Emily Johnston, who admitted shutting down 5 pipelines last year with the help of four friends, has finally found a judge willing to hear her “necessity defence”.
I shut down an oil pipeline – because climate change is a ticking bomb
Emily Johnston
Friday 24 November 2017 20.00 AEDTNormal methods of political action and protest are simply not working. If we don’t reduce emissions boldly and fast, that’s genocide.
Alittle over a year ago, four friends and I shut down all five pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil into the United States by using emergency shut-off valves. As recent months have made clear, climate change is not only an imminent threat; it is an existing catastrophe. It’s going to get worse, and tar sands oil—the dirtiest oil on Earth—is one of the reasons.
We did this very, very carefully—after talking to pipeline engineers, and doing our own research. Before we touched a thing, we called the pipeline companies twice to warn them, and let them turn off the pipelines themselves if they thought that was better; all of them did so.
We knew we were at risk for years in prison. But the nation needs to wake up nowto what’s coming our way if we don’t reduce emissions boldly and fast; business as usual is now genocidal.
In shutting off the pipelines, we hoped to be part of that wake-up, to put ourselves in legal jeopardy in order to state dramatically and unambiguously that normal methods of political action and protest are simply not working with anywhere near the speed that we need them to.
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Three of our trials (which are in four states) had already rejected the use of the necessity defense. In North Dakota, the judge said essentially “I’m not going to let you put US energy policy on trial”. But recently, I and the other Minnesota defendants were finally granted it.
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I was struck by the North Dakota judge’s implicit understanding that letting science be spoken in her courtroom would have had the effect of putting energy policy on trial—of reversing, in effect, who was the defendant, and who the prosecutor.
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Via Eric Worrall