[ Industry-designed bills to silence climate protests are under
consideration in Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota and Montana. More are
likely to come.] [[link removed]]

FOUR MORE STATES PROPOSE HARSH NEW PENALTIES FOR PROTESTING FOSSIL
FUELS  
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Alexander C. Kaufman
February 20, 2021
HuffPost
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_ Industry-designed bills to silence climate protests are under
consideration in Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota and Montana. More are
likely to come. _

A Native American environmental activist dances with an eagle feather
in front of the construction site for Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline
near Palisade, Minnesota on January 9, 2021., KEREM YUCEL/AFP/GETTY
IMAGES

 

Dawn Goodwin spent her 50th birthday among towering pines and yellow
birches whose tree rings make her lifespan seem like a child’s in
comparison. But on that cool, overcast Saturday in December, the
growling of construction trucks and chainsaws drowned out the natural
soundscape of gushing freshwater and wind whispering between pine
needles on the banks of the Mississippi River. 

Goodwin was at this river crossing near Palisade, Minnesota, to
protest the construction of the energy company Enbridge’s Line 3
pipeline, a $9.3 billion project to carry tar-sands oil ― one of the
dirtiest varieties of crude oil ― from Joliette, North Dakota, to a
terminal facility in Clearbrook, Minnesota. From there, it’s
distributed to refineries. Goodwin winced as workers felled a mighty
spruce while clearing a 50-foot berth for the pipeline, its sappy
rings laid bare as its crown thudded to the ground.

“At that moment, the tree just spoke to me, saying, ‘I’m being
disrespected. I am medicine. And they’re just cutting me and
throwing me aside with no care,’” said Goodwin, who lives on the
White Earth Reservation and goes by the Ojibwe name Gaagigeyaashiik.
“I just felt like I needed to go and pick it up, so I walked
over.” 

Without realizing it, she’d stepped over an invisible border and had
officially trespassed into a construction site. Within seconds, half
a dozen police officers surrounded her, carrying zip ties to arrest
her. Video footage of the incident shows her ― bundled in an
oversize green hoodie, a black winter jacket and matching mittens ―
apologizing repeatedly as fellow activists chant, “Let her go.” It
proved enough to talk the officers down to a misdemeanor citation.
She’s due in court next week.

Under a new bill in the Minnesota legislature, Goodwin could face much
steeper consequences. Had any of her fellow activists caused even
minor damage to equipment at the site, the bill could’ve held
virtually anyone even remotely involved — especially those caught
trespassing — liable for the damage, threatening protesters with up
to 10 years in prison and $20,000 in fines. 

An activist wouldn’t even need to be convicted of trespassing to be
held liable ― an arrest is enough under the legislation. 

[Dawn Goodwin, pictured in the green hoodie in the center, was cited
on Dec. 12, 2020, for stepping too close to the Line 3 pi]

Dawn Goodwin, pictured in the green hoodie in the center, was cited on
Dec. 12, 2020, for stepping too close to the Line 3 pipeline
construction site during a protest.  DAWN GOODWIN

“It is extremely draconian,” said Teresa Nelson, the legal
director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. “We
don’t impose those kinds of punishments on people in any other part
of our statutory code.” 

Minnesota’s bill is tougher than similar legislation proposed in
other states, but it’s not unique. The legislation follows a model
that’s been approved in 14 states and is also under consideration in
Arkansas
[[link removed]],
Montana
[[link removed]],
and Kansas
[[link removed]]. The
model designates ― if it isn’t already so ― any oil, gas, coal,
or plastics facilities as “critical infrastructure” and adds
aggressive new penalties for vague charges of trespassing or
tampering.

This special status is normally given to dams and nuclear reactors,
and allows lawmakers to increase criminal penalties for commonplace
protest at these sites, such as blocking a roadway, tethering oneself
to equipment or even just rallying near a company’s property. In
many cases, any person or organization associated with an individual
activist convicted of breaking the law can be held accountable. What
was once a misdemeanor is now reclassified as more severe crimes ―
in some cases, even felonies ― with fines of tens of thousands of
dollars, and convictions can sometimes carry jail sentences.

The uptick in these proposals is a sign that state lawmakers are using
the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot to justify new restrictions on peaceful
demonstrations that are meant to prevent protests in the first
place, free-speech experts say.

“When someone has to weigh the potential of imprisonment for
protesting, they will really, very likely limit their own speech,”
said Nora Benavidez, director of the advocacy group PEN America’s
U.S. free expressions program. “These bills are just a chilling
effect on protest.”

