Science
Greenpeace Is Ordered to Pay Energy Transfer, a Pipeline Company, $660 Million
A North Dakota jury on Wednesday awarded damages totaling more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, which had sued Greenpeace over its role in protests nearly a decade ago against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The verdict was a major blow to the environmental organization. Greenpeace had said that Energy Transfer’s claimed damages, in the range of $300 million, would be enough to put the group out of business in the United States. The jury on Wednesday awarded far more than that.
Greenpeace said it would appeal. The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It has portrayed the lawsuit as an attempt to stifle oil-industry critics.
The nine-person jury in the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, N.D., about 45 minutes north of where the protests took place, returned the verdict after roughly two days of deliberations.
It took about a half-hour simply to read out the long list of questions posed to the jurors, such as whether they found that Greenpeace had committed trespass, defamation and conspiracy, among other violations, and how much money they would award for each offense.
Afterward, outside the courthouse in Mandan, both sides invoked the right to free speech, but in very different ways.
“We should all be concerned about the attacks on our First Amendment, and lawsuits like this that really threaten our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal adviser for Greenpeace USA.
Just moments before, Trey Cox of the firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, the lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, had called the verdict “a powerful affirmation” of the First Amendment. “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right,” he said. “However, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable.”
Earlier in the week, during closing arguments on Monday, Energy Transfer’s co-founder and board chairman, Kelcy Warren, an ally and donor to President Trump, had the last word for the plaintiffs when his lawyers played a recording of comments he made in a video deposition for the jurors. “We’ve got to stand up for ourselves,” Mr. Warren said, arguing that protesters had created “a total false narrative” about his company. “It was time to fight back.”
Energy Transfer is one of the largest pipeline companies in the country. The protests over its construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national attention and thousands of people to monthslong encampments in 2016 and 2017.
The demonstrators gathered on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, arguing that the pipeline cut through sacred land and could endanger the local water supply. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued to stop the project, and members of other tribes, environmentalists and celebrities were among the many who flocked to the rural area, including two figures who are now members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
But the protests erupted into acts of vandalism and violence at times, alienating people in the surrounding community in the Bismarck-Mandan area.
Greenpeace has long argued that the lawsuit was a threat to First Amendment rights, brought by a deep-pocketed plaintiff and carrying dangerous implications for organizations that speak out about a broad range of issues. Greenpeace has called the lawsuit a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, the term for cases meant to hinder free speech by raising the risk of expensive legal battles. Many states have laws that make it difficult to pursue such cases, though not North Dakota.
Mr. Cox laced into Greenpeace during closing arguments on Monday. The company accused Greenpeace of funding and supporting attacks and protests that delayed the pipeline’s construction, raised costs and harmed Energy Transfer’s reputation.
Jurors, Mr. Cox said, would have the “privilege” of telling the group that its actions were “unacceptable to the American way.” He laid out costs incurred that tallied up to about $340 million and asked for punitive damages on top of that.
“Greenpeace took a small, disorganized, local issue and exploited it to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and promote its own selfish agenda,” he said. “They thought they’d never get caught.”
The 1,172-mile underground pipeline has been operating since 2017 but is awaiting final permits for a small section where it crosses federal territory underneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River, near Standing Rock. The tribe is still trying to shut down the pipeline in a different lawsuit.
Lawyers for Greenpeace called the case against the group a “ridiculous” attempt to pin blame on it for everything that happened during months of raucous protests, including federal-government delays in issuing permits.
Three Greenpeace entities were named in the lawsuit: Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund and Greenpeace International. Greenpeace Inc. is the arm of the group that organizes public campaigns and protests. It is based in Washington, as is Greenpeace Fund, which raises money and awards grants.
The third entity named in the lawsuit, Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, is the coordinating body for 25 independent Greenpeace groups around the world.
It was principally the actions of Greenpeace Inc. that were at the heart of the trial, which began Feb. 24. They included training people in protest tactics, dispatching its “rolling sunlight” solar-panel truck to provide power, and offering funds and other supplies. Greenpeace International maintained that its only involvement was signing a letter to banks expressing opposition to the pipeline, a document that was signed by hundreds and that had been drafted by a Dutch organization. Greenpeace Fund said it had no involvement.
On Wednesday, the jurors found Greenpeace Inc. liable for the vast majority of the damages awarded, which came to more than $660 million, according to representatives for both Greenpeace and Energy Transfer. The damages cover dozens of figures that were read out in court for each defendant on each claim.
Separately, Greenpeace International this year had countersued Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, invoking a new European Union directive against SLAPP suits as well as Dutch law.
