Civil disobedience in defense of the environment

It may yet emerge as one of the most significant forms of resistance in the 21st Century: resistance to the wanton, deliberate destruction of the environment by economic actors and their occasional state allies. It already includes some fairly radical new genres, such as civil disobedience in defense of the environment.
Quite strikingly earlier this year Al Gore insisted at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative that:

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration."

Gore also insisted on the extent to which carbon companies were engaging in a form of massive fraud by minimizing the risk of the global climate crisis.
Interestingly, this was at about the same time that a British jury acquitted six Greenpeace activists who had painted Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s last name on a smokestack at the Kingsnorth power plant in Kent (at an apparent cost of $50,000 to the energy company). The trial involved testimony from a NASA climate change expert and a representative of the Inuit community of Greenland who testified about the disapearance of his village. Eventually, the jury accepted a lawful-excuse defense to an accusation of property damage, on the grounds that the damage had been caused with the intention of averting an even greater damage from climate change. The danger was presented as not only real, but immediate. It is doubtful that the decision will be followed, as it may have the potential to undermine many criminal prohibitions, but it is indicative of a quite substantial change of mood in part of the British public. It also reflects at least a willingness to take arguments from climate change at face value in court, and to use the law in ways that justify radical political protest against some of the biggest polluters.