Robert Kennedy Jr: "Polluters Make Themselves Rich By Making Everybody Else Poor"

From the plastic pollution crisis to the acidification of the ocean, in the second installment of SURFER’s conversation with 11-time world champ Kelly Slater and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., the two go deep on how issues of clean air and water and unite people rather than divide them. Kennedy also leans into the idea that pollution is a product of corruption. Read on for more and stay tuned tomorrow for the third and final chapter of the interview. – Jake Howard

When we were planning this interview it was to talk about the issue of plastic pollution in the ocean. It's an overwhelming crisis on so many levels.

Robert Kennedy Jr.: Plastic is hard because you can’t find a point source.

Kelly Slater: So much of it is the consumer. Now.

Kennedy: You can’t really sue somebody who’s smoking a cigarette for violating the Clean Air Act. It’s death by a thousand cuts. But there are things we need to do to control plastic pollution. There are some pretty obvious things that have worked in other countries in the world. It’s a total crisis. There’s now 150 million metric tons of plastic pollution in the ocean. We’re adding 11 million more tons a day. By 2050 there is expected to be more pounds of plastic in the ocean than fish. Then there’s all the microplastics that are part of that. They’re now in the fish that we’re eating and it’s really bad for you. They’re not only carcinogenic, but they’re very potent endocrine disruptors. They disrupt fertility. They disrupt sexual behavior, sexual development, sexual identity. They’re now ubiquitous in the ocean and they’re in all the fish we’re eating. It’s not sustainable. It’s not a good thing. But there are ways that it can be controlled. And there are solutions. We just need the political will like in Europe.

Now we have plastic pollution because the packaging companies are able to externalize their cost. For example, you get a little credit card in the mail from Amazon in a big box and it’s filled with bubble wrap or Styrofoam peanuts. The company that sent you that bears none of the responsibility for disposing of those materials. There’s no incentive to make the packaging smaller or send it to you in an envelope. The taxpayer is subsidizing the cost of disposing that waste. So, we’re all paying for the disposal. We shouldn’t do that. The guy who put that packaging into the stream of commerce ought to be paying for it.

We have landfills in every community. There’s a landfill in New York that’s the highest point on the East Coast of North America. It’s literally the biggest geological feature on the East Coast—and it’s a landfill. It’s a memorial to the inefficiency of subsidizing plastics producers and other producers of waste. They don’t have these giant landfills in Europe, and the reason they don’t is because they have a system called Extended Producer Responsibility. Basically, the producer of the packaging is responsible for recovering, recycling and reducing the waste. It’s up to them to get it back, and if they can’t show that they recovered it, they pay a big fee for anything that’s put into the stream of commerce and not recovered. So, there’s a huge economic incentive to reduce the amount of waste put into the environment—versus the taxpayer subsidizing it all.

This is using free market capitalism to achieve efficiency. Efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste. But we have a system in this country where polluters can do it for free. And so, of course, they’re not going to care about what it does to the environment.

Slater: Is there an avenue to getting to that, Bobby? Is there an avenue to doing that in States?

Kennedy: There’s a lot of legislation. And you know, one of the guys who’s really fantastic and has a tremendous vision is Wes Carter.

Slater: Yeah, Wes does A New Earth Project, which is in the business of finding solutions for more sustainable, recyclable packaging materials. A lot of the surf manufacturers are starting to use them to ship boards.

Kennedy: He’s an incredible guy. He’s a very enlightened individual in a lot of different ways, but he is also incredibly capable. And, you know, he’s a great leader. He’s driving this across the country. There are a lot of other people, even within the industry, who are also driving this. There are even some of the big industry leaders that one might consider bad guys who are on board with this.

I think it’s doable. I think, ultimately, it’s going to happen. It has to be a priority. If I get into the White House, I’m going to make this one of my number one priorities. We have to get rid of the plastics.

You’ve said in the past that pollution is the result of corruption, can you explain that a little?

Kennedy: A lot of pollution is a result of, let’s say, crony capitalism. All pollution is a subsidy, ultimately. Say there’s somebody who’s bringing a product to market and escaping the discipline of the free market by externalizing costs, under true free market capitalism they would have to pay all their costs—from getting the product to market to cleaning up after themselves. That’s a lesson we’re all supposed to learn in kindergarten.

What polluters do is they figure out ways to externalize those costs, to get the public to shoulder some of their costs. They usually do that through corruption. They do that by avoiding a permit condition, corrupting a political official so he overlooks their violation. I’ll give you an example, the General Electric Company in the Hudson Valley, which I fought for many years. They were discharging PCPs into the river. It contaminated all the fish. The fisheries were privatized.

