He was one of 11 siblings. His father was shot in the head. He was once arrested for heroin possession. And some say his entire family is cursed.
At 55, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a quaking voice.
Spasmodic dysphonia causes his larynx to quiver involuntarily. But this does not stop him from speaking his mind as the Harvard-educated attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of Time Magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet.”
Kennedy is in a big hurry to “de-carbonize the economy” and save the world from a “rigged marketplace” of “corporate crony capitalism” that he says has polluted our planet and devastated our financial system.
Yet he’s been hanging out with a carbon-burning character named T. Boone Pickens — an 80-year-old oilman and former corporate raider who has spent tens of millions of dollars preaching energy independence now that he’s sure there’s a buck in it.
“If you asked T. Boone, ‘If you had the dirtiest, filthiest oil, and it was American, would you take it?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah!'” Kennedy said. “He believes in global warming, but he’s not that concerned about it.”
Kennedy met briefly with me before taking the stage at the University of Denver, where he compared our addiction to fossil fuels to Great Britain’s past reliance on slave labor.
Just as abolishing slavery led to the industrial revolution, getting rid of carbon will lead to unimaginable prosperity, Kennedy promised a packed auditorium.
“Right now, we have a marketplace that’s rigged to reward the worst kind of behavior,” he said. “The dirty, filthy poisonous, expensive fuels from hell rather than the cheap, clean abundant fuels from heaven.”
Kennedy and I traded stories about Pickens, who I always thought was part of the system that Kennedy opposes — a system that Kennedy complains showers oil, gas, coal and nuclear power producers with trillions of dollars worth of subsidies.
Flush with money, power and influence, Pickens once forced the firing of the general manager of an Amarillo, Texas, newspaper, where I worked in the 1980s, because he was upset with its coverage, I told Kennedy.
Today, Pickens is an energy hedge fund manager, whose BP Capital reportedly lost about $2 billion last year with its bad bets on natural gas. Amusingly, Pickens suffered this loss just as he published his latest self-aggrandizing book, “The First Billion is the Hardest.”
“I think he lost half his fortune,” Kennedy chuckled. “He’s down to his last billion, the poor guy. I’ve spent a lot of time with him. My attitude is, come on board. Welcome.”
Kennedy has even been encouraging powerful people to sign the Pickens Plan, as seen on TV.
Otherwise, Kennedy isn’t fond of carbon-burners. To him, degrading the environment is another form of deficit spending. It’s how big corporations profit by exporting the true costs of their enterprises onto others.
“Polluters make themselves rich, by making everybody else poor,” Kennedy said in a speech that lasted more than an hour and twenty minutes.
“If you are in a polluting industry, you can make yourself a billionaire by poisoning the rest of us. You show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a Fat Cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.”
Earlier this month, a Congressional panel asked Kennedy to confirm a remark he reportedly made in 2002: “Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.”
“I don’t know if that’s an accurate quote,” Kennedy replied, “but I believe it, and I support it.”
Pickens, by contrast, once addressed a complaint about the stench of his Amarillo cattle feedlot by remarking that it “smells like money.”
Kennedy and Pickens now share the same economic problem. They want Americans to embrace their personal investments in alternative energy and they want U.S. taxpayer help distributing their electrons over a modernized national grid.
Pickens wants to build a $2 billion wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. Kennedy wants to build an enormous solar power plant in the Mohave Desert.
Kennedy is a partner and advisor to Silicon Valley’s VantagePoint Venture Partners, which has invested in BrightSource Energy of Oakland, Calif.
BrightSource recently struck deals with Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric to provide solar-generated electricity on par with a nuclear power plant, only cheaper and cleaner.
The deals, however, require regulatory approval and, of course, transmission lines that can stretch from the burning Mohave to the energy-burning cities.
The economic stimulus plan that President Obama signed Tuesday commits about $40 billion for energy-related projects, including only about $11 billion to upgrade the nation’s electrical grid.
Kennedy says it’s a start.
“Just because oil prices went down, we can’t forget about our commitment to get off foreign oil, which is destroying this country,” Kennedy said. “We borrow $1 billion a day from countries that don’t like us to buy $1 billion oil a day from countries that don’t like us.”
He may be right. But he sounds just like Pickens.
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
