Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 10/04/2011 2:28:58 PM PDT by Titus-Maximus
The United States faces a clear choice of pushing forward quickly to refine solar, wind and other renewable energy sources or continue to ignore the less obvious costs of reliance on oil, coal, and nuclear energy, Robert Kennedy Jr. told a group of environmentalists Sunday afternoon.
In discussing other costs that are often ignored, Kennedy cited the process of transporting coal from West Virginia. The government spends millions of dollars per mile to fill thousands of miles of road in the state with 22 inches of asphalt, Kennedy said.
"Coal claims to be cheap but is probably the most catastrophically expensive way to boil a pot of water that has ever been devised," said Kennedy, the son of slain U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. "The coal trucks weigh 90,000 pounds and will pulverize less robust roads."
Speaking at the Connecticut Fund for the Environment and Save the Sound's annual meeting, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper, said renewable energy will ultimately be more efficient than traditional fuels.
"If you read a paper today you can't help but see most of our problems are caused by our use of energy," Kennedy said. "Whether it is Fukushima or Indian Point power plant the problems are linked to how we extract it, deploy it, or reuse it."
The recent rejection of President Barack Obama's job proposals by Republican legislators, who cast further investments into solar and green energy projects as cronyism, are disingenuous given the public subsidization of oil, nuclear, and coal electricity interests, Kennedy said.
What Kennedy cited costs that should be associated with those energy sources, including what he estimates is a $4.5 trillion price of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the next 20 years, and $750 billion in subsidies to oil companies.
"This hemorrhage annually of American wealth has beggared our nation that when I was a little boy, owned half the wealth on the face of the planet," Kennedy said.
Kennedy drew a historical parallel between Congress' struggle to pursue greener energy policy over the long term to the debate whether to abolish slavery in the English Parliament in the 19th century.
He said both debates included similar arguments about economic dislocations. Kennedy said emancipation triggered an opposite effect, because smart entrepreneurs saw the opportunity posed by the end of slavery to create industrial machinery that made up for the advantage lost by the end of free labor.
"Because slavery represented 25 percent of the gross national product for Britain, people argued that if you abolished slavery the economy would crater," Kennedy said. "Instead the British economy exploded as entrepreneurs rushed into that space and started the Industrial Revolution."
Another Kennedy retard.
The irony of that is that the Skakels were at least as rich, and possibly richer, than the Kennedys when Bobby and Ethel were married in 1950. An even greater irony is that Ethel's father George Skakel made his fortune in the coal business--he founded Great Lakes Carbon. Unfortunately, his children and grandchildren were even bigger screwups than the Kennedys.
Thanks Titus-Maximus.
And the “good looks” gene definitely ended with JFK, Jr.
My Dad (RIP) was a renegade Irish Catholic.
In the 60s he told me a Kennedy is “someone who wants to give your money to a poor person and get credit for doing it”
And the “good looks” gene definitely ended with JFK, Jr/
Yes they did. The rest look and act like inbred loons.
I’ve read a lot of books about the Kennedys, and it seems to me that they peaked collectively when JFK became president. After that, it was downhill, and their decline got a lot faster after Joe Sr. had a stroke. He was the brains of the outfit, totally unscrupulous but pragmatic. After he was out of the picture, his sons started making really big blunders. For example, if it had been up to Joe Sr., Bobby would never have gone after the mob, because the price of alienating them was too high.
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey, An Innocent Millionaire
Why does a drug addict like him get to lecture us about how to live?????
He sounds scatterbrained. I wonder if his mind on drugs is like the fried eggs in the public service announcements years ago which urged people to avoid drugs.
But since he’s a Kennedy, and a good liberal, we’re supposed to revere him and worship him????
I call BS!!!
No way there is 22 inches of asphalt! Hell, the roads are not 22 inches deep INCLUDING the road bed. Coal trucks here in WV at best travel only a couple of miles from a mine to a tipple and at that it is usually on secondary roads.....NOT Interstates.
I'm thinkin' Bobby-boy needs another fix
Memorial Tunnel was a bottleneck, four lanes down to two.
I 79 handles a large volume of traffic, especially trucks... much more so than that stretch of I 68. I 81 is also heavily travelled by trucks.
Not all that familiar with the southern part of the state.
When you said “up and over” did you mean Corridor H (US 33)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy,_Jr.
1983
In 1983, he was arrested in a Rapid City, South Dakota, airport for heroin possession. A search of his carry-on bag uncovered 183 milligrams of the drug.[4] Upon entering a plea of guilty, Kennedy, then 29 years old and a first time offender, was sentenced to two years probation, periodic tests for drug use, treatment by joining Narcotics Anonymous, and 1,500 hours of community service by Presiding Judge Marshall P. Young.[4] After the court was satisfied with Kennedy’s compliance with the sentence, it ordered that Kennedy’s record regarding the offense was to be sealed and expunged.
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