What services does Instrumental Communications offer?

Instrumental Communications offers content strategy development, AI tools for marketing, ethical storytelling, crisis communication management, media relations, and digital content strategy, specializing in nonprofit and advocacy communications.

Why is ethical storytelling important for nonprofits?

Ethical storytelling ensures that nonprofit narratives are authentic, respectful, and empower the people they feature. It builds trust with audiences and prevents exploitation of vulnerable communities.

How does Instrumental Communications work with clients?

We work collaboratively with nonprofits, advocacy groups, and mission-driven organizations, offering tailored communication strategies, training, and content creation to amplify their impact and reach strategic audiences.

Do you offer how to use AI in communications services?

Yes, Instrumental Communications specializes in AI communication management, helping organizations plan, prepare, manage, and integrate AI into their work without losing their humanity.

An Update on the Plot to Kill Greenpeace

Mar 5

Written By Travis Nichols

March 4, 2026

Meanwhile . . .

Protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016. Credit...John L. Mone/Associated Press

For the past ten years, Energy Transfer, a Dallas-based fossil fuel company valued at approximately $64 billion, has been trying to kill Greenpeace.

The case has been a coordinated legal campaign designed to bankrupt a political opponent, which deserves attention in its own right, but it’s also, for activists and advocates in a certain tradition, a larger cultural tragedy.

For these activists, "Greenpeace" had become, over the past 50 years, more than just an organization, a movement, or a brand. It was more like a powerful spirit, an almost mythical thing that could be conjured by the mere mention of its name or a gesture towards its tactics.

Recall Succession, when Cousin Greg needs someone to blame for his lost inheritance, he sues . . . Greenpeace. Or Seinfeld, when an NBC executive wants to impress Elaine, he sets sail with...Greenpeace. Or even Bob's Burgers, when the Belcher kids protest the local yacht club they become . . . Greenpeace kayaktivists.

Greenpeace has been central to the story of the modern, action-driven environmental movement, and it has carried its banner for so long, it’s become both that movement's past and possibilities. It was, for some, at once the vessel and the flag.

It was "the boy stood on the deck, trying to recite 'the boy stood on the burning deck.'"

What?

On February 27, Judge James Gion of the Southwest Judicial District of North Dakota finalized a $345 million judgment against three Greenpeace entities in a lawsuit brought by Energy Transfer over protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and 2017.

The judgment formalized the end of the trial that began last year, when a nine-person North Dakota jury found Greenpeace USA liable on all counts brought by Energy Transfer, including defamation, conspiracy, trespass, nuisance, and tortious interference with business operations.

The jury also found Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund Inc, separate legal entities, liable on some, but not all, of the claims. More on that later.

The 2025 verdict awarded Energy Transfer just a smidge over $666 million, but in October, Judge Gion cut that award roughly in half, and his judgment last week formalized that reduced figure as "final."

Gion's judgment also requires Greenpeace to pay 11% interest on that $335 million, starting March 19 — more, according to Greenpeace USA's 2024 financial filings, than the organization's total assets of $23 million.

Greenpeace should, IMO, just show up at ET's Dallas headquarters with a giant novelty check for whatever the fantasy amount ends up being, since it’s not a figure based in any financial reality. It’s a signal, the vessel and the flag of fossil fuel fascism.

The case stems from 2015, when large-scale protests erupted near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation in North Dakota, where thousands had gathered in opposition to the pipeline's Missouri River crossing.

The Standing Rock tribe has long maintained that the pipeline threatens its water supply, and many, many people still agree with the tribe.

No matter. After Trump's election in 2016, Energy Transfer filed its suit alleging Greenpeace orchestrated efforts to halt pipeline construction, including organizing protesters, sending supplies, and making false statements about the project. All of which caused ET to lose . . . let me check my notes . . . yes here it is . . . a kajillion dollars. Give or take.

Greenpeace denied those allegations, arguing its employees had little to no involvement in the protests, and that the organization played only a minor supporting role in what were Indigenous-led demonstrations.

The concept of diffuse, Indigenous-led resistance seemed to baffle Energy Transfer and its allies, since a key element of the company's legal theory was that Greenpeace served as a centralized command-and-control operation for what were in fact de-centralized, self-organizing protests.

That framing misrepresented how the Standing Rock movement actually functioned, as a distributed network driven by shared values, not a hierarchy taking orders from a single organization, but, alas, the jury believed it, and they used a rigorous accounting method of "why not, I don't know, $666 million dollars?" to award ET its damages.

Greenpeace said it will seek a new trial and, if that fails, appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court.

As to the other Greenpeace entities, Greenpeace International filed a countersuit against Energy Transfer in Amsterdam under Dutch law and the European Union's anti-SLAPP directive. The next hearing in that case is scheduled for April 16, 2026. Energy Transfer has asked the North Dakota Supreme Court to block the Dutch suit, a request that remains pending. So it goes.

So What?

Emboldened by Trump's victory and its ushering in of a Project 2025 world, fossil fuel giants and their lackeys have been hell-bent on killing off protest in America, particularly climate protest.