New York’s constitution says the people own all the fisheries in the state. They’re not owned by General Electric. They’re not owned by the government. They’re owned by the people. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use or enjoyment by others. That’s the law that applies to the commons. The commons are all those assets, the air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands, the shared assets of our community, the beach, the shoreline, the oceans. They don’t belong to a government. They belong to the public. Everybody can use them and nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure other people’s use or enjoyment by others.

The role of government in the commons is to regulate the use of the commons to make sure nobody’s taking more than their share. With General Electric, there was a law that said you can’t dump toxic waste in the river, but they were able to go to the governor of New York, two different governors, in fact, and say, “Hey, we have 60,000 employees here and we’re being beaten by our competitors in the market because we have to pay for the cost of these PCPs. If you make us pay that cost, we’re gonna move our plants to New Jersey. They’ll get the employment. They’ll get the tax revenue—and we’re still gonna dump our stuff into the Hudson.”

Both those governors then allowed them to get away with it. General Electric left 10 years later anyway. They closed plants, fired all the employees, and don’t have a single employee in New York. And they left behind a $4.3 billion cleanup up bill that nobody could afford. So, that is called externalizing your costs, and that is what polluters do. In a true free market economy, it would be required to properly value the natural resources. It’s the undervaluation of those resources that cause us to use them so wastefully.

In a true free market, you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and 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 quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. 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 and force the public to pay their production costs. And that’s what all these plastic producers do. They’ve got politicians on the take, so they don’t have to pay the cost of recovering their plastic.

We all benefit from clean air and having good water, why are things like clean water and clean air such divisive subject for people?

Kennedy: I don’t think it’s divisive unless you start talking about climate. I believe the climate crisis is real, that humans are causing it, that it’s existential, but if you make that a political issue, you’re going to get into a fist fight. So, I don’t insist other people understand it, but if you can be more specific, that makes a difference. Example, coal mining cutting down the Appalachian Mountains. We’ve cut down and flattened 1.4 million acres in the Appalachians, these are the lands of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, where NASCAR and bluegrass music came from. Nobody thinks that’s a good idea.

And if you talk about acid rain, it’s destroyed the forest cover on the high peaks of the Appalachians from Georgia to Quebec. Now it’s destroying shellfish. I talked to one of the biggest shellfish producers in Oregon. They can’t raise shellfish anymore because the oceans are so acidic. The shellfish can’t mobilize the calcium of out of the water column to build their shells.

When we were fighting in Flint, Michigan, against the lead in the water we had Hells Angels standing shoulder to shoulder with urban Blacks because nobody likes toxic water. You can get everyone united on that. Even while at Standing Rock, we didn’t sell Standing Rock as a climate issue. We said it’s about protecting these sacred spaces.

For surfers, you talk to them about clean water and getting earaches and sick after it rains and missing a great swell. The storm drains carry waste, sewage, and in the case of San Clemente, you have thousands of casks of nuclear waste sitting right there on the beach.

The nuclear waste situation at San Onofre is much more serious than people realize, and it’s a canary in the coal mine for other nuclear plants that will be going offline eventually.

Slater: I think it’s drawing that connection for people. I think most surfers have heard about it are concerned about Fukushima, but we don’t surf in that every day, so we’re not really exposed to it. I think we can all agree that there’s a huge issue there, and no one knows how to solve it. It’s also complex.

The nuclear thing is so complex, and it’s such a long-term problem, like the climate, it’s hard for people to really wrap their head around.

Slater: It’s about getting people to make those connections sometimes. Bobby mentioned the acidification of the oceans. I don’t know how many large container ships there are in the world, but when somebody told me this statistic, that 16 of the largest container ships in the world create as much pollution as all the cars on the planet, I was floored. And they’re using this leftover fuel, bunker fuel. It’s left over from the oil industry. Bobby, we’ve talked about this before. They can’t use it when they’re within 15 miles of the coast, they use diesel jet fuel when they get close. But they’re spewing out this thick, black pollution. There’s a strong theory that that’s what’s really helping increase the acidification of the oceans.

Kennedy: You know what, I had no idea about that. I mean, I know bunker fuel. I’ve dealt with incidences involving bunker fuel, particularly in the Bahamas. There's a there’s a big problem with one of the biggest, most important reefs in the in the country. It’s where “Flipper,” all the James Bond films were made, probably 100 Hollywood pictures have been shot there. It’s a big elk-horn coral reef. There’s a power plant there that is leaching bunker fuel. The reef is all dying. It’s bleaching because of it. And this is a global biosphere reserve. It's one of the most picturesque, beautiful and well-known environmental features on the planet. And it’s just being utterly destroyed by this. Oh, I know how bad bunker fuel is. It’s not good stuff. It’s just a witch’s brew of toxins and I get it.

Hit the link below for the first installment of SURFER’s conversation with Slater and Kennedy. Stay tuned tomorrow for the final chapter.