IMPRISONING SLAVES’ DESCENDANTS, BANKRUPTING TINY CHURCHES

The similarities among the state bills are no accident. 

The legislation is based on a model bill that the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing policy shop funded by
corporations and conservative billionaires, drafted and began
promoting to Republican state lawmakers in the wake of the fight over
the Dakota Access pipeline project. State disclosure records routinely
show lobbyists for companies such as Enbridge, Exxon Mobil Corp., Koch
Industries and Marathon Petroleum consulting lawmakers on the
legislation.

[Environmentalists and Native American activists march to the
construction site for the Line 3 oil pipeline near Palisade, Min]

Environmentalists and Native American activists march to the
construction site for the Line 3 oil pipeline near Palisade,
Minnesota, on Jan. 9.  KEREM YUCEL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Bills of this type have surfaced in roughly half of states
[[link removed]] over
the past four years, but they’ve passed at a more rapid pace since
the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the country fell into crisis,
the governors in Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia all signed
legislation
[[link removed]]
in the middle of March 2020.

Some bills have proven too harsh even in states where the fossil fuel
industry is most powerful. Louisiana’s Republican-controlled
legislature, for example, passed a bill last May that would have
imposed mandatory three-year prison sentences for trespassing on
fossil fuel sites. It potentially created a scenario
[[link removed]]
where the state would’ve needed to jail elderly Black women seeking
recognition of a slave burial ground that possibly contained their
ancestors’ remains. The state’s Democratic governor, John Bel
Edwards, vetoed the bill. 

Yet, brutal outcomes for typically sympathetic figures have done
little to dissuade other governors. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) signed a
bill
[[link removed]] last
month that religious leaders warned could bankrupt “some tiny little
church in the middle of Appalachia that’s trying to protect its
people from pollution,” the Rev. Joan VanBecelaere, executive
director of Unitarian Universalist Justice Ohio, told HuffPost
[[link removed]]
in December. 

THE GREEN BOGEYMAN 

That bills are predicated on the idea that fossil fuel protesters are
becoming more violent is somewhat ironic. The model for the
legislation came in response to the Dakota Access pipeline conflict,
in which militarized police and private security forces brutalized
environmentalists and Indigenous activists who for months camped out
at the site of the proposed oil project. At least 300
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unarmed protesters
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were injured in a single day, and one woman nearly lost her arm
following a crackdown by police. The heavily armed security forces
reported no similar injuries. 

That didn’t stop the industry groups pushing the bill from
suggesting that the legislation was needed to stem the risk of violent
protest. In December 2017, five energy trade groups and a big oil
company sent a letter to lawmakers listing six examples
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of threats environmentalists posed to their infrastructure.

Only one example actually involved environmentalists. During the
Dakota Access fight, activists clipped the locks on fenced-in portions
of a connected oil pipeline in the Midwest and closed the valves,
briefly cutting off the flow of oil to refineries. The demonstrators
were arrested and prosecuted under existing laws. The other five
examples had nothing to do with protesters, and were instead loosely
bound by mental illness or workplace grievances.

[Activist Pete Sands of the Navajo Nation looks out over an area set
as a borderline where the police guard a bridge near Ocet]

Activist Pete Sands of the Navajo Nation looks out over an area set as
a borderline where the police guard a bridge near Oceti Sakowin Camp
on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Dec. 3, 2016,
outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota.  JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The fearmongering harkens back to the years immediately after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the FBI declared ecoterrorism
the biggest domestic threat and used the sweeping surveillance and law
enforcement measures passed under the Patriot Act to harass
environmental radicals. As a young journalist working for the Chicago
Tribune in 2002, Will Potter fell into the federal government’s
crosshairs when FBI agents threatened to make life “very
difficult” for him if he didn’t agree to become an informant on
the animal rights group he and his girlfriend had protested with
months earlier. In 2018, Potter compared the ALEC bill to the
post-Patriot Act crackdown.

“It’s about installing fear so they don’t go out and protest in
the first place,” Will Potter, author of “Green Is The New Red
[[link removed]],” told HuffPost
[[link removed]]
at the time. “The purpose of this law isn’t to wrap everybody up
and send them to federal prison. It’s to scare people, to create
fear.”

THE LATEST WAVE

The Minnesota bill faces dim prospects of becoming law in a state
where Democrats control the governor’s mansion and half the
legislature. Earlier versions of the bill, introduced in 2018, 2019
and 2020, all failed to reach the floor for a vote.

