Raising the Price of Protest

Greenpeace Staff Attorney Deepa Padmanabha outside the Morton County Memorial Courthouse after closing arguments.

For the past three weeks, in a state courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota, the fossil fuel company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline has been trying to put a dollar amount on the price of protest. Their starting bid was $300 million.

In a civil suit, Energy Transfer claimed Greenpeace secretly orchestrated the Indigenous-led Standing Rock protests through a campaign of misinformation, tortious interference, and, I guess, black magic.

Wednesday afternoon, the jury awarded Energy Transfer over twice what the fossil fuel giant originally asked for. Hundreds of millions of dollars.

The decision has a very real chance of bankrupting Greenpeace in the US, and will have financial implications for Greenpeace offices around the world.

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By blaming Greenpeace, Energy Transfer framed Standing Rock as a monolithic movement with a centralized, top-down power source. This power source, some mythical “Greenpeace,” made decisions for everyone, doled out money, and gave permission for various actions across time and space.

That strict hierarchical world is the only one Energy Transfer can imagine, a world where everything has a centrally-controlled price that dictates decisions. They can’t conceive of a distributed power network of self-organizing resistance hubs where needs or rights might not have a dollar value. They can’t imagine large numbers of individuals who share the same values, embodying collective resistance and protection. There has to be a big, rich boss. Greenpeace.

And while Energy Transfer, part of MAGA’s private wing, is working to bankrupt protesters through legal slop, MAGA’s enforcement wing is physically detaining protesters without the due process the constitution requires.

Last Saturday, federal agents kidnapped, without charge or explanation, Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil—a legal, permanent U.S. resident—at his home, in front of his pregnant wife, then transported him a thousand miles away to a detention center in Louisiana, where they’ve held him since.

Now, they are fighting tooth and nail to deport him. Why? Because he protested the U.S. enabling of the genocide in Gaza, peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and assembly.

In Mahmoud Khalil’s case, the punishment for speaking out against government policy is arrest, detention, and deportation..

In Greenpeace’s case, the punishment for speaking out against corporate abuse is half a billion dollars.

This oligarch affinity group of private interests and government agents are raising the cost of non-compliance for anyone engaged in meaningful resistance. They want non-compliance to feel impossible.

On the corporate side, Energy Transfer is part of an effort to commodify protest by tying its cost directly to the theoretical economic impact resistance might have on company value. They are falsely claiming that, somehow, Greenpeace led the #NoDAPL resistance at Standing Rock, and that the campaign of “misinformation” and “tortious interference” caused the company multi-million dollar delays, exorbitant security costs, bad PR, and just generally bummed them out.

Price? Half a billion dollars.

According to economist Karl Polanyi, a “fictitious commodity” is something that was not originally produced for sale but is treated as if it has a market price. So, for example, human activity is not something naturally produced for sale—it’s a fundamental part of life—and yet we have hourly wages, gig economy services, and salaries that allow companies to translate our human activity, our life, into a flexible, market-traded service. Labor.

Or, another example from Polanyi – land. Land is a shared communal space, not “naturally” for sale, but corporations like Energy Transfer have turned it into a commodity, filled with other extractable commodities. They understand the price.

And now, Energy Transfer is trying to turn protest into a “fictitious commodity” with a price that can be calculated, both by corporate interests, and, they hope, protesters who will have to think twice about whether they can afford it.

These moves aren’t just about punishing Greenpeace— though the oligarchs are clearly relishing that part—they’re about establishing a financial formula for suppressing dissent. It’s about making disobedience an externality in economic calculations, rather than a fundamental political right.

If this logic holds, the right to protest will no longer be an inherent democratic right but a cost-burdened activity—one that could be priced out of existence for groups without the financial means to withstand these lawsuits.

It’s not just about suing Greenpeace for damages but about setting a precedent: the more expensive a project, the more financially risky it will be to protest it. At the end of the day, it’s about making sure corporate power dictates what kind of activism is financially and legally survivable.

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Beyond imprisoning and bankrupting protesters, the oligarchs are also trying to fix protest in their MAGA worldview, where gold cards replace green cards and dissent requires a fixed payment, like membership dues or an HOA fee.

In their world, if, for example, you want to protest Elon Musk’s unelected gutting of humanitarian aid programs by holding up signs outside a Tesla dealership, then you need to weigh your disobedience on the Mahmoud Khalil/Greenpeace scale. Is it worth it to speak out?

Do you have half a billion dollars? Do you want to be deported without due process? Can you risk it?

And even if you’re not a protestor. Even if you aren’t holding up signs, chanting, or marching. You’re just somebody who works with federal grants to help transition the economy off of fossil fuels. Because you believe climate change is real.

Then, you’re also at risk. The FBI recently informed Citibank that it had received ‘credible information’ about a possible conspiracy to defraud the United States through the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). And until the FBI can find out just what’s going on here, the EPA has frozen billions of dollars in funding for Habitat for Humanity, the United Way, the Climate United Fund, Appalachian Community Capital, and a few more partner organizations.

So you, too, need to weigh your work on these newly tipped scales. Can you afford to work on clean energy? On Gaza? On gender? On justice?

It’s all part of the overall campaign to raise the cost of disobedience until it feels impossible. This is how authoritarianism grows: not just through sweeping military takeovers or riotous occupation— but also through a slow, methodical increase in the physical, financial, and mental price of resistance.

Protesters aren’t just assaulted and jailed; they are sued and financially squeezed, legally entangled. Lawsuits make speaking out unaffordable. Immigration laws make activism life-threatening. Police make dissent a bodily risk.

The goal is not just to punish protest, but to make the very idea of defiance feel too costly to attempt.

The next stage won’t look like the military coups we’ve seen elsewhere. Like everything else, it will be as “American” as apple pie. Idiocracy as prophecy. A mesmerizing spectacle, while the courts chip away at representative government, the price of disobedience rises, until everyday people become too scared—or too fatigued—to fight back.

If they can make Greenpeace pay $600 million, if they can disappear Mahmoud Khalil into a detention center, then you should probably just keep quiet. Pick your battles. Save your powder. You survived the first Trump administration, right?

Right?

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Photo by Stephanie Keith/Greenpeace

Amber Massie-Blomfield, in her book Acts of Resistance, writes:

“Lately, I’ve been reminded of the story of A. J. Muste, a prolific American pacifist who, according to legend, during the years of the war in Vietnam, stood outside the White House with a candle, every single night. For years. When a journalist asked him, ‘Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone with a candle?’ he answered: ‘Oh, I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.’”

Resistance starts with a decision like this, a choice to refuse compliance, to refuse silence, to refuse to look away. But individual resistance is not simply about high-profile symbolic acts—candles or banners—it’s about sustained, boring, uncomfortable defiance. It’s about school board meetings, abortion funds, mutual aid, and calling out bad actors, even when it’s inconvenient. It’s about discomfort, pushing back against people we might know and love but who we know, in our heart of hearts, are wrong.

It will, most likely, mean being seen, being labeled, and being targeted.

It will cost a lot. But not as much as silence.

Follow Alleen Brown’s reporting on the Greenpeace trial here: https://bsky.app/profile/alleenbrown.bsky.social

And share why you’re with Greenpeace here: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/act/we-will-not-be-silenced/