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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council; Professor, Pace University School of Law
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Does the purported conflict between New York environmental organizations reduce the effectiveness of environmental causes there?
A: We do have a lot of environmental groups in New York State. If you look at the typical environmental law book in this country you'll see that the seminal primal cases are Hudson River cases. That's because we have a population that was committed to the river, activist, litigious, willing to go to the planning and zoning board meetings and ultimately to court. They protected the Hudson and generated this extraordinary wealth of environmental law now used by communities across North America as case law to defend their own communities.
There is no social movement in history that has succeeded without having diverse groups. In the environmental movement we have groups like Greenpeace that do civil disobedience and Nature Conservancy that takes a lot of corporate money and stays out of controversy but does a wonderful job in preserving landscapes. That there are a lot of environmental groups in New York and that they may occasionally step on each other's toes is not a sign of poor health; it's a sign of the good health of the environmental movement.
Q: Will you be able to turn your environmental ideas to other parts of the world? And what are your thoughts on the Kyoto Accords?
A: Generally speaking, Europe has a much stronger environmental commitment than the U.S. Businesses have a greater acceptance of regulations that are recognized as important to society. Even in the most right-wing business communities in Europe you don't get people saying, "There's no such thing as global warming." That's the position of the coal, oil and automobile industries here, with the exception of Ford. Places like Poland have a much stronger environmental ethic than we have in this country: 70 percent of its farms are organic as there's a strong resistance to using chemical pesticides. We have some of the strongest environmental laws of any country but among the worst enforcement. They're much more susceptible to the huge amounts of money that are going into politics. The most important environmental regulation that we could pass in this country would be campaign finance reform.
Q: Is it philosophically difficult to prosecute corporations who pollute the environment when various levels of our own government are the country's most egregious polluters? San Francisco International Airport was cited 80 times recently for violating environmental standards.
A: Government is the worst polluter in the U.S., especially the military. There's a lot less leverage in the courts when you go against government agencies because of doctrines like sovereign immunity. But there's also an attitude. If you're a mayor and somebody sues you for not having a sewage treatment plan, you're going to make a calculation to fix this plant now for $100 million and float the bond and explain to voters where the money is, or hire lawyers and fight this for four years until you move on to higher office. If you sue a corporation they often make the calculation: Eventually I'm going to have to do this, so I'm going to do it now and these guys are going to cost me some publicity.
Q: Recently a federal judge compelled the Department of Energy to release documents related to the Vice President's Energy Task Force. How significant is this, and what will be the environmental impact of the Bush-Cheney energy plan?
A: The Bush-Cheney energy plan is a $34 billion subsidy to the oil industry, the nuke industry and the coal industry. There is language in the plan that expresses a strong love and favor for conservation, and there are 11 conservation and renewable programs, but none of them are funded. There's no money in the budget or the bill; it's all going to big oil, big coal and big nuke, which don't need the money. These are industries that gave $60 million to Republican congressional candidates during the last cycle – more than any other industry – and Bush is the largest beneficiary. They're getting $34 billion in return, and it's a disastrous policy for our country. The plan says we should study CAFE standards – Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. We don't need to; we know they work. If we raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy by one mile per gallon, we get more oil than there is in two Arctic National Wildlife Refuges. If we raise oil efficiency by 2.7 miles per gallon in our cars, we eliminate 100 percent of Gulf imports into this country.
President Carter passed CAFE standards in response to the second oil crisis in 1979. Those standards were directed towards getting our country up from 20 to 40 miles per gallon by 1990. Within six years, we had raised average fuel economy by seven-and-a-half miles per gallon. That efficiency caused an oil glut in this country, collapsing the price of gasoline to the lowest levels in decades. Oil companies went to the Reagan administration and persuaded them to roll back CAFE standards. The Gingrich Congress subsequently made it illegal for the government to pass them. In 1986 we doubled imports from the Persian Gulf and they've been going up ever since. If Reagan hadn't done that we would not have imported one drop of Gulf oil into this country after 1986. We almost certainly wouldn't have had a Gulf War, and if you can follow the logic from there, we probably wouldn't be involved in Afghanistan today and the World Trade Center might still be standing. We could have avoided price shocks on the international oil markets, entanglements with countries in the Middle East that are unstable and hostile to us and we would all be richer because instead of spending $3,000 a year on gasoline, individuals would be saving $1,500. We would have generated enough savings to pay off the national debt since 1986 and we would all be breathing cleaner air and be richer as individuals. That's a real energy plan.
As a believer in the free-market economy, I don't think that under ideal circumstances the U.S. government ought to be telling Detroit what kind of cars to make. But the reason that we have low-efficiency automobiles is because of huge subsidies to the oil industry that allow the American oil companies to artificially lower the price of gasoline in this country, so that gasoline is about $1.25 a gallon. In Europe, where they pay the true cost of their gasoline, they pay about $5 per gallon. If we were paying the true cost without hidden subsidies, we would be paying $5 and the American consumer would be screaming at Detroit to give us cars that got 40 miles per gallon.
Q: Many companies claim that environmental regulations are unfairly applied retroactively. On what basis should environmental laws apply after the fact?
A: Major complaints are the Superfund Law or the Resource Conservation and Reauthorization Act, passed 20 and 30 years ago. If somebody used pollutants like the PCBs dumped by G.E. into the Hudson River, G.E. comes back and says (and this is what all these companies say), "We really didn't know it was wrong when we did it." My response is, You made a profit on it and it's not the taxpayers' obligation to clean it up. If you made a mistake in your business that's a business decision, and that's the free market at work if that puts you at a disadvantage later. People didn't discover pollution in 1970. Jack Welch himself was directly and intimately involved with the decisions to release this stuff into the environment at a time when G.E. had plenty of information that it was wrong. They need to learn the lesson that the rest of us learned when we were in kindergarten, which is that you have to clean up after yourself.
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein