A Canadian man who, in an attempt to raise awareness about climate change, used a high-powered rifle to fire shots at a pipeline in South Dakota in 2022 and a power station in North Dakota in 2023 was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in federal prison.
The man, Cameron M. Smith, 50, who pleaded guilty last September in U.S. District Court in Bismarck, N.D., to two counts of destruction of an energy facility for the vandalism, was also ordered to pay $2.1 million in restitution.
In July 2022, Mr. Smith used a high-powered Bushmaster rifle to fire rounds into a transformer and pump station that was part of the Keystone Pipeline in Clark County, in eastern South Dakota, according to court records. The act caused about $500,000 in damage and disrupted the pipeline, which carries oil from Canada through the United States, records show. Electrical service to some customers in North Dakota was also disrupted, prosecutors said.
Ten months later, in May 2023, Mr. Smith again used a Bushmaster rifle to shoot at the Wheelock electric substation near Ray, in northwest North Dakota, causing about $1.2 million in damage court records show.
All energy facilities are federally protected, and damaging them can be deemed an act of terrorism if an attack is intended to “affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate,” according to the Justice Department. Judge Daniel Traynor of U.S. District Court in Bismarck, N.D., found that Mr. Smith’s actions had met that definition — a finding reflected in the sentence he handed down.
Mr. Smith, whose lawyer said he is autistic, was an online marketer who was renting a small home on the Oregon coast at the time of his arrest. He was not working at the time.
Doug Passon, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, said in court documents that Mr. Smith was “extremely misguided in his attempt to bring awareness to the climate change crisis by vandalizing the electrical substations of private power companies.”
“He is, however, no terrorist,” Mr. Passon said. During the pandemic, Mr. Smith spent “an inordinate time online and focused on the existential threat of climate change,” Mr. Passon said in court filings, though he added that Mr. Smith had been interested in climate change for many years.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Passon said: “In his heart of hearts, Cameron Smith did what he did out of love for the planet and all its inhabitants. Nobody condones what he did, and it is obviously a crime deserving of consequence.”
But Mr. Passon said that the prison term was too much for 50-year-old man like Mr. Smith, who he said had serious health issues like Crohn’s disease. He said that it was exceedingly rare for such a case to be deemed an act of terrorism.
“He caused zero harm to any human,” Mr. Passon said. “No customers of power companies testified that they were victims or were even aware of a power outage. In fact, he went out of his way to avoid harm by targeting unmanned, remote power stations in the middle of nowhere and in the dead of night.”
Law enforcement officials, however, saw this as intent in his crimes.
Mr. Smith “orchestrated and carried out targeted attacks on critical energy infrastructure in North and South Dakota using a high-powered rifle, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage and leaving homes and businesses without power,” Alvin M. Winston Sr., special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis office, said in a statement.
In the last few years, homeland security officials have warned that the U.S. power grid has become a target for far-right extremists who are trying to sow chaos by bringing down the infrastructure that keeps society functioning, according to experts in extremism.
