressure on Lipinski as its key champion for House Democrats to include the criminalization provisions. In an alert sent to other lobbyists, AOPL encouraged direct outreach to Lipinski and Alex Beckmann, the Lipinski staffer working primarily on pipeline issues, to remind his office about the importance of including the criminal penalty provisions. Bost, a senior GOP member of the Transportation Committee, is referred to as the industry’s “House champion” on the push to include new criminal penalties.

Lipinski, a member of the business-friendly Blue Dog caucus member, is facing a rematch in the primary next year against Marie Newman, a progressive challenger. The Illinois incumbent has fundraised heavily from the oil and gas sector over the course of his career, including corporate PAC donations this cycle from AOPL member companies Plains All American and Phillips 66.

“Congressman Lipinski would never support legislation that takes away the First Amendment rights of protesters,” Phil Davidson, a spokesperson for Lipinski, told The Intercept in a statement. “Labor and industry have approached the congressman on the issue of safety in light of some incidents that have occurred. The congressman has made clear that while maintaining safety is critical, he would not be supportive of anything that takes away the legitimate right to protest.”

In an email, John Stoody, AOPL vice president for government and public relations, underscored his belief that the criminalization provisions sought by industry are “narrowly targeted to specific dangerous activities threatening working and public safety” and include “specific First Amendment reference protecting free speech and right of assembly.”

Stoody noted that the industry still hopes that “Reps. Rush and Ocasio-Cortezwould join pipeline operators in opposing the shooting, torching or potentially blowing up of pipeline facilities” and confirmed that Bost and Flores are the industry’s champions in advancing their interests. The pipeline industry also shared its legislative proposal with Lipinski, Stoody added.

Meanwhile, advocates are fighting to resist the measures, which they say are part of a larger strategy to intimidate and imprison activists seeking to prevent the spread of oil and gas infrastructure. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union won a major victory, securing a federal court injunction against the industry-crafted law in South Dakota that criminalized “riot-boosting” protests of pipeline infrastructure. The Center for Constitutional Rights has challenged a similar industry-backed law in Louisiana.

“It is deeply troubling to learn that the House of Representatives may be engaged in a bipartisan effort to include language like this in federal law,” said Kathleen Ruane, senior legislative counsel with the ACLU, citing recent legislation designed to counter the demonstrations at Standing Rock.

“Proponents of these anti-protest measures claim that they are intended to ensure safety,” Ruane added. “However, there are already laws on the books for that. These measures are clearly intended to chill the speech of environmental activists, Native American tribes, and their allies in the fight to protect their lands and water.”

Greenpeace, too, has tracked the spread of similar industry-authored proposals as they have been introduced in more than two dozen state capitols. Connor Gibson, a research specialist with Greenpeace, echoed Ruane’s concerns.

“Oil companies are blatantly attempting to ghostwrite federal law, and they are making sure that peaceful protest activity would be punished in the same manner that acts of violence or sabotage would be,” Gibson said.

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092019/oil-port-protesters-charged-texas-fossil-fuel-infrastructure-law-pipelines-greenpeace-houston

A group of activists who shut down one of the nation's largest oil ports by hanging off a bridge over the Houston Ship Channel have been charged under a new Texas law that imposes harsh penalties for disrupting the operations of fossil fuel infrastructure.

The charges could present the first test for a wave of similar state laws that have been enacted around the country over the past three years in response to high-profile protests against pipelines and other energy projects.

More than two-dozen Greenpeace activists were arrested in Harris County after a number of them dangled from a bridge on Sept. 12 holding banners with the aim of blocking oil and gas tankers from passing through a busy shipping channel below.

The Texas law they were charged under was based on a model bill promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an industry-backed group.

Lawmakers in at least 16states have introduced versions of the bill over the past three years. Seven states have enacted them as law, according to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, and Iowa and South Dakota have enacted different bills with similar aims. The U.S. Department of Transportation earlier this year also proposed that Congress enact similar language into federal law.

The bills create harsh criminal penalties for people who trespass on pipelines or other "critical infrastructure" facilities, and several of them allow for steep fines of up to $1 million for organizations that support people who violate the laws.

