Six Greenpeace activists were cleared of charges today for intentionally damaging a coal plant in the U.K.

The Independent reports,

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

Greenpeace UK states,

During the trial, the world’s leading climate scientist came to court and challenged the government’s plans for new coal, calling for Gordon Brown to announce a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants without carbon capture and storage. Cameron’s environmental policy adviser said there was “a staggering mismatch between what we’ve heard from government and what we’ve seen from government in terms of policy”. An expert on climate change impacts in the UK said some of the property in immediate need of protection from sea level rises included parts of Kent (Kingsnorth being “extremely vulnerable”) and that “it behoves us to act with urgency”. And an Inuit leader told of his first hand experiences of the impacts of climate change.

After hearing all of the evidence, the jurors (representatives of ordinary British people) supported the right to take direct action to protect the climate from the burning of coal.

Implications for “eco-terrorists” in the U.K. and abroad, who still constitute the largest global terrorist threat, could be significant.

Biggest Terrorists are Still the Elves

The FBI reported earlier this year that while America and the world were diverted by other political issues, eco-terrorism continues to be the biggest domestic threat.

Bron Taylor, a professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida describes the Earth Liberation Front (ELF or Elves), who are considered the largest of these groups,

Generally speaking, the Earth Liberation folks are motivated by a deep kind of affective connection to nature that many of them would characterize as spiritual or religious.  They believe that the human species is perpetrating a war on nature and that those who are connected to nature and belong to it have a right to defend themselves.

Their success is attributed to their large and diversely spread membership, but their exact numbers or full capabilities continue to be unknown

Bob Holland, a retired arson investigator said,

Every time a fire breaks out and somebody takes a spray ocan and writes ‘ELF’ or ‘ALF’ on there, then everybody gets all excited that ‘Oh this movement has started back up.  The movement never really left.

However, fighting environmentalists at home is not nearly as an attractive political agenda in Canada or the U.S.

And there are little oil revenues to be obtained from it either.

Recent Syncrude Case

On July 24, 2008, protesters entered a Syncrude mine in Alberta and put up signs.

Syncrude issued a lawsuit on Aug. 15, 2008 for $120,000 and an injunction to keep Greenpeace members off its property.  No property damage or disruption of operations were alleged.

Prof. Moin Yahya of the University of Alberta Faculty of Law said in the Calgary Herald,

It’s a strategic lawsuit.

This is very common in the United States where you have all the anti-abortion protesters who stand outside clinics saying ‘save lives.’ They’ve been sued in the past under a similar type (of suit).

Telling the protesters to stop coming on the property is even more powerful than seeking money.

If the court grants the injunction and the group defies it, they’re no longer at war with Syncrude — now they’re at war with the judge and in contempt of court.