The Law Firms Propping Up Big Oil

KPFA - Terra Verde

Energy Transfer – the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline or DAPL – is suing Greenpeace USA for $300 million, claiming that the environmental group and not the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, organized the resistance against DAPL at Standing Rock in 2016-17. The suit is another Big Oil strategy to shut down opposition to its climate-damaging activities. If successful, it could have far-reaching implications.

The brains behind the lawsuit — the international law firm, Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher — has a long history of helping fossil fuel and other polluting industry silence their opponents.

Earth Island Journal editor-in-chief Maureen Nandini Mitra and Terra Verde cohost talks with Emily Sanders, a reporter and investigator with Exxon Knews, and Haley Czarnek, National Director of Law Students for Climate Accountability, a student-led organization, about big law firms that are part of an ecosystem of enablers helping fossil fuel companies to keep doing business as usual and the growing effort by activists to hold them accountable.

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