Swallowing a new kind of Twinkie defense, a British jury last week found nine Greenpeace vandals not guilty of causing £30,000 of criminal damage at a coal-fired power plant. The defendants admitted to causing the damage, but claimed that they had a “lawful excuse” since they were attempting to prevent still greater damage: the plant’s contribution to global warming. Witnesses on their behalf included an Inuit leader from Greenland (an odd choice, since global warming would make life more livable there) as as well as scientist James Hansen, who testified that the carbon dioxide emitted by the plant could be responsible for the extinction of 400 species. (Alas, he didn’t say which ones.) The science advisor to Al Gore, Hansen has gained notoriety for publicly claiming that

If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains—no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

The jury ended up buying Greenpeace’s argument, despite the fact that the judge instructed them that a “lawful excuse” defense requires that the property at issue be damaged or destroyed to prevent the immediate harm to the property of another.

Read the rest of this COMMENTARY web exclusive here.