RFK Jr.: ‘Free energy for every American!’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the United States doesn’t need 20 or 30 years to go from gas-powered cars to electric. Israel is doing it in three years, and so could the U.S., Kennedy told a crowd of about 850 on Thursday at the University of Denver’s Newman Center for the Performing Arts. Click here to watch an excerpt of his speech.

 “In three years Israel will be free of gas completely,” Kennedy said. “They regard it as a security issue. Well guess what: It’s a national security issue for us, too.” But most of Kennedy’s 1 ½-hour talk, part of the DU Daniels College of Business Voice of Experience Speaker Series, focused more on environmental impacts than international relations.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., says entrepreneurs lack only a grid to convert country to solar, wind

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment,” he said. “We’re living a science-fiction nightmare today in this country where a family can’t go fishing and come back and eat the fish safely.” Kennedy, 55, is an environmental attorney, author, a prosecutor of big energy companies and an investor in sustainable energy. He’s on the board of VantagePoint Venture Partners, a firm that invests in promising “transformative” companies like Better Place Israel, which is deploying the first nationwide network for charging electric vehicles. That plan calls for the electricity to come from solar and wind power. Kennedy said it would cost $150 billion for the U.S. to build a nationwide solar and wind energy grid. The energy plants themselves – the windmills and solar-energy facilities—would cost another $650 billion, but entrepreneurs would cover that, he said. He pointed to T. Boone Pickens, Warren Buffett, Al Gore and Kennedy himself among those poised to spend on sustainable development if and when a grid is built.

Two obstacles confront investors, he said. “Huge subsidies going to energy-producing incumbents,” or what he calls “carbon cronies.” And two, “the need for a national grid that can act as a marketplace. Our grid is archaic, overused and falling apart.” Kennedy compares the feasibility of a nationwide solar and wind-energy grid to nationwide backbones built for telecommunications, the Internet and the interstate highway system.

He referred often during his talk to the devastation of West Virginia’s mountain forests at the hands of coal companies, some of which he’s prosecuted. He was at different times hopeful, grim and reflective. “My father said to me when I was 14, ‘They’re not just destroying the environment. They’re impoverishing these communities forever.’ Because there’s nothing the people will be able to do with these lands that have been made barren. I’ve flown over parts of West Virginia and it’s like a mountain has been pulled out of its roots. Four hundred square miles of flattened forest.”

Kennedy called the notion that we have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection a “false choice.” “There’s no stronger advocate of free-market economies than I am,” he said. “In a true free-market economy, you can’t make yourself richer without making your neighbor richer and enriching your community. Polluters make others poorer. Coal companies and other polluters are cheating the free-market system. Show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. Crony capitalism is rampant.”

Kennedy places much of the blame for “crony capitalism” on the press. “We don’t have a press that works,” he said. “Americans are getting their news from Rush (Limbaugh) and Fox. We have a negligent press that no longer does its job. It entertains and appeals to the reptilian part of our brain: Kobi Bryant, Brittany, Brad and Jen. People know more about them than they do about global warming.”

To what extent a sustainability movement succeeds will largely depend on President Barack Obama’s energy bill and whether it can “plow down those barriers to a national marketplace,” Kennedy said. “You ought to be able to sell your own excess energy at the market rate. We need to turn every American into an energy entrepreneur and punish waste.”

Asked what personal sacrifices he thinks need to be made to achieve his sustainability aims, he replied, “I don’t think it involves personal sacrifice. I think it (sustainable-energy development) makes us richer. I’m building a house how that’s essentially off the grid.” Kennedy said companies that make money but pollute in the process essentially privatize inherently public trusts such as water, wilderness, wildlife and air. “Destruction of the environment,” he said, “is always also a subversion of democracy.”