During closing arguments on Monday in North Dakota, Everett Jack Jr. of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, the lead lawyer for the Greenpeace Inc., was a study in contrast with Mr. Cox. Both men wore dark suits and red ties to make their final arguments before the jury. But their demeanors were polar opposites.
Mr. Cox was energetic, indignant, even wheeling out a cart stacked with boxes of evidence during his rebuttal to argue that he had proved his case. Mr. Jack was calm and measured, recounting the chronology of how the protests developed to make the case that they had swelled well before Greenpeace got involved.
Given the months of disruptions caused locally by the protests, the jury pool in the area was widely expected to favor Energy Transfer.
Among the observers in the courtroom were a group of lawyers calling themselves the Trial Monitoring Committee who criticized the court for denying a Greenpeace petition to move the trial to the bigger city of Fargo, which was not as affected by the protests. The group included Martin Garbus, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, and Steven Donziger, who is well-known for his yearslong legal battle with Chevron over pollution in Ecuador.
After the verdict, Mr. Garbus called it “the worst First Amendment case decision I have ever seen” and expressed concern that an appeal that reached the Supreme Court could be used to overturn decades of precedent around free-speech protections.
The group also took issue with the number of jurors with ties to the oil industry or who had expressed negative views of protests during jury selection. But Suja A. Thomas, a law professor at the University of Illinois and an expert on juries, said the precedent in North Dakota courts was not to use “blanket disqualifications of jurors just because they might have some kind of interest,” whether it’s financial or based on experience or opinion.
Rather, the judge has to determine whether each individual juror can be impartial. “There can be interest; they have to determine whether the interest is significant enough such that the person cannot be fair,” Ms. Thomas said.
Natali Segovia is the executive director of Water Protector Legal Collective, an Indigenous-led legal and advocacy nonprofit group that grew out of the Standing Rock protests. Ms. Segovia, who is also a member of the trial monitoring group, said her organization was involved with about 800 criminal cases that resulted from the protests. The vast majority have been dismissed, she said.
What had gotten lost during the Greenpeace trial, she said, was the concern about water that had spurred so much protest. She said she saw a larger dynamic at play. “At its core, it’s a proxy war against Indigenous sovereignty using an international environmental organization,” she said.
NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.
Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.
But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.
On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.
A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.
For the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few.
“I think the mood generally is pretty light,” Ray Allensworth, the spacecraft program director at Firefly, said that afternoon. “I think people are just excited and also just kind of relieved to see how well the mission went and just kind of taking a moment to enjoy the last few hours with the lander.”
Scientists with cargo on the other commercial moon missions had invested years of effort and ended up with little or nothing. Those NASA assigned to Blue Ghost are coming away with a cornucopia of new data to work with.
Robert Grimm, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who led one of the scientific payloads, acknowledged his good fortune. “Better than being a crater,” he said.
One of the NASA experiments had collected data just as Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from different angles of the exhaust of the spacecraft’s thrusters as they kicked up lunar dust and carved a small crater.
“This gives us the ability with these cameras to measure three-dimensional shapes,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists working on the project known as Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies, or SCALPSS.
Engineers want to understand those dynamics to prevent potential disasters when bigger and heavier spacecraft like SpaceX’s Starship land astronauts on the moon. If NASA sets up a lunar outpost, spacecraft will return to that site more than once. Rocks flying upward could knock out an engine on a descending spacecraft or damage nearby structures.
In early looks at the photographs, one of the surprises is that the exhaust plume from the thrusters started kicking lunar dust when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record the dust cloud from a much larger lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, plans to send to the moon later this year.
NASA not only wants to understand lunar dust, or regolith, but also how to get rid of it. The particles can be sharp and abrasive like shards of glass, posing a hazard to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on Blue Ghost called the Electrodynamic Dust Shield used electric fields to clean dust off surfaces.
Two experiments collected information that should cast light on the moon’s interior.
Dr. Grimm’s payload was the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, the first of its kind deployed on the surface of another world.
To deploy, spring-loaded launchers flung four probes about the size of soup cans in four different directions. Connected by cables to the lander, the probes worked like supersized voltmeters. A second component, raised atop an eight-foot-high mast, measured magnetic fields.
Together, these readings reveal naturally occurring variations in electric and magnetic fields that tell how easily electric currents flow deep underground, and that tells something about what is down there. The conductivity of colder rocks, for example, is lower.
Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill, using bursts of nitrogen gas to excavate dirt. A needle at the end of the instrument measured temperature and how easily heat flows through the material. Because of rocks in the way, the drill went down only about three feet, not the 10 feet that had been hoped.
In videos, “you can see the rocks flying out and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built the drill.
