A Kennedy in the environment's court

Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday 21/2/2008 Page: 6

WE ARE thinking about the environment in the wrong way, says Robert Kennedy Jnr, the US ecologist and son of presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968. "There's this so-called divide between economics and the environment," Mr Kennedy said. "The thinking is not good enough.

Nature is the infrastructure of the economy, it's the best investment." Speaking for an hour without notes at a solar power conference in Adelaide yesterday, covering territory from the preservation of New York's Hudson River by a coalition of Vietnam veterans to why the theme of wilderness continues to emerge in the Bible and the Koran, Mr Kennedy held 600 delegates enthralled.

Mr Kennedy, a lawyer who has taken on and won dozens of major environmental lawsuits in the US, holds simultaneous, passionate beliefs on environmental protection and freemarket economics. "The problem we have in the US, and in Australia, is that markets are not free, not as free as they should be." A culture of protecting profits at the expense of public health was the most damaging thing standing against action on climate change, he said. "We need to go into the marketplace and catch the cheaters, the polluters. In 100 per cent of circumstances, good environmental policy is good economic policy," he said.

"The reason that we're protecting the environment is that we recognise that nature enriches us. The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. We're not doing it for the fishes and birds, we're doing it for our own sake." Mr Kennedy blames a lazy media for not bringing green issues into the public eye frequently enough, but said he is an optimist, and encouraged by what had seen during a flying visit to Australia. He urged other state governments to follow South Australia and introduce "feed-in tariffs" to allow people with solar power to sell it back to the energy grid at double the market rate.

"This is a great idea, because it turns every home into a power station. Think about it from a national security angle. A terrorist can attack a power station, but they can't attack a million separate homes." The NSW Government said this week that it would not be supporting a feed-in tariffs scheme, preferring to concentrate on other areas of renewable energy.

In contrast to the buoyant Mr Kennedy, the former NSW premier Bob Carr, who was also at the solar meeting, said he had become deeply pessimistic about human efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming. "If you look at the technology, it's just paralysed by sheer slowness," Mr Carr said. "We're used to being told that the pace of technology is so rapid, but that's only with gadgets like mobile phones. The pace of renewable development is just glacial. So I'm a pessimist."