Good environmental policy is good economic policy

By Mike Myslinski

Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved State Council delegates with an impassioned speech about how the Bush administration has plundered the nation's natural resources with corporate-friendly policies over the past four years.

"The White House is trying to say you have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection," said Kennedy. "And I can tell you, that is a falsehood. ... Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy."

Speaking without notes, Kennedy said society must both create jobs and protect the environment for future generations. "If, on the other hand, we want to do what George Bush is urging us to do — which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity — we could generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride, and they're going to pay for it with denuded landscapes, poor health and huge clean-up costs that are going to amplify over time."

Kennedy's defense of the environment has earned him recognition as one of Time magazine's "Heroes for the Planet." A best-selling author and award-winning writer, he is currently senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a clinical professor and supervising attorney at Pace University School of Law's Environmental Litigation Clinic. His latest book is Crimes Against Nature, which details the dangerous environmental record of the Bush administration.

He warned State Council delegates about the dangers that polluters pose to the economy as well.

"In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community," he said. "What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force you and me to pay his production costs."

Corporations are "constantly trying to figure out how to externalize their costs — make someone else pay them — and the best way to do that oftentimes is through pollution, by forcing their costs onto the public at large — by stealing something that belongs to us — the air, the water, the shared resources, the common wealth, the wildlife, the public lands."

Coal-burning utilities put mercury in the air that poisons the fish and makes families ill, and put asthma-causing chemicals in air that creates acid rain that destroys lakes and forests, he said. "Those impacts are imposing costs on the rest of us that should in a true free-market economy be reflected in the price of that company's products when they come to market. What private companies and other polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of free markets and force you and me to pay their production costs."

As an environmental lawyer, Kennedy said, he goes "out into the marketplace [to] catch the polluters and the cheaters and say to them, 'We're going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you're internalizing your profits' — because when somebody cheats the free market, it distorts the entire marketplace."

There are five times more corporate CEOs in the Bush cabinet than any president has ever had, he said. "When corporations gain control of political power, as they have in this White House in a way that we've never seen in American history, they plunder. They steal from the American people, they steal from our treasury, and they steal our public trust assets."

He added: "Nobody, no matter how much money you can make, has the right to steal the air from our children's lungs."

He also criticized Bush for alienating so many other nations, through which he had once traveled at his father's side, meeting respectful leaders. "They loved our country. They were hungry and desperate for our leadership. They believed in our moral authority. ... It took us 230 years to build up those reservoirs of respect, of leadership, of moral authority through disciplined and visionary leadership from our politicians, both Republican and Democrat, and in three and a half years this administration, through incompetence and arrogance, has absolutely destroyed that."

Kennedy ended his speech in time to make several of the same points about the environment in a live interview from State Council on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," which Council delegates watched on television monitors.