Still, three feet was deep enough for the scientific measurements, Dr. Zacny said. Data from the drill and the magnetotelluric sounder could both give hints about how the moon and other rocky worlds formed or why the near side of the moon looks so different from the far side.
“It’s really a basic question about lunar geology we’re trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm said.
Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, also built a second device called PlanetVac to demonstrate a simplified technology to collect samples. This device used compressed gas to stir up regolith into a small tornado and direct it into a container.
The technology will be used on a robotic Japanese space mission known as Martian Moons Exploration, which will bring back samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars.
“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us confidence that it should work on Phobos as well,” Dr. Zacny said.
Brian Walsh’s experiment on Blue Ghost did not look at the moon but back at Earth.
“It’s a really good vantage point,” said Dr. Walsh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University.
Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that deflects solar wind particles around Earth. His telescope recorded X-rays emitted when high-speed particles from the sun slam into atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The boundary between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind is like two sumo wrestlers pushing against each other. The view from afar should help scientists tell whether that boundary shifts slowly or in sudden leaps.
That is important because it affects how well Earth’s magnetic field protects us from occasional gargantuan belches of charged particles that bombard the planet during solar storms.
“We’re trying to figure out how that gate opens and how energy spills through,” Dr. Walsh said.
Blue Ghost has already left a lasting impression.
Maria Banks said that as she left the mission operations center each night, she would look up at the moon hanging in the sky.
“Which would just basically stop me in my tracks every day,” Dr. Banks said. “I don’t think I’ll ever see the moon the same again, because for the rest of my life, Firefly’s lander and our instruments will be up there.”
The shadow of the Blue Ghost spacecraft after it landed on the moon, with Earth in the distance.
Firefly Aerospace
Blue Ghost just completed its mission, which lasted a full lunar day — two Earth weeks — on the near side of the moon.
The spacecraft, about the size of a small car, conducted a series of experiments. It drilled three feet into the lunar soil, took X-ray images of the magnetic bubble that surrounds and protects Earth and sought a mysterious yellow glow at sunset.
Built by Firefly Aerospace, a startup in Texas, Blue Ghost was launched from Earth in January and pulled into orbit around the moon in mid-February. A couple of weeks later, it took this video, sped up by a factor of 10, as it circled 62 miles above the surface. The shiny sheets are radiator panels that protected the spacecraft from the extreme heat while in sunshine.
A timelapse video of Blue Ghost orbiting the moon on Feb. 26.
Firefly Aerospace
Landing
In the early hours of March 2, Blue Ghost fired its engine to drop it out of orbit, falling toward the moon. Just over an hour later, it was on the surface in Mare Crisium, a lava plain inside an ancient 345-mile-wide impact crater in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.
Blue Ghost became the first completely successful landing by a commercial company, and Firefly achieved that on its first try.
Moon dust and small rocks scattered during Blue Ghost’s landing.
Firefly Aerospace
Several companies and countries have aimed to land on the moon in recent years. The map below shows the crewed Apollo moon landing sites, as well as more recent robotic landings from China, India, Japan and commercial companies. Recent crash sites from failed landings are also shown.
Drag the moon in any direction to view the landing sites.
China has a 100 percent success rate with four successful Chang’e robotic landings, but many other missions have crashed.
The failures include Hakuto-R Mission 1, from Ispace, a Japanese company; Beresheet, from an Israeli nonprofit; Luna 25, from Russia; and Chandrayaan-2, from India. (India’s second try, Chandrayaan-3, was successful.)
Three other landers — SLIM, from the Japanese space agency, and Odysseus and Athena, from Intuitive Machines of Houston — landed and communicated back to Earth, but their success came with an asterisk. All three toppled over after landing.
Experiments
While Firefly built and operated Blue Ghost, NASA sponsored the mission, part of the agency’s efforts to tap into commercial ventures to send its scientific cargo to space at lower costs. NASA paid Firefly $101.5 million to carry 10 science and technology payloads to the lunar surface.
Blue Ghost landed at lunar sunrise so that the solar-powered spacecraft could operate for the longest possible duration.
Lunar sunrise at Mare Crisium.
Firefly Aerospace
One of Blue Ghost’s payloads, PlanetVac, demonstrated a technology to simplify the collecting of soil and rocks. It fired a blast of gas into the ground, which propelled material into a container. This technology will be used on a Japanese mission, Martian Moons Exploration, which will collect samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars, and bring them back to Earth for study.
PlanetVac collected a sample of lunar material.
