On October 20, 2016 Ken Ward and two others were arraigned in Washington State on criminal charges of burglary, criminal sabotage and being part of an assembly of saboteurs. Ken Ward, an activist with the Climate Disobedience Center, now faces up to 30 years in prison for breaking through a fence to turn off a Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline valve.

As The Guardian reported earlier today: "In courtrooms across the US, the activists are pushing to argue that these disruptions are a last resort given political inaction and are “legally justified to avoid the catastrophic harm caused to humanity by unprecedented climatic disruption”." This so-called "necessity defense" has legal precedent.

But Skagit County Superior Court Judge Michael E. Rickert, who presides over the case, has dismissed the proposed necessity defense on the grounds of his own uninformed opinion. Claiming that "[...] there’s tremendous controversy over the fact whether it [climate change] even exists. And even if people believe that it does or it doesn’t, the extent of what we’re doing to ourselves and our climate and our planet, there’s great controversy over that.” Judge Rickert further remarked that there’s “great controversy” with “over half of our political leaders”. Finally, he argued that Mr. Ward's action would do nothing to thwart any environmental disaster. "All that happens is a valve is turned.”

While it is true that a large number of primarily conservative politicians continue to falsely claim "great controversy" surrounding climate change, there is no room for uninformed opinion in judicial decisions that directly, and potentially severely, affect people's lives. The scientific consensus on climate change itself has been confirmed in multiple independent, peer-reviewed studies. 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that humans cause climate change and the greater the scientists' expertise in the field, the higher the consensus (Cook et al., 2016). Furthermore, the risks of climate change and failure to mitigate these risks have been highlighted repeatedly in the annual global risk reports of the World Economic Forum, the IPCC Assessment Reports and publications of every major scientific organization in the world. To willfully ignore this evidence is unbecoming of a judge. To dismiss acts of civil disobedience as pointless is an insult to the many resistant men and women we celebrate today, the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marion Wallace Dunlop, and César Chávez, among many others.

We ask that Judge Rickert reconsider his decision after adequately informing himself on the issue of climate change. Alternatively, the decision regarding Mr. Ward's necessity defense should be reassigned to a scientifically literate judge at the Skagit County Superior Court. More than ever, we must be able to rely on our courts for decisions grounded in facts, not political opinion. 

(Photo: Ken Ward. Photograph: shutitdown.today)