The South Dakota law, passed in anticipation of protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, had a different twist. It created a way for the state or companies to seek damages from anyone who advises or encourages a person who engages in a "riot," defined as use of force or violence by three or more people acting together. Environmental groups sued, and on Sept. 18, a federal judge temporarily blocked the state from enforcing that part of the law. The judge wrote that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on at least some of their claims.[-->noem had to cave?]

Oil and gas industry groups have lobbied in favor of the bills, part of an effort to ratchet up pressure on protesters.

Environmental and civil liberties advocates have argued that the bills are an effort to stifle free speech and legitimate protest, noting that people who trespass can already be charged under existing laws.

"This is a bullying tactic that serves the interests of corporations at the expense of people exercising their right to free speech," said Tom Wetterer, general counsel of Greenpeace USA, in a statement.

In Texas, 26 people who were charged under the new law in connection with the bridge protest could face two years in prison and fines of up to $10,000, according to Travis Nichols, a Greenpeace spokesman. The organization itself could face a fine of up to $500,000 under the new state law, though Nichols said it has not been charged. Many of the protesters also face federal charges.

The Harris County District Attorney's Office did not immediately respond to questions for this article. Sean Teare, a Harris County prosecutor, told Reuters, "This action cost our community many, many millions of dollars in lost commerce."

[pix By hanging from a bridge over the Houston Ship Channel, Greenpeace protesters shut down traffic to the oil port ahead of a Democratic presidential primary debate in Houston on Sept. 12. Credit: Greenpeace

The charges appear to be the first under any of the new laws targeting fossil fuel infrastructure protesters.

The first "critical infrastructure" bill wasenacted in Oklahoma in 2017 as activists there were gearing up to fight plans for an oil pipeline. While more than a dozen people have been arrested under the law in Louisiana, as part of protests against an oil pipeline there, none has been charged yet. Several of the people arrested there have joined a constitutional challenge to Louisiana's law, which is pending in federal court, said Bill Quigley, a lawyer representing some of the activists.

The Texas protest was timed with the Democratic presidential debate in Houston. But it also came less than two weeks after the new law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, went into effect.

Nicole Debord, Greenpeace's legal counsel, said in an email that the group was waiting to see what evidence prosecutors provide, but that the law is "ripe for challenge."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

ACTIVISM

OIL SPILLS/PIPELINES

LITIGATION

DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/06/bayou-bridge-protesters-arrested-louisiana-advances-bill-toughening-penalties-pipeline-protests

no linx many

Bayou Bridge Protesters Arrested as Louisiana Advances Bill Toughening Penalties for Pipeline Protests

By Julie Dermansky • Friday, April 6, 2018

Protester chained to a barrel in the road]

On Thursday, April 5, opponents of the Bayou Bridge pipeline attempted to shut down its construction by blocking an industrial supply company’s facility in Iowa, Louisiana, just outside of Lake Charles on the same day a bill spelling out harsher penalties for pipeline protesters was advanced to committee during the Louisiana legislative session.

For about two hours starting at 6:30 a.m., roughly 20 protesters blocked the entrance to Yak Mat, an industrial yard that supplies access mats used to create temporary roadways at pipeline construction sites and enable trucks to pass through muddy areas. The site is close to the starting point of the Bayou Bridge pipeline, which spans south Louisiana from Lake Charles, near the Texas border, to St. James, along the Mississippi River. The pipeline is the tail end of Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access pipeline network, which begins in North Dakota.

Renate Heurich, locked to a barrel, being rolled out of the entrance to the Yat Mat lot in Iowa, Louisiana, during a protest against the Bayou Bridge pipeline.]

Louisiana joins several states, including Wyoming, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, in introducing a bill specifically making the types of protests increasingly common at oil and gas pipeline construction sites criminal acts with harsher penalties.This latest proposed legislation parallels an anti-protest law that passed in Oklahoma in May 2017. Protests against the Dakota Access pipeline were cited as the inspiration for these “critical infrastructure” bills, which liken the actions of pipeline protesters to “terrorist activities.”

