RFK Jr: The environmental movement is captured by “carbon fundamentalism” and Biden’s climate agenda is a corporate crony “scam”
“If Americans knew what was happening, there would be a revolution about it”
“I’ve been fighting the coal industry for 40 years, but I don’t focus on climate.
I focus on the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains.
The Appalachians are the richest terrestrial ecosystem in North America.
We’re exploding I think 2,800 tons of ammonium nitrate explosives a week.
It’s the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb once a week by these big companies, Peabody, Consol, Massey.
They’re blowing the tops off the mountains to get at the coal seams beneath.
They’ve leveled 1.4 million acres, bigger than the state of Delaware.
These are the landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett came, bluegrass music came out of it, NASCAR racing, so much of our culture is tied up in these purple mountains majesty.
They’ve filled 2,200 miles of rivers and streams with mining tailings, and destroyed the water, destroyed the fisheries, destroyed the health of the population.
I talk about acid rain. Acid rain has destroyed the forest cover on the Appalachians from Georgia to northern Quebec.
Today, 20% of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized from acid rain. Nobody wants that, right?
We’re losing the oyster fisheries in Washington and Oregon, because the oceans are now becoming so acidic that the bivalves, like oysters, can’t mobilize calcium out of the water column to build their shells.
This is terrifying.
And then, we have mercury in all the fish in our country, and nobody wants that.
With what Biden’s done in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is his big climate act, the money is going to carbon capture projects.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just a scam, it’s a boondoggle for the oil industry, for the methane industry.
And then to offshore wind farms, which are producing energy at five times the cost of onshore wind farms, and they’re exterminating the whales and the marine mammals.
We were drawn to the environmental movement out of love … for these creatures, and we’re now sacrificing those on the altar of carbon fundamentalism.
The real way to deal with carbon is to restore our soils.
If we do regenerative agriculture across this country, we absorb 100% of our carbon budget. That’s what we ought to be focusing on.
We should get rid of all subsidies to mature industries, and then let different energy generation sources compete in a marketplace.
We’ll get the cheapest energy, and we’ll get the most environmentally sound energy policy.
We don’t have free market capitalism, we have corporate crony capitalism.
We have socialism for the rich, and this very brutal, barbaric capitalism for the poor.
In a true free market, you can’t make yourself rich without … enriching your community.
A true free market would promote efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste.
You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs.”
From MeatEater with Steven Rinella