The Department of Justice on Friday announced that Donald Zepeda of Maryland and Jackson Green of Utah have been charged with felony destruction of government property following a climate change stunt that involved dumping red powder on the encasement protecting the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives Rotunda.
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The climate activist group Declare Emergency was behind the act.
In its press release, the Department of Justice said that Zepeda and Green’s stunt had caused more than $50,000 in damage.
They also say in the release:
Green previously was charged in a separate act of vandalism at the National Gallery of Art that occurred on November 14, 2023. Green was charged with one count of destruction of National Gallery of Art property for that offense. As a result of that offense, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson had ordered Green to stay away from the District of Columbia and stay away from all museums or public monuments. On February 22, Judge Berman Jackson ordered that Green be held in the D.C. jail for violating the conditions of his release.
Who will be held accountable when an impressionable young person watches this anti-American call to violence and translates their fantasies into action?
Major energy companies asked the Supreme Court Wednesday to reconsider a state court decision allowing Honolulu’s lawsuit against them for alleged climate damages to proceed.
In October, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled against the companies’ effort to dismiss the case on the basis that federal law prevents claims under state law, allowing it to continue to trial. The companies, which include Chevron and Sunoco, urged the Supreme Court Wednesday to intervene, noting “years might pass before another opportunity to address this pressing question comes along.”
“This case presents the Court with its only foreseeable opportunity in the near future to decide a dispositive question that is arising in every climate-change case: whether federal law precludes state-law claims seeking redress for injuries allegedly caused by the effects of interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions on the global climate,” the petition states. “After the decision below, there is now a clear conflict on that question.”
“State court litigation is not a constitutionally permissible means to establish global climate and energy policy,” Theodore J. Boutrous, the attorney for Chevron, said in a statement. “As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held in dismissing a similar New York City lawsuit, ‘such a sprawling case is simply beyond the limits of state law.’”
“Honolulu will respond in court on this, and that will be the only comment on the petition,” Matt Gonser, executive director of the city’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Delaware Superior Court held in January that the state’s claims against oil companies for “injuries resulting from out-of-state or global greenhouse emissions and interstate pollution” were preempted by the federal Clean Air Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit likewise found in April 2021 that New York City could not bring claims against energy companies under state law, noting that “global warming is a uniquely international concern that touches upon issues of federalism and foreign policy.”
The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled on Feb.7 that there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public, finding that the “spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities.”
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