Shortly after police arrived on Thursday, the protesters dispersed, except two New Orleans residents, both educators. Renate Heurich and Susan Prevost chained themselves into barrels fastened to the ground at the entrance to the mat supply yard. Both women started the day in crawfish costumes to emphasis the oil pipeline’s threat to the wild crawfish habitat in the Atchafalaya Basin, a National Heritage Area which the pipeline is being built through, despite an ongoing legal challenge.

[Law enforcement at the anti-pipeline protest

Law enforcement officers waiting to move in on the protesters in Iowa, Louisiana. There were more members of law enforcement at the protest than protesters.

Protester dressed as a crawfish

One of the Bayou Bridge pipeline protesters, dressed as an iconic Louisiana crawfish, in Iowa, Louisiana.]

Prevost stressed the importance of protecting Louisiana’s heritage. She worries that an oil spill in the basin will mean that future generations of local Louisianans won’t know the joys of traditional crawfish boils. A spill in the basin could decimate the wild crawfish population. “Can Louisiana really afford the Bayou Bridge pipeline from the company that has the worst record on pipeline accidents?” Prevost asked me the night before the protest.

Heurich, a founding member of 350 New Orleans, believes it is imperative to take a stand against climate change. She believes direct actions against the pipeline are necessary because tremendous public outcry against the permitting of new fossil fuel projects and ongoing legal challenges against the pipeline have not succeeded in stopping its construction.

“Six Democratic New Orleans city council members recently voted in favor of a new gas plant and Democratic governor John Bel Edwards still won’t acknowledge man’s role in climate change,” she said, “but they all know humans are responsible for climate change. I don’t believe they’re dumb. It is absolutely about the money.”

[Anti-pipeline protester Renate Heurich

Renate Heurich, a retired teacher and member of 350 New Orleans, protesting against the Bayou Bridge pipeline in Iowa, Louisiana.]

A large group of law enforcement officers and protesters at the site of the demonstration

Protesters move back when police move in and tell them to disperse. All but the two who remained in the barrels complied. ]

Heurich also wants to protect Louisianans from the pollution oil and gas industry sites produce which sicken many people in fenceline communities, like St. James, a small town where the Bayou Bridge pipeline will end.She told me that people she knows are already dying of illnesses associated with toxic emissions from industrial sites in the area, including Keith Hunter, a retired carpenter, whom she met at an anti-pipeline meeting in St. James. Others she met a year ago in St. James have been diagnosed with cancer.

After sheriff’s deputies managed to move Heurich’s barrel out of the way, operations were able to resume. The deputies offered Heurich and Prevost a deal: If they unlocked themselves on their own, they would be charged with felony trespass, but avoid being taken to jail. Heurich unlocked herself, while Prevost remained in her barrel until noon, deciding to unlock herself after two trucks passed dangerously close to her.

Truck loaded with mats passes next to protester chained to a barrel in the road

Truck loaded with mats returning to the yard passing dangerously close to Susan Prevost who was locked into a barrel fastened into the ground.]

Susan Prevost removes herself from the barrel she chained herself to

After conferring with a lawyer, Susan Prevost removes herself from a barrel she attached herself to in order to block work on the Bayou Bridge pipeline. ]

Susan Prevost is led away by two police officers

Susan Prevost being led away by police after her arrest during a protest against the Bayou Bridge pipeline.]

Cherri Foytlin, one of the founders of the anti-pipeline L’eau Est La Vie Camp (Water Is Life), was also arrested after live-streaming the demonstration for over an hour at the end of the driveway, which she thought was a public road. “I complied with what the officers told me,” she wrote in an email. When the police came after her, others from the camp pleaded with the officers to let her go, explaining she hadn’t heard them tell her to get off the driveway.

Another activist who took part in the protest was accused of stealing a car. All were released later the same afternoon but face charges.

Cherri Foytlin in the back of a police car

Cherri Foytlin, in the back of a police car being taken to jail for trespassing during a protest against the Bayou Bridge pipeline.]

Protester escorted by two officers

Protester being taken away.]

Heurich found it ironic that their direct action took place hours before the state legislature advanced to committee the bill HB 727, which would strengthen punishments against pipeline protesters. She said the attorney for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, who reportedly helped draft the bill, sat next to its lead sponsor during the session. “The oil and gas industry writes a law to protect its interest, in order to keep Louisiana a sacrifice zone while at the same time taking away our First Amendment right to protest its actions,” she said in dismay, “and our legislators support it.”