The legislation could, however, win approval in Arkansas, Montana,
Kansas. 

The Arkansas bill designates a range of fenced-off areas associated
with natural gas and oil production and storage as “critical
infrastructure.” Purposely entering or remaining on such
infrastructure would be a Class D felony, punishable by up to six
years in prison and a $10,000 fine, according to the International
Center for Not-For-Profit Law’s U.S. Protest Law Tracker
[[link removed]].

The bill makes causing “damage” to critical infrastructure a Class
B felony, punishable by up 20 years in prison and a $15,000 fine,
though the legislation does not define what constitutes damage. That
means “protesters who hold a peaceful sit-in at a pipeline
construction site and paint protest slogans on construction material,
for instance, could face lengthy prison sentences,” the ICNL stated
on its website.

“One might hope that any reasonable prosecutor, judge, or jury would
only use such a charge to go after people who compromise public safety
in a very serious way,” Connor Gibson, an independent researcher who
tracks anti-fossil fuel protest bills, wrote in a newsletter
[[link removed]]
about the Arkansas bill earlier this month. “But do you want to be
the one to test that theory?”

[Sheriffs in Aitkin County, Minnesota, arrest "water protectors"
during a protest at the construction site of the Line 3 oil p]

Sheriffs in Aitkin County, Minnesota, arrest “water protectors”
during a protest at the construction site of the Line 3 oil
pipeline.  KEREM YUCEL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The Montana bill, introduced last month, is more standard. The
legislation labels virtually any coal, natural gas or oil facility
“critical infrastructure” and makes trespassing “without
permission by the owner of the critical infrastructure, on
conviction” a misdemeanor “punishable by a fine of not more than
$1,500 or by imprisonment in the county jail for not more than 6
months.” Trespassing with the intent to vandalize would be “a
felony punishable by a fine of not more than $4,500 or by imprisonment
for not more than 18 months, or both.” Tampering with the facility
or causing any damage would amount to “a felony punishable by a fine
of not more than $150,000 or by imprisonment for not more than 30
years, or both.”

Like the other bills, the Montana legislation threatens that “any
organization found to be a conspirator” with individuals convicted
on any of those charges “shall be punished by a fine that is 10
times the amount of the fine provided for the appropriate crime.”
The legislation defines an “organization” broadly as “a group of
people, structured in a specific way to achieve a series of shared
goals.”

The bill is set for a hearing before the Montana Legislature’s
Judiciary Committee next Wednesday.

The legislation in Kansas stands out for its creative expansion of
existing racketeering laws ― the kind that’s put in place to help
prosecute organized crime syndicates, like the Mafia ― to cover
those who “commit, attempt to commit, conspire to commit or to
solicit, coerce or intimidate another person to commit” acts such as
trespassing on fossil fuel companies’ property.

Critics say the bill is mostly about politics, a way for its author,
Republican state Sen. Mike Thompson to signal his climate-denying
views now that he’s serving as chair of the Senate’s utilities
committee. 

“There is no anti-pipeline movement in Kansas in particular, and
there’s never been any kind of protest or civil disobedience at any
kind of fossil fuel site,” said Rabbi Moti Rieber, executive
director of the Kansas Interfaith Action, a religious coalition that
advocates for climate action in the state. “So this is a bill that
addresses a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Thompson did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on
Monday.

At a hearing [[link removed]] on Tuesday,
officials from two of the oil and gas industry’s top trade groups
― the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American
Petroleum Institute ― testified in favor of the legislation. API’s
Kansas representative, J. Kent Eckles, said “environmental attacks
on our industry” made the measures necessary. 

Reading between the lines, Rieber said the legislation was meant to
dissuade groups like his from taking part in future protests by
raising the risk that a demonstration could hold a church, temple or
mosque liable for thousands of dollars in fines if one of its members
is convicted under the statute, if it passes.

“There are people of faith who are concerned about climate change as
a religious imperative, and you can imagine something where they’d
do a public witness at a fossil fuel installation,” Rieber said.
“This is meant to intimidate people from taking action.” 

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Goodwin. On the day she was
cited, she had spent hours praying beside the gushing river and
connecting with the spirits who she believes have guided the Ojibwe
for generations. She sees herself as “protecting my homeland, my
treaty and my religious freedom.” She’s afraid of what might
happen if the legislation passes, but she said she won’t be
deterred.

“I want to cry, but I’m so angry I can’t cry,” Goodwin said.
“It gives me more energy to try even harder to stop them.” 

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