Picking it up at Huffington Post:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water supply, but his reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions. The list includes winning numerous settlements for Riverkeeper, prosecuting governments and companies for polluting the Hudson River and Long Island Sound, arguing cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline, and suing treatment plants to force compliance with the Clean Water Act.
Kennedy is an Attorney for Riverkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. He teaches law at Pace University.
So water, check. Where does he stand on coal? In withering terms he, well, just read on:
there is no such thing as "clean coal." And coal is only "cheap" if one ignores its calamitous externalized costs. In addition to global warming, these include dead forests and sterilized lakes from acid rain, poisoned fisheries in 49 states and children with damaged brains and crippled health from mercury emissions, millions of asthma attacks and lost work days and thousands dead annually from ozone and particulates. Coal's most catastrophic and permanent impacts are from mountaintop removal mining. If the American people could see what I have seen from the air and ground during my many trips to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia: leveled mountains, devastated communities, wrecked economies and ruined lives, there would be a revolution in this country.
His blog on coal is uncomfortable reading, because he shows us our complicity in mountaintop removal and dirty coal technology, where you learn of your connection to mountaintop removal. Example: I live in Portland, Oregon. My utility owns a mountaintop-removing coal company two thousand miles away.
Today at Huffington Post, he commented on speculation that he might be tapped for Head of EPA, and said he would serve however Obama asked of him. He's of course as pleased as we are, and impressed to have a president who can talk and read.
"I think that Barack Obama understands that energy must be the centerpiece for his administration. That there really are two big issues, one is health care and the other is energy," he said. "And energy is intertwined with all other issues. If we can get off of foreign oil, for instance, we can save 700 billion a year. We can pay back the Wall Street debt we just ran up in just one year."
"That whole dark cloud of the Bush administration," he added, "has all the sudden been lifted."
Like his father, he's a fighter, and a tenacious, proven one. I hope that he's the next head of an agency that has been the simultaneous shill and doormat for the Cheney Administration.
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