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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Advocate of the Environment
Posted On 13 Nov 2010
Atty. Alvaro Noboa sponsored a conference from the Environmental Activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Thursday. Ecuador Times transcribed Mr. Kennedy’s relevant words of the speech.
“The nature is the infrastructure of our community, and that if we want to meet our obligation as a nation, civilization or generation, which is to create communities for our children that provide them the same opportunities for dignity, enrichment, prosperity and good health as the communities that our parents gave us we got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure. The air we breath, the water we drink, the wild life, the fisheries, the public land, the share resources of our society for the common wealth, the same as the landscapes and the rivers that connect us to our past, to our history that provides context to our communities and that is the life support system of our communities and also are the source of our values, virtues and our characters of people.
The people of Ecuador are very much the product of their landscape. You can’t separate the culture, the politics, and the attitude of the people, and if you simply take those landscapes and liquidate them for cash, and take the only value of those landscapes to make a few people rich by making everybody else poor. Then you are saying something morally about the country as well. You can make a feud oligarchy, a corporate kleptocracy and there’s is a few large powerful people who live in gated communities and make themselves very rich, but the vast majority of people in the country would be impoverished and will live diminished lives.
Good environmental policies 100% of the time are identical to economics policies. If we want to measure the economy, and this is how we ought to measure it, based on produced jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations and how it preserves the value of the aspects of our community, if on the other hand we want to do what the big polluters like Chevron and Texaco ask us to do which is to treat the planet as if it were a business on liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible and a few years of pollution based prosperity you can generate an instantaneous cash flow on the illusion of a prosperous economy. Our children are the ones that are going to pay for this with diluted landscapes, poor health, and huge clean up costs, that is going to amplify over time and they’ll never be able to pay.
Environmental entries is just as spending, its a way of loathing the cost of our generation prosperity under the backs of our children. One of the things I have done over 25 years as an environmental advocate, is to constantly go around confronting the idea that an investment on our environment is a diminishment to our nations wealth, it doesn’t diminish our wealth, it’s an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in road construction or telecommunications, its an investment you have to make if you are going to ensure the economic vitality of our generation for future generations. One of the things that I do today for 25 years is suing polluters, so I got more than 400 lawsuits, so today I am more involved in green technology, developing businesses, because I think that’s the greatest tool of advocacy today. This week on Wednesday I broke around the biggest power plant in America, we are building a solar plant that’s 2, 7 gig watts towards 2,700 mega watts of power per plant. Typically a nuclear power plant is 1-gig watts. So the one of 2,7 gig watts and is solar thermal, its big mirror on the Mohave Desert in California, these mirrors are manipulated by computers to shine light on a turbine on the top of a big tower, so we are building it and in 2 years will have it completed, it takes 10 years to build a coal plant, 10 years to build a oil plant, maybe 25 years to build a nuclear plan. To build a coal plant or oil plant cost three billion dollars a gig watt. I’m building a solar plant for three billion dollar a gig watt, so it’s the same price as the coal plant, but once you build the solar plant its free energy forever because the electrons are here in the earth for free, once you build the oil plant, you have to go to Saudi Arabia to get the oil out of the ground, and face the sheiks who hated democracy and are hated by their people, get in wars that cost trillion of dollars, protect the pipelines with military, escort the tankers across the Atlantic with military ships, then it get spilled all over the Gulf of Mexico, or Alaska, burn the oil and poison everybody in our country after you build that plant. So a solar plant offers free energy forever, in our country we use a thousand gig watts at peak, and five hundred of those are carbon based at 2% growth you have to double that in 50 years which is the life the power plant has, so we need a thousand gig watts of carbon free power that will cost three trillion dollars for our country, we have plenty of wind, we have the best wind that blows at night.
The nature is the infrastructure of our community, and that if we want to meet our obligation as a nation, civilization or generation, which is to create communities for our children that provide them the same opportunities for dignity, enrichment, prosperity and good health as the communities that our parents gave us we got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure. The air we breath, the water we drink, the wild life, the fisheries, the public land, the share resources of our society for the common wealth, the same as the landscapes and the rivers that connect us to our past, to our history that provides context to our communities and that is the life support system of our communities and also are the source of our values, virtues and our characters of people.The people of Ecuador are very much the product of their landscape. You can’t separate the culture, the politics, and the attitude of the people, and if you simply take those landscapes and liquidate them for cash, and take the only value of those landscapes to make a few people rich by making everybody else poor. Then you are saying something morally about the country as well. You can make a feud oligarchy, a corporate kleptocracy and there’s is a few large powerful people who live in gated communities and make themselves very rich, but the vast majority of people in the country would be impoverished and will live diminished lives.Good environmental policies 100% of the time are identical to economics policies.
If we want to measure the economy, and this is how we ought to measure it, based on produced jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations and how it preserves the value of the aspects of our community, if on the other hand we want to do what the big polluters like Chevron and Texaco ask us to do which is to treat the planet as if it were a business on liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible and a few years of pollution based prosperity you can generate an instantaneous cash flow on the illusion of a prosperous economy. Our children are the ones that are going to pay for this with diluted landscapes, poor health, and huge clean up costs, that is going to amplify over time and they’ll never be able to pay.
Environmental entries is just as spending, its a way of loathing the cost of our generation prosperity under the backs of our children. One of the things I have done over 25 years as an environmental advocate, is to constantly go around confronting the idea that an investment on our environment is a diminishment to our nations wealth, it doesn’t diminish our wealth, it’s an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in road construction or telecommunications, its an investment you have to make if you are going to ensure the economic vitality of our generation for future generations. One of the things that I do today for 25 years is suing polluters, so I got more than 400 lawsuits, so today Im more involved in green technology, developing businesses, because I think that’s the greatest tool of advocacy today. This week on Wednesday I broke around the biggest power plant in America, we are building a solar plant that’s 2, 7 gig watts towards 2,700 mega watts of power per plant. Typically a nuclear power plant is 1-gig watts. So the one of 2,7 gig watts and is solar thermal, its big mirror on the Mohave Desert in California, these mirrors are manipulated by computers to shine light on a turbine on the top of a big tower, so we are building it and in 2 years will have it completed, it takes 10 years to build a coal plant, 10 years to build a oil plant, maybe 25 years to build a nuclear plan. To build a coal plant or oil plant cost three billion dollars a gig watt. I’m building a solar plant for three billion dollar a gig watt, so it’s the same price as the coal plant, but once you build the solar plant its free energy forever because the electrons are here in the earth for free, once you build the oil plant, you have to go to Saudi Arabia to get the oil out of the ground, and face the sheiks who hated democracy and are hated by their people, get in wars that cost trillion of dollars, protect the pipelines with military, escort the tankers across the Atlantic with military ships, then it get spilled all over the Gulf of Mexico, or Alaska, burn the oil and poison everybody in our country after you build that plant. So a solar plant offers free energy forever, in our country we use a thousand gig watts at peak, and five hundred of those are carbon based at 2% growth you have to double that in 50 years which is the life the power plant has, so we need a thousand gig watts of carbon free power that will cost three trillion dollars for our country, we have plenty of wind, we have the best wind that blows at night.”
