Centralight

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Up close with… Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney, author, public speaker and businessman, is known as a guiding force in the environmental movement. Kennedy has been named one of Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Agents of Change" and one of Time magazine's "Heroes of the Planet." Kennedy visited campus in November to talk with environmental science students (above) and deliver an evening address to a packed house in Warriner Hall's Plachta Auditorium. Here he shares some of his views. What environmental advocacy means: "It's about recognizing that nature is the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to meet our obligation as a generation, as a civilization, as a nation, which is to create communities for our children, to provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and prosperity and good health as the communities that our parents gave us, we've got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the fi sheries, the public lands, the shared resources of our society." Wind resources: "The Great Plains states are the Saudi Arabia of wind. North Dakota is the windiest place on Earth at sea level. We have enough wind in North Dakota, Montana and Texas to provide 100 percent of the energy grid in our country, even if every American owned an electric car." The need for a national grid: "Our national grid is antiquated, it's already way overpowered, it was underbuilt to start off with, and it's misaligned. It doesn't reach the big wind centers of the prairie states, it doesn't reach the solar centers of the desert southwest. Virtually every farmer in North Dakota wants to put wind turbines on their property and save their family farms, regenerate the rural economies. The problem is, there's no way to transport those electrons from North Dakota to the big markets in St. Louis, New Orleans or New York, because our lines simply can't do long-haul transmissions of electrons. We need a national grid in this country." And a national marketplace: "What we need to do is create a national marketplace that reaches every American home and does what a market is supposed to do, which is to reward good behavior, which is effi ciency, and to punish bad behavior, which is ineffi ciency and waste. centralight spring '10 5 My home in Mount Kisco, New York, is powered by geothermal, but I have two diff erent solar systems on it. My home is a power plant – it produces all day long much more energy than I use. I should be able to sell that energy back to the grid and get market rates for it. Today there's no state where you can do that. There are 36 states that will buy some of it back. They'll let your meter run backwards until it stops, but then they'll stop buying it from you. None of them will give you market rates. What we need is a real marketplace. If I'm making energy, I ought to be able to sell it and get market rates, just like the utility can." Our challenge: "The greatest crisis we face today is the crisis of global warming. The greatest challenge that we face is how do we use and deploy and extract energy in a way that doesn't compromise the aspirations of future generations. … One of the things that I've done over the past two and a half decades is to confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation's wealth. It doesn't diminish our wealth. It's an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications or road construction. It's an investment we have to make if we're going to ensure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation." • PHOTO BY PEGGY BRISBANE

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