Kim Iversen: Speaking of the small farmers, one question that I think a lot of people have is, we all know that you are you’re environmentalist; you’ve been in environmentalist for a long time fighting against pollution, fighting against many things that have to do with the environment but there’s a lot of questions about climate change and what we’ve seen around the world is that many of the climate change policies that are enacted by certain countries like the Netherlands or in uh very Sri Lanka we see that it crushes the small farmers that they cannot keep up with the big farms they don’t have enough land in order to do some of the more um you know natural ways to fertilize the land and so it is some of these policies are really crushing the small farms.
Where do you stand on climate policies that are being enacted right now? There is a difference between environmentalism and climate change. Where do you stand on all of that, and what types of policies do you support?
Robert F.. Kennedy Jr.: The climate issues and pollution issues are being exploited by the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates and all of these big Mega billionaires the same way that COVID was exploited. To use it as an excuse to clamp down — top down totalitarian controls on society and to then to give us engineering solutions. And if you look closely as it turns out, the guys who are promoting those engineering solutions are the people who own the IPs, the patents for those solutions. It’s being used.
They’ve given climate chaos a bad name because people now see that it’s just another crisis that’s being used to strip mine the wealth of the poor and to enrich billionaires.
I for 40 years, have had the same policy on climate and engineering. You can go check my speeches from the 1980s, and I’ve said the most important solution for environmental issues is not top-down controls, it’s free market capitalism and what we have in this country now is not free market capitalism; it’s corporate crony capitalism.
It’s capitalism cushy, kind of socialism for the rich, and a brutal, barbaric merciless capitalism for the poor.
A true free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution is waste. In a true free market would require us to properly value our natural resources and it’s the undervaluation of those resources that caused us to use them wastefully.
In a true free market you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community, but what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for the rest of us and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market.
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.
In terms of the carbon industry, all of the things that people are trying to do to promote — to end carbon, we should be doing anyway because, carbon means cutting down all the mountains in West Virginia. It means you know we polluted 2200 miles of rivers and streams in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. Every freshwater fish in America now has mercury in its flesh from coal-burning power plants. That is a theft from the public. The waterways and lakes on the Appalachian, on the high Appalachian, every one of them is now sterilized from acid rain.
We need to be reducing — whether you believe in climate change or not — carbon-based climate change — we need to be reducing our dependence on carbon. Carbon receives globally about 5.2 trillion dollars in subsidies a year. If you end those subsidies, carbon cannot compete against more efficient and cleaner energy sources, and that’s what we should be doing; we should be ending subsidies for where all for the carbon industry. And we should be using true free market capitalism and trying the most efficient sources of energy.