Kennedy Pushes Green to Leasing Conference
Sean Murphy, Associate Editor -- Supply Chain Management Review, 9/30/2008 6:29:00 AM
Going green won't just help the environment. It will help the corporate bottom line, it will help communities, and make all of our lives better.That was the message attorney and environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr. was trying to get across during a speech at the Seaport Boston Hotel Monday as a keynote speaker for NationaLease's annual conference.
Kennedy described how hybrid technology and battery-powered vehicles are the way of the future, talked about a program that promises to wipe out gasoline-powered vehicles in Israel within five years, and delivered a scathing indictment of the Bush administartion, corporate America and even the media for hampering the American public's ability to get informed on global warming and take action.
Kennedy didn't exactly come out and say that corporate America should be like Wal-Mart, but he said the retail titan is one leader in helping make the world a greener place, in part by using electric systems in its trucks to cut back on carbon emissions, noting the company has saved over $40 million just by doing that alone.
But many companies, specifically oil companies, are trying to stop Americans from seeing the need to go green. Specifically, Kennedy alluded to documents that prove these companies have made a point to "sow confusion among the public" on the issue.
"Our country has been bombarded by a propaganda campaign," he said.
He went on to poke holes in the idea that the economy is too dependent upon oil to support itself without it. He likened the present political climate to that of Great Britain prior to abolition of slavery. Arguments then, he said, were that eliminating slavery would kill the economy.
When the government finally did end it, the lack of slavery encouraged entrepreneurs to find mechanical solutions to the labor void, which prompted the Industrial Revolution, Kennedy said.
A more modern example is Iceland, which Kennedy said was a poor nation when it imported coal and oil for most of its energy needs, until the nation began converting to geothermal in 1970. Today, geothermal energy plants produce 90 percent of the country's energy, and when measuring by gross national product, Iceland is now the fourth richest country in the world.
"We have much greater geothermal resources than they have in Iceland, but it's largely untapped," he said.
The U.S. also has massive areas of desert that would be prime locations for solar arrays, and wind farms would do well in the Midwest, which he called "the Saudi Arabia of wind."
But to do that, Kennedy said, the U.S. first must revamp its national grid, just like it did with the DARPANET computer network in 1979, which paved the way for the development of the modern Internet, or the update of the national telecommunications networks in 1996, which modernized telephone service as we know it.
Now, he said, a $500 billion project is necessary to do the same thing to the national grid, which would allow power generated on one side of the country to actually transmit to the other. That would make massive solar and wind farms the key to eliminating the need for fossil fuel and nuclear power plants nationwide.
Kennedy said that's already happening in Israel. He and other firms are helping that country eliminate fossil-fuel plants to the point where that country's grid will allow for cheap, rechargable battery power to be available everywhere, including charging stations on every corner for automobiles.
And they're not stopping there. Once that network is up and running, which is expected to happen by 2011, Kennedy said the country will place a 75 percent tax on all new gas-powered automobiles bought there, effective taxing fossil-fuel-based cars out of existence.
After that, Kennedy plans to do the same in Denmark, then the United Kingdom.
"This is not something that's 10 years away, or 20 years away, or 50 years away. It's three years away, if we want it," he said.
But some people, he said, don't want it. Kennedy blasted the Bush administration for hiring lobbyists representing "the worst of the worst of the worst polluters in their industry" to run agencies like the National Forestry Service, the EPA, and other government bodies that are supposed to be in charge of helping keep America clean.
"The leadership we have in Washington have really led us on the wrong course," he said.
Kennedy also blamed slow reaction to global warming issues in the U.S. on a corporate culture of what he called "corporate crony capitalism," the antithesis of a free market, which he said is impeding progress on many levels, including environmentalism.
Kennedy even blamed mainstream media which, he said, thanks to the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1988 and the gelling together of all media companies into five massive conglomerates, has led to less news and more fluff.
"We're the best entertained and the least informed country in the world," he said.
After the speech Kennedy reiterated that finding new, clean, effiicient forms of electricity and electric-powered automobiles are the way out of the world's environmental crisis, even more so than fuel cells and other alternative fueling technologies.
"All of these other technologies are, in my view, a dead end," he said.
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