Tennessee raises felony charge for ‘interfering’ with oil and gas pipeline projects
APRIL 16, 2023
In the past four years, Tennessee has passed multiple laws aimed to protect fossil fuel projects from community challenges, like the law that preempts local governments from blocking fossil fuel projects, or the one that allows the state to boycott banks that divest from fossil fuels.
One of these recent laws targets protestors. In 2019, Tennessee criminalized protests against fossil fuels by expanding the definition of “critical infrastructure” to include oil and gas pipelines – and changed the existing misdemeanor offenses to felony offenses.