Louisiana law already prohibits trespassing at sites known as “critical infrastructure,” including power plants, oil refineries, chemical plants, water treatment facilities, and natural gas terminals.House Bill 727 adds pipelines and their construction areas to the list of critical infrastructure sites, a move in reaction to growing pipeline protests nationwide.

HB 727 is based on a model bill produced by the conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). “But it is ALEC-plus” Pam Spees, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing a coalition of groups against the Bayou Bridge pipeline in a variety of legal challenges, said. “People not involved in an action, who don’t protest, damage, or injure anything or anybody, can still be held accountable for being associated with activists.”

The bill increases the penalties for any damage to or interference with pipeline and other critical infrastructure sites. Sentences range from one to 15 years in prison with a $10,000 fine or six to 20 years plus a $25,000 fine if the damage could threaten human life or disrupt site operations. In addition, this state bill criminalizes “conspiracy to commit trespass.” Anyone involved with organizing a protest like the one on April 5 could face a year in prison. And anyone connected to an action that involves damaging the infrastructure could end up with a prison sentence of 20 years and fines of up to $250,000 if a judge rules that they are part of a conspiracy that threatens life or the operation of critical infrastructure.

“The language concerning conspiracy is worrisome,” Spees told me during the protest in Iowa. “The conspiracy provision makes it possible for law enforcement to arrest people before they have actually done anything wrong, even if they are just planning a nonviolent protest.” After Thursday’s protest, Spees traveled to the jail to help make sure everyone arrested during the demonstration was released.

Along with a handful of others, Meg Louge, a member of 350 New Orleans, spoke out against HB 727 at the state capitol in Baton Rouge. Many of them objected to the proposed law because existing trespass laws are already in place. Some argued during Thursday’s legislative session that the new law is meant to quash dissent against oil and gas pipelines. “The representatives who spoke in favor of the bill cited the protests in North Dakota a couple of times and how they don’t want Louisiana to ever have a ‘Standing Rock’ type situation,” Louge said.

Though Louge was not pleased the bill was moved to committee, she said that she was glad that Rep. Valarie Hodges, one of the bill’s sponsors, agreed to amend the conspiracy language during the session, before the bill is voted on in committee.

While Thursday’s pipeline protest didn’t go as planned, Heurich was not discouraged. “Today’s action was a success,” she said during a call. “One of our goals is to get the word out that climate change is a huge issue and that there is real opposition in Louisiana.”

Karen Savage, an award-winning investigative reporter, did not expect to be arrested as she covered Energy Transfer Partners’ controversial construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline through Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin, a river swamp bigger than the Florida Everglades.

“We were on land that the pipeline company doesn’t even claim to have,” she said, adding thatshe had permission in writing from the property owner to be there. “I didn’t think there was really any risk at all.”

Savage, a freelance reporter who teaches at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism, has previously covered the BP oil spill and environmental justice issues. Truthout describes her as “embedded” with L’eau Est La Vie protest camp, which opposes the pipeline.

She now faces “critical infrastructure” trespass charges, as do over half a dozen others recently arrested near Bayou Bridge construction. These felony charges come under a newly minted Louisiana law modeled after “critical infrastructure” laws in other states, which have been criticized as efforts to criminalize oil and gas pipeline protests.

Louisiana’s first felony trespass arrestscame on August 9, when three people kayaking through waters adjoining Bayou Bridge construction were charged under the new law, according to pipeline opponents who said the kayakers were paddling in public waterways. And three more people were arrested the same day as Savage, according to Truthout.

Early Monday morning, a Bayou Bridge activist who identifies as a “water protector” was tased and arrested after being forced from a “skypod,” a device similar to the tripods sometimes used in civil disobedience campaigns. That person was charged and held on $10,000 bail, according to a statement put out by local activists.

Like many who opposed Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota, Bayou Bridge opponents identify themselves as water protectors. Some of those opposed to Bayou Bridge have engaged in tree-sits as a form of civil disobedience.

