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Climate-Change Defense, The
...In September, a British jury shook up the world of green politics when it accepted a lawful-excuse defense for property damaged with the intention of averting even greater damage from climate change. In an effort to draw public attention to government support for new coal-fired electricity projects, six Greenpeace activists painted Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s last name on a smokestack at the Kingsnorth power plant in Kent. The plant’s owner, the energy company E.ON, claimed that the paint cost more than $50,000 to remove.

With supporting testimony from the NASA climate-change expert James Hansen and a representative of the Inuit community of Greenland (who described watching villages “eroding into the sea”), the protesters convinced the jury that the threat posed by Kingsnorth carbon was not only real but also immediate enough to justify their high-profile graffiti. What’s more, they claimed, by halting the plant’s carbon-dioxide emissions for a day, they averted more than $1.5 million worth of damage to human health and wealth around the globe. ..