Robert F Kennedy Jr has been on the vanguard of the environmental movement long before it began moving toward the mainstream. In his weekly radio show Ring of Fire he along with Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder have been chronicling the exploits of coal, oil and nuclear polluters for years. Robert has a reputation as a resolute defender of the environment which stems from a litany of successful legal actions. He was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his success helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore the Hudson River. The group’s achievement helped spawn more than 130 Waterkeeper organizations across the globe.
In his just published article in the Huffington Post,”Big Carbon’s Sock Puppets Declare War on America and the Planet” Robert Kennedy lays out an incredibly accurate analysis of Americas environmental, energy and business based challenges. He begins the article, “It’s now become de rigueur among the radical right wing rhetoricians to characterize any government support of America’s green energy sector as wasteful, fruitless, and scandalous. They greeted with glee the collapse of the government supported solar company, Solyndra, America’s first major casualty in our race with China to dominate the “new energy” economy. With Solyndra dying on the battlefield — its marketplace choking on inexpensive Chinese solar panels — the right wing’s response was to hoist the white flag and declare defeat in the war for global cleantech leadership. That brand of “Can’t Do” cowardice is a boon to the carbon and nuclear power incumbents who fund so much of the right wing’s activities — but it’s bad for America.”
Speaking at Solar Power International in 2009 as keynote speaker his address was called, A vision for Energy Independence, Jobs and National Wealth. It’s interesting to look at his talk now through the lens of some history thats paseed and the what’s been going on most recently in the multi billion global solar industry. His article is quite timely as some 60,000 protesters from across Japan including a Nobel-prize-wnning author Kenzaburo Oe, gathered in central Tokyo for an anti-nuclear rally recently, urging the Japanese government to cut reliance on atomic power. So far Germany is one of the few countries that has agreed to stop building nuclear power plants.
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