Eco-activists responsible for sabotaging pipelines in 2016 are committed radicals willing to take whatever measure they deem necessary to fight global warming, according to a report Tuesday from The New York Times.
Shutting off portions of the Keystone Pipeline and violating the law is necessary to prevent climate change, two of the Seattle-based activists told TheNYT. Their strident positions have come at a high price.
Emily Johnston, an editor and a poet from Seattle, joined several other activists from Seattle and across the West to shut-off valves on a pair of oil pipelines Canadian energy company, Enbridge, owns and operates.
“I’m not courageous or brave,” Johnston told a crowd at a progressive church in Oregon shortly after getting bailed out following her sabotage efforts. “I’m just more afraid of climate change than I am of prison.”
Temporarily closing down pipelines in Minnesota was part of an effort to save the world from fossil fuels, Johnston wrote in a 2017 editorial for The Guardian. A judge is allowing her to use a “necessity defense” to justify her actions in 2017 against the Enbridge Pipeline System.
She was not the only person in her group to demonstrate a rabid obsession with destroying energy projects to prevent global warming. Michael Foster’s compulsion to engage in direct action against pipelines seriously damaged his personal life and ultimately broke apart his family.
Foster was convicted in October of conspiracy and reckless endangerment after cutting through a chain link fence and turning a shut-off valve on the Keystone Pipeline to demonstrate against the Dakota Access pipeline. His behavior before that point had a profoundly negative effect on his children.
“When we would try to refuse, when we would say, ‘Hey, I’m tired,’ or ‘Hey, I have homework,’ or ‘He, I have school today,’ it would be: ‘Don’t you care about the planet? Don’t you care about the future’?” one of his older children said, referring to Foster’s repeated efforts to use his children as mouthpieces to distribute his message.
“This is not a typical criminal case,” Judge Laurie Fontaine said in 2017 during Foster’s trial. She was referring to the necessity defense Foster and his fellow activist, Sam Jessup, made to justify their actions.
“If you can’t convince the government, then you convince the people … and it seems to me the way you convince the people in this world is by 60-second sound bites, by commercials,” she added. If an activist is concerned about global warming, then the best option is to convince lawmakers to tackle the problem – engaging in eco-terrorism is not the answer, Fontaine noted.
Read more at Daily Caller
I would like to take all these enviromentalists wacko activists and put them all to work building Birdhouses planting trees a nd cleaning up highways and roadways and city parks after one of their dumb Earth Day Celebrations
Environmentalists believe that they should try to ensure that their world-view is accepted by everyone else, if not by persuasion, then by coercion. In their view, matters of conscience (theirs) take precedence over everything else, even the law of the land. The insidious way in which they have infiltrated modern society and gained influence should give us all cause for concern.
Take, for example, the judicial system in the UK, supposedly a bastion of law and order. It’s hard to find justification for some decisions in the past 20 years. Here’s a few:
• 1996: A jury in Liverpool acquitted four women who caused £1.5 million damage to a Hawk jet Fighter at the British Aerospace factory;
• 1999: Three women were acquitted of causing £80,000 damage to Trident nuclear submarine equipment;
• 2000: Greenpeace director Lord Melchett and 27 activists were found not guilty of criminal damage, after ripping up a field of GM crops.
• 2000: Five Greenpeace activists were found not guilty of criminal damage after occupying a municipal incinerator in London. The prosecution (ie the taxpayer) was ordered to pay the costs of £250,000.
• 2007: Six Greenpeace activists scaled a chimney at Kingsnorth power station in Kent and daubed slogans on it causing £26,000 worth of damage. Found not guilty.
• 2015: Thirteen activists were found guilty of aggravated trespass when they blocked runways at Heathrow, causing 25 flight cancellations and what the judge called “astronomical cost”. Nevertheless, they were spared jail and given just six weeks’ suspended sentence.
It seems that when one is “acting out of conscience”, it’s ok to break the law. But it’s just another example of the extent to which the Environmentalist zeal has spread its message into popular culture.
Prison or their mom’s basement suit ? Everything they are wearing and the tools used were available because of fossil fuels .
None of them could survive long without fossil fuels . But that isn’t really what it’s about is it ?
These useful idiots probibly worship Gaia Al Bore is their High Priest they celebrate Earth Day by sitting lotus style going OOOOOMMMMMM OOOOOMMMM OOOOMMMMM they howl like pack of wolves when the Full Moon rises their probibly all strict vegans and they read Al Bores junk science book Earth In The Balance(Its their Bible)they watch Bores two junk science fake movies as well as DiCaprio’s junk science fake films and they think those Hurricanes last year was warnings from Gaia and they probibly also read James Lovelocks wacko book Gaias Revenge and they must ride bikes everywhere