Firefly Aerospace
Another experiment, Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, flung four sensors, each a little smaller than a soup can, in directions at 90-degree angles to one another (like north, south, east and west on a compass). The sensors landed about 60 feet away, and, connected by cables to the lander, measured voltages — essentially a supersized version of a conventional voltmeter. An eight-foot-high mast shot upward, lifting an instrument to measure magnetic fields. The experiment gathered data about naturally occurring currents inside the moon, which provides hints about what the moon is made of down to 700 miles below the surface.
Blue Ghost launched a sensor trailing a thin cable, then raised a mast.
Firefly Aerospace
A pneumatic drill used bursts of nitrogen gas to blow away soil and rock, reaching three feet below the surface. A probe measured temperatures and the flow of heat from the moon’s interior.
The LISTER experiment drilled into the surface.
Firefly Aerospace
Solar Eclipse
While people on Earth were taking in a blood moon and a total lunar eclipse on the evening of March 14, Blue Ghost witnessed and photographed a total solar eclipse.
Blue Ghost turned red as the sun slipped behind the Earth.
Firefly Aerospace
During the eclipse, temperatures dropped from 100 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 270 degrees. The spacecraft relied on battery power to continue operating through five hours of near-total darkness.
A series of images fading to darkness during the total solar eclipse on March 14.
Firefly Aerospace
This image shows the “diamond ring effect” as the sun began to emerge from behind Earth.
The diamond ring effect.
Firefly Aerospace
Sunset
On March 16, the sun began to set and the lunar day was nearly over. Before its mission ended, Blue Ghost snapped high-resolution images of the scene. It was more than a few final pretty snapshots. Scientists are hoping the pictures can help solve an enduring scientific mystery of the lunar horizon glow.
Eugene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 who in 1972 was the last man to walk on the moon, sketched observations of a glow along the horizon before sunrise. However, that phenomenon is not easily explained because the moon lacks an atmosphere to scatter light.
Sunset on March 16, with Earth and Venus just above the horizon.
Firefly Aerospace
Signoff
This was the last message from the Blue Ghost spacecraft, about five hours after sunset:
Mission mode change detected, now in Monument Mode
Goodnight friends. After exchanging our final bits of data,
I will hold vigil on this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars.
Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.
But it is remarkable that a species might be outlasted by its own ingenuity.
Here lies Blue Ghost, a testament to the team who, with the loving support of their families and friends, built and operated this machine and its payloads,
to push the capabilities and knowledge of humanity one small step further.
Per aspera ad astra!
Love, Blue Ghost
The spacecraft was not designed to survive the bitter cold of the lunar night. But another lunar mission, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft, surprised engineers last year by riding out several lunar nights. In early April, after the sun rises again, Firefly will listen for radio messages from Blue Ghost, just in case it does revive.
A French scientist was prevented from entering the United States this month because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration’s policies on academic research, according to the French government.
Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, described the move as worrying.
“Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values we will continue to proudly uphold,” Mr. Baptiste said in a statement. “I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law, wherever they may be in the world.”
Mr. Baptiste did not identify the scientist who was turned away but said that the academic was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research and had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials stopped him.
The U.S. authorities denied entry to the scientist and then deported him because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his “personal opinion” on the Trump administration’s science policies, Mr. Baptiste said.
It was not immediately clear what led the border authorities to stop the scientist, why they examined the contents of his phone or what they found objectionable about the conversations.
Customs officers are allowed to search the cellphone, computer, camera or any other electronic device of any travelers crossing the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, although the agency says that such instances are rare. In 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched, according to the agency.
Mr. Baptiste’s office declined to provide further details about the case. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Paris also declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the National Center for Scientific Research said that the scientist who was turned back did not wish to speak to the media and declined to comment further.
The Agence France-Presse news agency reported earlier on the scientist’s refused entry to the United States.
Mr. Baptiste, the minister, has been particularly vocal over the past few weeks in denouncing threats to academic freedom in the United States, where funding cuts and layoffs by the Trump administration have targeted institutions of higher education, scientific research and the federal government’s own scientific work force.
Mr. Baptiste has urged French universities and research institutes to welcome researchers seeking to leave the United States.
“Europe must be there to protect research and welcome the talent that can contribute to its success,” Mr. Baptiste wrote on social media after meeting with his European counterparts in Warsaw on Wednesday to address “threats to free research in the United States.”
Jennifer Jones, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in the United States, said she worried that cases like the one involving the French scientist would have a chilling effect on research collaboration across borders.
“My fear is that these are early cases with many more to follow,” Dr. Jones said. “I am hearing from my network that people are very concerned about any kind of international travel in either direction.”
“And that should worry all of us,” she added. If scientists limit their movements to conferences and other events designed to advance research, she said, “it is the public that is going to suffer.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
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