Trespassing Near 'Critical Infrastructure'

Traditionally, trespass charges are relatively low-level crimes often punishable by little more than a fine.

The law turning trespassing — if it’s near “critical infrastructure” or construction sites for critical infrastructure — into a felony carrying a sentence of up to five years went into effect on August 1. It specifically amended the Louisiana criminal code to include oil and gas pipelines under the definition of “critical infrastructure,” and included “conspiracy” charges to enter or damage these sites with harsh penalties both in terms of prison time and fines.

Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Bayou Bridge pipeline, supported the bill elevating “critical infrastructure” trespassing to a felony, a local ABC News affiliate reported in April.

Another ALEC Bill Now Law

The Louisiana law is similar to a bill pushed nationwide by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded bill mill whose members include oil and gas companies like Chesapeake Energy and Continental Resources. Energy Transfer Partners has twice supported ALEC’s annual conferences, according to Sourcewatch.

Part of the reason that trespass charges are rarely serious is that it can be a complex legal issue to sift out who exactly owns a piece of land, especially if ownership is disputed. The owners of land where Bayou Bridge construction is currently underway have said that the company never obtained an easement or seized their property through eminent domain, meaning that they believe the construction is illegal.

Bayou Bridge opponents predicted that the bill would be used to target their campaigns — particularly if there’s a risk of being arrested for a felony even when you reasonably believe you are not trespassing.

“Clearly the purpose is to chill lawful dissent,” New Orleans-based environmental activist Meg Logue told The Advocate in April.

Other reports of police misconduct and the blurring of the lines between public officials and private security at Bayou Bridge sites drew a warning from lawyers from three prominent civil liberties organizations in late July.

Police stood by while company “[c]onstruction workers [used] chainsaws on the very trees these individuals are sitting in,” William P. Quigley, law professor and director of the Loyola Law Clinic; Pam Spees, senior staff attorney at Center for Constitutional Rights; and Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center wrote in a July 28 letter to Louisiana’s governor. “We also have reports that various state employees from the Department of Public Safety, Corrections, and Probation and Parole are working as private security in this matter.”

DeSmog has previously reported that legislatures in at least three other states have begun considering laws similar to ALEC’s model bill. So far this year, “critical infrastructure” bills have passed either the state House or Senate in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Similar bills have also been introduced in states including Virginia, New York, Ohio, and Minnesota, and Colorado and Washington state have also considered related measures.

some of the key findings from the report:

ALEC has been influential on a wide range of legislation in Texas including:

- The “Critical Infrastructure Protection” law enacted this year to criminalize protest;
- Expansion of the state’s preemption of local gun safety regulations;
- A 2019 attempt to preempt local paid sick-leave ordinances;
- Controversial “Stand your Ground” and Voter ID laws; and
- A law establishing a system of “high-risk insurance pools.”
BNSFRailway, Energy Future Holdings, McLane Company, and VISTRA Energy are some of the known Texas-based funders of ALEC.
Both Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy have filed complaints with the IRS against ALEC for claiming501(c)(3) charity status despite extensive lobbying for the benefit of its corporate backers.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing “think tank” and a member of ALEC’s sister organization the State Policy Network, is ALEC’s closest partner in the state. TPPF is a funder and member of ALEC, serving on several of ALEC’s task forces.

Since the 2010 FBI assessment was written, the specter of environmental extremism has been trotted out by both law enforcement and energy-industry security teams to describe a wide variety of grassroots groups opposed to the continued extraction of fossil fuels.In 2011, theRoyal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP ) published a report [4] titled, “Environmental Criminal Extremism and Canada’s Energy Sector.” The RCMP warned that environmental extremism posed a “clear and present criminal threat” to the energy industry. While both the FBI and RCMP reports make an effort to distinguish between lawful protest and criminal activity, they often conflate the two – in the RCMP report the terms “violence” and “direct action” are used interchangeably – and suggest opposition to the energy industry will lead to extremism. (The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division declined to answer questionsabout the 2010 bulletin.)

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critical infrastructure natl sec

Fossil fuel companies and trade groups are using essential pipeline safety legislation to further criminalize pipeline protests.

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