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New Hampshire Public Radio reports that a judge has “again rejected an attempt to use a competing harms defense for five protesters who tried to stop a train bringing coal to the Merrimack Station power plant in 2019.”

Judge Andrew Schulman … had already denied the request on two previous occasions, writing that their alleged conduct “could not, in and of itself, prevent or in any measurable way limit, retard, or restrict climate change.”

The article talks about legal precedent, involving protests during construction of Seabrook Station nuclear plant: “In that case, the New Hampshire Supreme Court said that the competing harms defense only applied to imminent, urgent threats.” Planet-wide environmental catastrophe is insufficiently urgent, I guess, compared to slightly increasing a company’s costs of operation.

Read or listen to the whole story here.

 

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