Ken and Jay and their lawyers Matt Pawa and Joan Fund had planned to use groundbreaking necessity defense to argue that the lobster boat blockade was justified in light of the imminent threat of climate change. They were going to call James Hansen and Bill McKibben to the stand as expert witnesses.

James Hansen

Dr. James E. Hansen is a leading climate change scientist and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He is the former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, which he led from 1981 to 2013. His research in the field of climatology has helped sound the alarm about the risks of anthropogenic global climate change and he has advocated for swift action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. He is the author of Storms of My Grandchildren, which outlines his vision for addressing climate change.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He is founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and theBoston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.” A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern.