Oil Drilling Auction Protester Planning to Put Global Warming on Trial
Tim DeChristopher. (image: huffingtonpost.com)
Last year, Tim DeChristopher disrupted a U.S. Bureau of Land Management oil lease auction by placing bids he couldn’t honor. He did this to throw a wrench into oil exploration and drilling, and in the process “won” 22,500 acres he couldn’t pay for, taking them at least temporarily off the market, and drove up prices for other parcels.
DeChristopher now faces trial on felony charges of interfering with a government auction and making false representations. As the Associated Press reported Monday, his lawyers have planned a novel defense: they intend to put global warming on trial. They are planning a variation on the venerable “necessity” defense, which makes it a defense to criminal liability that “(1) the defendant acted to avoid a significant risk of harm; (2) no adequate lawful means could have been used to escape the harm; and (3) the harm avoided was greater than that caused by breaking the law.” His lawyers’ argument is that DeChristoper bid illegally to save us from climate change.
As a legal tactic, it’s almost certain to fail—the necessity defense has rarely been successful in civil disobedience cases. It falters on two grounds:
• There are lawful alternatives to protest a law or government action—such as by staging a protest, writing to elected representatives, or filing a lawsuit. Indeed, Utah oil leases have been successfully blocked by lawsuits brought by environmental groups.
• Second, there usually has to be a strong element of immediacy to the harm. The classic example is, cold and freezing in the woods, you may break into a cabin in search of food and shelter.
However, what about as a protest tactic? Even in losing, if DeChristopher can get a federal judge to allow his legal team to present evidence that global warming poses a significant harm justifying illegal acts, that’s a victory. Global warming will have been debated in federal court as a threat requiring extraordinary action, at least potentially on a par in terms of seriousness and urgency with the risk of freezing or starving, lost alone in the woods. That is a powerful metaphor or symbolic statement for environmentalists, even if it doesn’t spare DeChristoper jail time.
[...] In a post last month here on HeatingOil.com, Steven Zweig, an attorney, said that if DeChristopher’s legal team was allowed to debate the dangers of global warming in a federal court, it would be a major symbolic victory for the environmental movement. [...]
[...] DeChristopher, the then-college student who disrupted an auction for Utah gas and oil leases has a new defense: selective prosecution. And it’s likely to work about as well as his previous [...]