Ken Ward, left, and Jay O'Hara before sailing to block a coal shipment.
Credit: Ben Thompson
John Upton at Climate Central
writes about Ken Ward and Jay O'Hara, two Climate Activists who staged a coal delivery blockade in the spring of 2013. Their protests resulted in criminal charges of disturbing the peace, conspiracy, and boating offenses, which could result in hundreds of dollars in fines and up to five years in prison. In defense, their attorneys are preparing a novel and potentially paradigm changing strategy. For the first time ever they will use as defense the "urgency of climate change"
The men’s attorneys are planning to deploy a novel strategy. It’s called the necessity defense. They will argue that the urgency of climate change and greenhouse gas pollution was so great that their clients’ actions were legally justifiable.
The trial’s outcome could have far-reaching implications, with fossil fuel blockades growing in popularity around the world as a form of climate-related protest. And the trial could grab national headlines. Former NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen and prolific climate writer Bill McKibben told Climate Central that they plan to testify in Ward’s and O’Hara’s defense.
The legal brouhaha was set in motion in the spring of 2013. Following an early-morning waterfront prayer in Newport, R.I., Ward and O’Hara navigated a lobster boat into a shipping channel, pulled close enough to shore to shout to supporters on land, and dropped an anchor weighing more than 200 pounds — one that was chained and locked to their vessel. They called local police. Coast Guard officers boarded their boat, inspected it, and remained on board as the hours ticked by and the sunny day became overcast and windy. The 690-foot Energy Enterprise idled along the shoreline, unable to deliver its payload of coal to a power plant in Somerset, Mass. Before dusk, threatened with tens of thousands of dollars worth of daily fines, Ward and O’Hara commissioned a salvage company to use a crane aboard a barge to lift the oversized anchor, then they motored to a marina in Fall River, Mass., and went home.
The importance of this case can't be overstated. Those of us who have put our futures and bodies on the line to fight for change of our disastrous environmental policies know that criminalization of our activities reduces our actions and deters the actions of so many others.