Energy, Economy and the Environment
Environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr. speaks in Boone

By Jeff Eason

Last Thursday Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a free lecture at Appalachian State University’s Farthing Auditorium titled “Our Environmental Destiny” to a packed house. The son of former U.S Attorney General and 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the younger Kennedy is chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper Project, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Council, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and award-winning author.

Earlier that day, Kennedy met with media representatives of Appalachian Voices, The Mountain Times, The Appalachian and WASU-FM at the Appalachian Voices office on Howard Street in Boone. The following is a portion of what Kennedy had to say during that interview:

The Mountain Times: During the past year, people who would have normally been against offshore drilling and other environmentally damaging practices are now for them because of high gas prices. How much has changed in the environmental movement in the past year?

Robert Kennedy: This year has been a transformational year for the environment. There is that aspect of it, where people are deciding we’ve got to do more extracting activity in this country and make more power. But what I see a lot of is a focus on renewable energy. There’s optimism, particularly in the business community, that we can be self-sufficient, that we can end our dependence on foreign oil and that we don’t have to tear down our mountains for coal, that we should be looking at new energy sources rather than old energy sources.

We should be looking at solar energy that is bringing us electrons every day for free. They just have to be harvested and transferred. We can harvest solar energy much cheaper to society as a whole than we can by digging coal from the ground or we can by building new nuclear power plants.

What I hear more and more from the business community—and I’m working with some of the Fortune 500 corporations as well as the clean tech groups—is that they are seeing an enormous drag that our carbon addiction is having on the American economy. We’re giving trillions of dollars of subsidies every year to Big Coal and their carbon cronies to stay in business and those subsidies are the principal impediment to creating more efficient, much cheaper and indigenous sources of energy in the marketplace.

What we really have to do is construct a new marketplace in this country. We have to rebuild our infrastructure and our energy transportation infrastructure—our power grid, in other words—and open up the power grid to the marketplace. If you put solar panels on your roof and there is a time of the day when you’re producing more energy than you’re using, then you ought to be able to throw that right back on the grid, and you ought to be able to get market rates for it. But there’s no state right now where you can do that. There is no access to the grid.

So there are two things we really need to do. We need to re-align our grids so they hit the big power centers of our country: the wind centers, the solar centers, the geothermal centers. We have to rebuild the grid so it can actually transfer the electrons across the country. Then we have to open up the grid and get rid of the rules so that every American can be an energy entrepreneur. Every home could be a power plant. I’d rather bank on American energy entrepreneurs than on Saudi Arabian oil or Appalachian coal.
I was with T. Boone Pickens last week and I spent the day with him in Dallas. He’s trying to build these wind farms. The Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind. There’s enough wind power in just North Dakota, Montana and Texas to power 100% of the energy needs of our country even if every American owned an electric car.

Scientific American just did a study that showed if you took an area less than 18% of the most barren desert land of the Southwest, an area 92 miles by 92 miles, and put solar-thermal plants there that you could power 100% of the energy needs of our country.

I’m on the board of a company that just signed a $9.5 billion contract to provide a gigawatt (one billion watts) a year of solar-thermal energy to Pacific Gas & Electric of California. We’re building what will be the biggest solar-thermal plant in the world. We’re building it cheaper than you can build a nuclear plant, cheaper than you could build a coal plant. And we’re going to build it a lot faster, and the electrons are free. So we can literally have free energy in this country if we invest in that infrastructure to produce energy that you don’t have to go over to Saudi Arabia for, drill it out of the ground, get in a $4.5 trillion war to protect it, destroying America’s prestige and moral authority.

And you don’t have to tear up the Appalachian Mountains and permanently destroy the economies of these regions. That 18% of land is a much smaller footprint than what we’re now tearing up in Appalachia. We can put these solar thermal plants in New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada and power the entire nation.

Now there are voices out there that are calling for more oil drilling off the coast but that’s like a crack addict asking for more crack. It’s not going to do any good for our country. Right now the oil being taken out of the Arctic is being taken out by a foreign oil company, British Petroleum. And guess where it’s going? To Asia. So there’s no guarantee that oil that is taken off our coasts will come to us. First of all, the White House’s Energy Office says that it will be 15 years before the first drop of that oil will go in our tanks and they say that even then the price drop will be insignificant. Since we only have two percent of the global reserves and we use 25% of the world’s oil, Saudi Arabia will always be able to control the price. If we produce a little more, they can produce a little less and keep the price the same.

All drilling does is continue our addiction to carbon, which is destroying our economy. If you look at the nations that de-carbonized their economies, in every case they experienced instantaneous prosperity. Iceland—which is now in a lot of economic trouble because it bought these bundle derivatives like we did—was the poorest country in Europe in 1970 when its economy was 100% dependent on oil and coal. Then they decided to de-carbonize and last year Iceland was completely de-carbonized and got 90% of its energy from geothermal sources. It was the fourth richest country by GDP (gross domestic product) on the face of the earth. Sweden did the same thing. It started de-carbonizing in 1996 and now it is the fifth richest country in GDP.

We’re paying a lot more for coal and oil than the market reflects. We’re paying with acid rain, which is destroying the forest cover in the Appalachians and destroying our lakes and creeks. Where I fish in the Catskills, one-fifth of the lakes are sterilized because of acid rain. It’s putting mercury in the waterways of 49 states. In 19 states every freshwater fish is inedible because of mercury. You can’t safely eat them.

Acid rain is destroying the mountain tops, the historic landscapes of the Appalachian Mountains. It’s responsible for tens of thousands of deaths from particulate emissions. It causes a million lost workdays a year. Those are all impacts that we pay for in the long run. You’re not seeing it in your energy bill but you’re seeing it in your taxes because we pay for people who are hospitalized, we’re paying for those lost workdays, we’re paying for those lost recreational opportunities.

What I’m saying is that we need real free market capitalism in this country where actors in the marketplace have to pay the true cost of bringing their product to the market. If the coal companies had to pay that true cost, they couldn’t compete with solar-thermal energy in a true free market.

The environment and nature is the infrastructure of our communities. We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fish and the birds. We’re protecting it for our own sake. We recognize that nature is our infrastructure and that if we want to meet our obligation as a generation and as a nation and a civilization, which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and prosperity and good health, as the communities that our parents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure.

The air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands, the shared resources of our community, the public trust assets…those assets that can’t be reduced to private property but are by their very nature owned by all the people. They connect us to our past and belong to our children.