magazine. Kerry can often come across as a calculating politician who holds his finger to the wind. But on the environment, he is clearly not "faking it" as the following excerpts show:
«AlterNet AvantGo Edition
Kibitzing with Kerry
Amanda Griscom, Grist Magazine
He has the jaw and build of Paul Bunyan; he windsurfs, kite-boards, and snowboards; and he's married to Teresa Heinz, one of the most powerful environmental philanthropists in the country. He has his finger on every hot-button environmental issue in D.C., from helping to lead the Senate campaign against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to pushing for improved fuel-efficiency standards to advocating for an aggressive renewable energy development plan. With the exception of that Harley Davidson Wide Glide he likes to parade at campaign events, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) looks to be the ultimate embodiment of Beltway eco-chic.
But what goes on behind the glossy-green public image? What does this presidential candidate's environmental record really look like after his nearly 20 years in the U.S. Senate? Rifle through the archives of the League of Conservation Voters, and you'll find he gets an A+ -- literally. Kerry has a 96-percent lifetime voting record. Despite concerns that Kerry is a limousine liberal, there seem to be few contradictions between his environmental image and his track record
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Kerry: When you add it [the Bush admin's record] all up, it's a stunning assault on environmental common sense. You begin with global warming, which is one of the most serious challenges of all, you add it to the ocean pollution and fisheries challenge that we face. And then you couple that with the quality of our rivers and streams and lakes, the air-quality issues of the United States, the forest and mining policies, the drilling policies, arsenic in our drinking war, and you just have an unbelievable series of backward-moving measures.
There is not one proactive, genuinely thoughtful, positive policy that you can point to that George Bush and his administration are advocating. You cannot find one area where they are genuinely advocating something. They have their Healthy Forests thing; it's a fraud. Clear Skies; it's a fraud. It's all very Orwellian -- remember in 1984 where "war is peace"? That's the Bush environmental policy.
Griscom: You've proposed a very aggressive energy plan, advocating a Renewable Portfolio Standard that sets a mandatory industry target to produce 20 percent of the nation's electricity supply from renewable fuels by 2020. Can you tell us how, practically speaking, we are going to get from here to there, given that right now as a nation we're producing less than 1 percent of our energy from non-hydro renewables?
Kerry: Yeah, but in California it's 13 percent. California is the sixth-largest economy in the world. That's the full mix -- hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, biomass, everything. In other states it's only 1 or 2 percent, but you can advance very quickly because there are enormous gains -- both economic and environmental -- to be made in many of those states. But we have to encourage the investments with incentives from a state and federal level.
Griscom: Wasn't that proposal essentially laughed out of the U.S. Senate as economically untenable?
Kerry: No. It was laughed at by the special interests who wrote the Republican energy bill. That's just the industry resisting. It has nothing to do with reality. The special interests come in and spend huge sums of money to get Washington to continue spending money on the old way of doing things. We spend incredible amounts of your money to do for the oil and gas industry what they could afford to do for themselves. And we shortchange the alternatives, the new ideas. They fight to drill in ANWR, they [take money away from] new energy -- it's that simple. The reality is that you can achieve a 20 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard fairly quickly if you put the kind of money into alternatives that you put into existing forms of energy.
Griscom: Can you take us through the economic advantages of your plan and how you would achieve it?
Kerry: Once a certain amount of money is allocated by government to do something, people generally find ways of getting at it. The government incentivizes people to move in that direction. It creates marketplaces. You make it profitable for people. You implement the RPS [Renewable Portfolio Standard]. You set up a series of joint ventures, of grants, of tax credits. You make requirements that companies have to produce a percentage of their electricity from alternatives and renewables, and that creates a market; then those states start bidding for companies to provide it. It's a different way of thinking, and it can lead to a better policy -- with goals set by leaders in policy-making with incentives to help get us there. It's exactly what we did with NASA and the space program. They'll do requests for proposals and then those companies say, well, 20 percent equals X amount of income and it's in our economic interests to get in the arena and compete. They'll start looking at ways to produce it. And you commit federal funds to help that process along.
Griscom: So it becomes profitable for companies when you commit federal funds?
Kerry: Correct. And committing those federal funds will, in the long term, create jobs and grow the economy. Just like the military did in the Cold War, or the space program.
Griscom: In the face of war and terrorism, environmentalism has dropped considerably in the polls as a primary issue of public concern. How can we get this issue back on the map?
Kerry: First of all, those polls often don't reflect people's real feelings. Polls are a snapshot of a moment. Poll results can be skewed by how questions are worded and how they are asked. When I say to audiences: Domestic, renewable sources are urgently needed now because they are entirely under our control, no foreign government can embargo them, no terrorist can seize control of them, no cartel can play games with them, no American soldier will have to risk his or her life to protect them -- audiences respond. I find that all over the country, people are responding to environmental concerns as I talk about it.
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Griscom: It's interesting to me that unlike other candidates, you've actually gone to Iowa, for instance, which has a strong United Auto Workers base, and argued for CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standards, putting yourself in conflict with what we traditionally think of as anti-environmentalists.
Kerry: You have to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. But the truth, in this case, should be appealing to UAW's workers: I believe I can put them to work. I believe I can have them working making cars; they can just make cars that are more efficient. It's not that hard. We can make cars that use biomass ethanol, cars that use hybrid-electric engines, that get 100 miles to the gallon by just being smarter. Somebody has to lead us there.
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Griscom: How do you consider yourself different from other candidates on the environment?
Kerry: This fight is such a part of who I am; it's not just an issue on my resume. I think I have the longest, strongest, clearest, most accomplished record on the environment of any of the candidates running. I began in 1970 when I spoke at Earth Day. I was chairman of Earth Day New England in 1990. I chaired a governor's task force on acid rain when I was a lieutenant governor and we developed a national platform for acid rain. I've been chairman of the Oceans and Environment Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee. I've rewritten our fisheries laws, our marine mammal protection laws, our plastic pollution laws, our flood insurance protection laws, our coastal-zone management laws. I've lead on tuna/dolphin safety issues, on banning driftnet fishing. I've been to all the major conferences -- Rio, Buenos Aires, Kyoto, The Hague -- on global warming. I led the fight to stop Newt Gingrich from attacking the Clean Air and Clean Water acts in 1996, and I've led the effort in the Senate to stop the drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge. I put together the first-ever sustainable development conference in Asia. I am proud of my record of accomplishment on the environment.
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Griscom: You are thought of as an avid environmentalist and you've built a reputation as an outdoorsman. Can you talk about your personal relationship to the environment? What made you care about these issues and how do you practice environmentalism in your own life?
Kerry: My mother was a strong environmentalist. She passed to all of us a great appreciation for the world around us. She started nature walks at our schools. She took us out in the early morning and taught us about birds. She read us Thoreau and Emerson and later Rachel Carson. We were always hiking and walking and learning about the outdoors, so from a very early age I had a powerful sense of its importance.
I'm really impressed, btw, by how good Kerry is at snowboarding, hockey, etc., at age 60. Looks very cool; I'm tempted to say the campaign should use footage in ads targeted to young or active people...but of course it could look like braggadocio or pandering. Probably best to keep serving it up as juicy visuals for the free media, I suppose.