Last month, the Clearwater County attorney filed an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court, making a second attempt to limit expert testimony in my trial on felony charges. I'm one of four defendants in the Minnesota "valve-turner" trial — after extensive research, my friend Annette and I drove to a shut-off valve site for Enbridge pipelines 4 and 67 in Leonard, Minn., on Oct. 11, 2016. We cut the chains into the site, and our friend Ben called the company to give them our exact location, tell them that we were climate activists there in a peaceful protest against tar sands oil (the most carbon-intensive of all oils) and say that if they didn't shut the valves remotely, we would do so. Our friend Steve, a documentary filmmaker, recorded the whole thing.
We began turning the valves and stopped a few minutes later when the company initiated remote shut-off. We stayed and waited (almost an hour) for the sheriff to arrest us. Friends of ours did the same at pipelines in North Dakota, Montana and Washington.
We did this because the federal government — even then, under the Obama administration — was (and is) utterly failing to address the imminent threat of climate change. We need to immediately stop the use of the dirtiest fuels — coal and tar sands — and reduce the use of other fossil fuels as quickly as possible. As quickly as if we wanted to leave a stable planet for our kids, because that's what's at stake.
We knew that if we risked prison time to draw attention to this failure and tried to shake the system up enough to respond, we might get people to listen to us. We might even get to use the legal "necessity defense" (see tinyurl.com/necessity-def), which would allow us to bring expert witnesses (scientists, mostly) to testify not only to what we did (which we've never denied) but also why we did it and why our actions were a reasonable response to an unreasonable crisis.
My friends and I are older, cautious people — I was the youngest, at 50 — and we have worked legally on the fight against climate change for years or decades as we grew increasingly worried by the science. We've written and signed petitions; organized protests; testified at hearings; met with our legislators; and much more. And we've watched the world get hotter, people die and be displaced, and governments dither — most of all our own. There are many reasons for this paralysis, starting with the amount of oil money in Congress and decades of lies from the fossil-fuel industry (see tinyurl.com/icn-report). But it cannot continue — if it does, it's not just a few places here and there that are at risk; it's everything (see tinyurl.com/uninhabitable-earth). And we're running out of time (see tinyurl.com/rs-mckibben).
We know that we can't stop fossil-fuel use overnight. We also know that we may already have passed some of the feared "tipping points" that render catastrophic climate change unstoppable, by creating feedback loops in which, for example, polar ice melts and the darker water left behind absorbs more heat, thus melting more ice, in a pattern we can no longer halt. Between these poles of knowledge lie continents defined by our ethics, determination and willingness to change. The technology is there — we only need to set our minds and backs to the task and move as seriously as we can toward the goal — 100 percent renewable energy — quite literally as fast as we can.
Our friends Leonard and Ken were sentenced to probation and community service. Our friend Michael is in prison in North Dakota right now; he'll be released on Aug. 1. Only our trial remains — because the judge granted us the necessity defense. If this happens soon, it will be the first climate-focused necessity-defense trial in the U.S. (the week after ours was granted, another one — of a minister in Spokane, Wash. — was also granted; his has also been appealed).
When the judge granted us the use of this defense, he wasn't saying that he thought we'd proved what we did was necessary, not by any means; he was simply saying that based on what we said and the evidence before him, there was a chance that we might be able to prove this. And since it seemed possible, he believed we had the right to fully assert our defense to a jury.