The climate crisis is where many other crises converge — it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, while sacrificing vulnerable communities for entrenched power. The movement to stop it is one of the few forces capable of bridging an urban intellectual class and rural working communities, so it is particularly scary to the oil and gas power structure currently blowing up the world. So the forces of extraction and exploitation are, right now, by their own admission, going for "total victory" through all the channels available to them.

The fight came to Greenpeace a few years before it came to USAID, Columbia University, the Washington Post, and countless other institutions. And the fight came to those institutions before it began its lurch toward whoever it’s lurching towards now.

A year on from the trial, maybe there was nothing Greenpeace could have done differently. But I’m sure they would have rather positioned themselves with a different kind of fight than a flurry of legal filings.

On the other hand, the lesson isn't necessarily just one of despair. The trial has been a test of values, of strategy, and of solidarity for an organization faced with existential risk brought on by the oligarchy.

One of the least-reported dimensions of this case is what happened before it reached a jury. At some point prior to trial, Energy Transfer floated a settlement. The terms, as reported, were significant: Greenpeace would have had to publicly agree with Energy Transfer's characterization of tribal land and cultural significance; acknowledge that some Standing Rock protesters were responsible for violence; and state on the record that core segments of the Dakota Access Pipeline were safe.

In a moment where many large legacy institutions have recalculated their risk exposure and rationalized complicity with the administration, Greenpeace chose to stand by its allies. They said no. They didn't cave to settlement offers that would have required they betray Indigenous communities and equivocate about the Dakota Access Pipeline's impacts.

Throughout the nine years of this lawsuit, Greenpeace maintained its ethic of care, supporting its own activists in the field, as well as partners, providing legal protection and media cover when necessary. Even during the trial, when things were looking bleak, Greenpeace didn't shift blame onto smaller partners to save itself.

Greenpeace plans for risk, avoids it whenever possible, and shares it when it can't be avoided. This duty of care includes not passing consequences on to more vulnerable partners, even when doing so, in this case, meant potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the end, Greenpeace stayed true to the movement's Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing — which emphasize inclusivity, bottom-up organizing, and mutual solidarity — and to its own Indigenous Peoples' Policy, which commits to respecting the leadership and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples.

Greenpeace understood that standing with Standing Rock meant being accountable for what could follow, even if what followed was legal harassment, internal conflict, and potential bankruptcy.

And now here we are.

Now What?

The lawsuit poleaxed Greenpeace leadership, and for years the bulk of the organization stumbled around in a daze without mounting an effective public defense. It wasn't for lack of trying by some on the inside, but the paralysis Greenpeace blundered through for a decade is a cautionary tale for groups hoping they can duck and cover now. You have to hit back, hard, or these well-funded right-wing creeps will just keep on until they get what they want.

The lawsuit, first filed in federal court in 2017, consumed Greenpeace's time, resources, and organizational culture for nearly a decade. Staff were deposed. The legal process forced Greenpeace to turn over even mundane internal communications to lawyers, where ET's teams could comb through them looking for "viral waste."

By many accounts, a culture of paranoia spread through much of the organization. Public financial documents showed Greenpeace's liabilities more than tripling between 2017 and 2023 as the group struggled, outside of the global ocean's work and a few other campaigns, to maintain relevance under the weight of the ongoing litigation.

By the time things got to North Dakota, it was grim.

A group of independent human rights lawyers who monitored the trial said it was deeply flawed and patently biased, citing concerns about juror impartiality, evidentiary rulings and the exclusion of media from proceedings.

During those years, right-wing interests worked to reframe environmental and advocacy organizations in the public imagination: not as grassroots communities but as elite bureaucracies — arms of a nonprofit-industrial complex disconnected from everyday struggles. The lawsuit provided a convenient frame for that narrative. That reputational damage does not appear in a court judgment but may prove as consequential as the financial one.

Energy Transfer's legal strategy represents a broader effort to assign a market price to dissent — transforming protest from a democratic right into a calculable financial liability, an attempt to make protest a fictitious commodity: something not naturally produced for the market, but now subject to a price that can be weighed by potential activists before they act.

The question that follows is whether that model is replicable, and what it requires. Duty of care is easier to articulate than to fund. The legal infrastructure, the staff support, the institutional will to absorb a nearly decade-long lawsuit while maintaining operations, they are not cheap.

How the broader sector builds and sustains that capacity, particularly under an increasingly hostile legal environment, may be as important a question as the outcome of any single appeal.

The North Dakota Supreme Court will eventually hear appeals from both sides — Greenpeace seeking dismissal and Energy Transfer seeking restoration of the higher jury award. The Army Corps environmental review, expected to be finalized soon, may affect the tribe's ongoing D.C. Circuit challenge. The Amsterdam anti-SLAPP hearing in April could set a significant European precedent for how corporate legal pressure on advocacy groups is treated internationally — determining, in effect, whether what Energy Transfer did in North Dakota can be done anywhere, and not just to Greenpeace, but to anyone.