Vision of future tinted in green

Environmentalism is good for economy, Kennedy says

By AUBREY COHEN

Ending America's dependence on carbon fuels would power the nation's economy the way abolition of slavery unleashed the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Friday in Seattle.

"Our deadly addiction to (carbon) is the major drag on the American economy," the lawyer and environmental activist told green building professionals in the keynote speech to this year's BuiltGreen conference. He spoke on a podium crowded with potted plants and trees.

"Every nation that has decarbonized its economy has experienced immediate prosperity."

Before Kennedy's talk, state Ecology Department Director Jay Manning noted that climate change was already affecting Washington, presaging "sort of an Old Testament future, with floods and fires and pestilence and disasters with a frequency we have not experienced before."

An alternate course would lead to homes that produced more electricity than they consumed, electric cars that produced no pollution and people who rarely drove those cars because they lived in compact communities close to work, shopping and convenient transit, Manning said.

"Last year, Washingtonians spent $16 billion on imported petroleum products. We could keep that $16 billion. We could spend it here on technology that exists."

Speaking to the point of the conference, Manning acknowledged that the economic downturn had slowed growth and construction in Washington, but added: "Growth will come back, and those people need to go somewhere."

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said climate change "became something very local" when a shrinking snowpack started affecting local power and water supplies. He also noted that the progress of Sound Transit light rail lines, the first of which is scheduled to open later this year, and the city's commitment to reducing emissions.

"Seattle is billing itself as the green building capital of America," he said. "We have the experience and knowledge and creativity to be able to export that to the rest of the country."

Kennedy praised Nickels, saying, "His leadership is unequalled among mayors across the country."

He also recounted his first visit to Seattle, in 1962, with his father, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, visiting the San Juan Islands and fishing in Puget Sound.

The United States has vast geothermal reserves, enough solar capacity to power the country, even if everyone had an electric car and enough wind capacity in three states to do the same, Kennedy said. He called the Great Plains States "the Saudi Arabia of wind."

The biggest technical hurdle in moving from dirty "fuels from hell" to green "fuels from heaven," is the nation's outdated electrical grid, Kennedy said. "A Texas wind farm owner cannot sell his electrons in New Orleans because the electrons would diffuse before they crossed the Texas border."

The U.S. could build the needed wind and solar infrastructure to power the country for about how much it spends every year on oil, Kennedy said. "For a $750 billion investment we could have free energy in this country forever."

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