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Greenpeace USA Won't Take a Corporate Check. Now It Owes $345 Million.

Greenpeace USA accepts no money from corporations or governments. A $345 million judgment is testing what that independence costs.

By The Pennygood team · Aug 2026 · 5 min read

Most large environmental groups keep a corporate giving page. Greenpeace USA keeps a rule against one: neither Greenpeace, Inc. nor Greenpeace Fund accepts gifts or matching gifts from corporate entities or government agencies, so that its campaigns and research stay clear of outside pressure. In late February 2026, that rule stopped being an abstraction. A North Dakota judge finalized a judgment of roughly $345 million against Greenpeace organizations — and there is no corporate donor to call.

A boat that never arrived

The organization began as a committee with a blunt name. In 1970, a group in Vancouver — Dorothy and Irving Stowe, Marie and Jim Bohlen, Ben and Dorothy Metcalfe, and Bob Hunter among them — formed the Don't Make a Wave Committee to try to stop a second U.S. nuclear weapons test at Amchitka Island, in the Aleutians.

On September 15, 1971, they sailed out of Vancouver in an aging halibut boat, the Phyllis Cormack, which the crew had nicknamed the Greenpeace. They were turned back before they reached Amchitka, and the test went ahead anyway. But the voyage put nuclear testing on front pages worldwide, and within months the United States abandoned the Amchitka test program altogether. The island was later declared a bird sanctuary.

The tactic had a name borrowed from the Quakers: bearing witness — the idea that simply showing up where a wrong is happening is itself a form of opposition. More than fifty years on, the group still describes its work in those terms: independent national organizations, peaceful protest, and confrontation used creatively.

The arithmetic of refusing money

Greenpeace USA is really two organizations, and the split explains a lot. Greenpeace, Inc. is a 501(c)(4) — it campaigns and lobbies, and gifts to it are not tax-deductible. Greenpeace Fund, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) that funds research, charitable work and public education, and gifts there are deductible. Greenpeace Fund has been tax-exempt since January 1979 and files from Washington, D.C.

The numbers are modest for an organization this recognizable. Greenpeace Fund reported about $26.3 million in revenue against roughly $31.5 million in expenses for its 2024 fiscal year — spending more than it brought in. Greenpeace's own membership FAQ breaks its spending down as 55% on campaigns, 21% on public information and education, 23% on fundraising, and 1% on management and administration.

It is also why the group pushes monthly giving so insistently. Recurring gifts, it argues, are what let campaigners plan and budget rather than guess.

What a SLAPP looks like from the inside

Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, sued Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace Fund over the pipeline protests, originally seeking $300 million. In March 2025 a North Dakota jury found the Greenpeace organizations liable for more than $660 million on claims that included defamation, trespass, nuisance, conspiracy, tortious interference and aiding and abetting. Judge James Gion later cut the award by nearly half, and the final judgment of about $345 million was entered in late February 2026.

Greenpeace calls the case a SLAPP — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, filed less to win damages than to make speaking up ruinously expensive. Marco Simons, its interim general counsel, put the group's position plainly: "Speaking out against corporations that cause environmental harm should never be deemed unlawful."

Neither side is finished. Greenpeace says it will seek a new trial and, if that is denied, appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court; it also has a case pending against Energy Transfer in the Netherlands under the European Union's anti-SLAPP directive. Energy Transfer, for its part, has said it will ask the North Dakota Supreme Court to reverse the reduction and restore the larger figure.

The campaigns that didn't pause

Through all of it the campaign list has kept running. Greenpeace USA is pushing for deep sea mining to be stopped before it starts, urging U.S. senators to back the Global Ocean Treaty and its target of protecting at least 30% of the world's oceans by 2030, and pressing for a global plastics treaty — alongside fossil fuel work and state-level climate fights, including in California.

Volunteering runs through a single volunteer platform that gathers events, trainings and toolkits in one place, with local events listed publicly. General questions go to connect@greenpeace.us or 1-800-722-6995.

If you want to help

Support goes through Greenpeace's own channels at greenpeace.org/usa. One thing worth knowing before you give: money to Greenpeace, Inc. funds the campaigning and lobbying but is not tax-deductible, while money to Greenpeace Fund is. Monthly giving is the option they ask for first. Volunteering costs nothing but time.

Behind a campaign like this are individuals — the person who spends a Saturday at a training, who organizes a local action, who keeps showing up with no salary attached. Pennygood is built for exactly those people: a place where a community can send someone doing good a small, steady monthly contribution. Greenpeace USA is not on Pennygood, and this is not a way to donate to them. But if you are the person quietly doing that kind of work, you can start a page at pennygood.me.