RFK Jr. and Climate Change
Even on the environment, his views are strange and unsettling.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., has polled surprisingly well so far. That may well be a fluke, but it may be worth taking a look at his views at this point. Unlike his views on vaccines, his views on climate change don’t involve blanket denial of science. But they do involve some of the same populist fears of conspiracy by elites.
Let’s begin with his deep distrust of EPA, which rivals that of the Republicans who want to abolish it although the reasons are quite different. Here’s what he has said about the agency: “I’ve spent 40 years litigating against the agencies, the regulatory agencies in the United States, so I can tell you that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is effectively run by the oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry.”
What about climate regulation? This, too, seems to be suspect in his eyes. Kennedy has said that “climate issues and pollution issues are being exploited by, you know, the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates and all of these big, you know, mega-billionaires, the same way that Covid was exploited, to use it as an excuse to clamp down top-down totalitarian controls on society.” In an interview, he expanded on that thought to say:
“The crisis has been, to some extent, co-opted — by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys’ club in Davos — the same way that the Covid crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, to impose totalitarian controls and to stratify our society, with very powerful and wealthy people at the top, and the vast majority of human beings with very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives. Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls.”
If Kennedy thinks climate regulation is like the COVID response, that’s quite a damning accusation given his worldview. As to COVID, he has said, ““intelligence agencies, pharmaceutical companies, social media titans, medical bureaucracies, mainstream media and the military … are using a health crisis to impose totalitarian control worldwide.” Along with Bill Gates, another of his villains is Anthony Fauci, whom he calls “a prominent face of the medical cartel and medical technocracy that is wrapped up in obliterating constitutional rights globally.”
As to just what kinds of climate action he would like to see, the answer is unclear. Like many others, he is skeptical of nuclear power, carbon capture, and geoengineering. He opposed a Dutch effort to clamp down on excessive use of fertilizer, which produces both conventional air pollutants and greenhouse gases, because he thought it was unfair to small farmers. But what he’s actually in favor of isn’t specified.
Despite his other oddities, maybe the strangest thing about his environmental views is this: The “environment” tab on his campaign website doesn’t say a single word about climate change. Not a word. It does mention clean energy in passing, which it advocates only as a way of reducing “toxic waste, industrial poisons, and pesticides.”
As someone who avidly supported his father and admired his work to clean up the Hudson, I find all of this especially sad. But I suppose his turn toward conspiracy theories is a sign of the times. Those theories have already had too much influence among conservatives. Let’s hope that they are not starting to infect progressives as well.
July 16 update: Look here for a video and tweet expanding on RFK Jr.’s views about the use of the climate crisis to expand “totalitarian” control by elites.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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Dan, when is UC going to implement your solutions in time to save and protect the human race?
Gosh, what a biased swipe at RFK Jr. Obviously Kennedy does not ‘think climate regulation is like the COVID response’.
Robert– did you read the italicized quotation? How else do you read “The crisis has been, to some extent, co-opted . . . the same way that the Covid crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, to impose totalitarian controls.” What does “totalitarian controls” refer to if not climate regulations??
Dan, quoting your article above, here’s what RFK Jr said about the agency:
“…the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is effectively run by the oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry.”
I spent 22 years at NJDEP and then EPA. I concur 100%. Review some Agency enforcement settlements: how many on the record demonstrably obtain a penalty sufficiently large to deter the source and remove the source’s economic benefit of noncompliance?
Here’s your next RFK Jr quote in which he referred to Covid:
“The crisis has been, to some extent, co-opted — by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum and the billionaire boys’ club in Davos — the same way that the Covid crisis was appropriated by them to make themselves richer, to impose totalitarian controls and to stratify our society, with very powerful and wealthy people at the top, and the vast majority of human beings with very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives. Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls.”
RFK Jr is clearly pointing out what every citizen knows: the wealthy and in particular industry owners run the show and EPA has been no exception, it is biased heavily in favor of industry in policy making, regulatory development and enforcement decisions. In practice, as RFK Jr says, citizens “have very little power and very little sovereignty over their own lives.”
As RFK Jr says further, “Every crisis is an opportunity for those forces to clamp down controls”. Industry controls the scope and extent of the practice of environmental protection. The environment has been in crisis and citizens have been ringing the bell for decades.
Perhaps Legal Planet could review these issues in future posts?
Thank you for being an intelligent human being with a critical mind.
Tragically, the increasingly out of control climate change disasters have not been dealt with since you warned us in 1961 and many, many other times over the decades:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=best+way+to+control+anxiety+attacks&aqs=edge.3.69i64i450l8.854674088j0j4&FORM=ANAB01&PC=U531
At least you keep trying, as the Best of the Best Envirnomentalist in UC.
Thank you Dan, but the Power of Money is still destroying our civilization.
OOPS, my anxieties got the best of me again, and I referenced the wrong post,that should have been:
https://legal-planet.org/2021/07/15/major-international-climate-developments/
Lets see here, we have homeless all over the place and rising, crime, fentanyl, drug addiction, economic uncertainty, unemployment, decay, urban downtown areas becoming vacant, and he wonders why he is doing better than an old guy who can barely walk. Talk about being out of touch. Perhaps he is also nuts because he had his father shot along with an uncle as president who was also gunned down. This type of trauma can make someone believe in a lot of weird conspiracy beliefs. Also, why does he need to believe in everything his father did or says. Is that what you believe as well? That is rare to believe what your father also believed in.
You speak so highly of the epa or environmental protection agency. Go look up who created the idea and started that whole thing.
Dick Nixon created the EPA. So what? Have you got a point, or just a bias?
I think another reading of Ted Lowi’s The End of Liberalism is in order.
While there are some issues that leave me with a bit of Sartrian nausea the Presidential candidate’s reflections on chronic disease and the intrinsic value of the life-giving values of Earth are needed today. I hope folks do their research and a much broader discourse can be generated given the diaspora and radical change in the Earth’s support systems.
Wow not progressive at all…
You could stand to listen to who and what rd jr. is and stands for…
Our land and waters are being poisoned by thousands of untested chemicals, the people running the epa are former lobbiests (did you forget who trump hired) and the system is clearly rigged to contually degrade our environment for corporate gain. Clearly you are a part of the system because everything he is saying about the epa and regulatory agencies can be found through researching work history. I am tired of the Obama and Biden Administration making 1 ft forward and 3 ft back. I campaigned for Obama thinking that he was different and one of the first things that he did in office was start off shore Drilling in the gulf. Look at the environmental impacts that has had. Your article is clearly a smear campaign and not based on facts or the current state of our environment.
In addition to claiming “40 years of litigating,” RFK Jr. also says “I spent 35 years as — I don’t want to toot my own horn, but — arguably the leading environmentalist in the country.” Has he actually done anything other than being part of the Hudson River cleanup? I recall that Joe Kane’s “Savages” showed RFK Jr. to be an ineffectual attention seeker.
No one with six children deserves a voice on anything involving environmental protection.
Shouldn’t be be suspicious of the EPA after it was shown that they were being told what to say by DuPont in the mid 2000’s with regards to the pollution WV? They have email records of DuPont stating what to say in public memos on the matter?…
Thank you for this. I’m disappointed in his lack of a specific plan. Climate change is an existential problem and this demands a very clear response.