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b'Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council The fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is so readily embraced by progressives can conceal that his message is an inherently conservative one. Listen to Kennedy talk for an hour and you\\u2019ll hear the words \\u201cfree market\\u201d invoked more often than in any Milton Friedman tome. \\u201cShow me a polluter, and I\\u2019ll show you a subsidy,\\u201d Kennedy is fond of saying, as he does here. The market is flawed, he says, by polluters who \\u201cmake themselves rich by making everyone else poor\\u201d \\u2013 externalizing their costs and internalizing the profits. Kennedy, Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council, was in San Francisco to promote The Last Mountain, a new film that features his efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. If dirty fuels were forced to cover their full costs, Kennedy says, not only could they not compete in the market, renewable energy would win. \\u201cRight now, we have a marketplace that is governed by rules that were written by the incumbents \\u2013 coal, oil, and nukes \\u2013 to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most destructive, most vindictive fuels from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome, safe, and patriotic fuels from heaven,\\u201d he says, to the loudest applause of the night. How did we get here? \\u201cOur democracy is broken,\\u201d Kennedy argues, with a campaign finance system \\u201cwhich is a system of legalized bribery.\\u201d And the U.S. Supreme Court\\u2019s Citizens United decision will only hasten the decline. \\u201cThe Citizens United case is the end of civilization, the end of democracy, with a 100-year-old law that said corporations cannot contribute to federal political candidates or officeholders. The Supreme Court just wiped that out, and we have a tsunami of corporate wealth that is now flooding into the political process.\\u201d Even so, Kennedy remains optimistic. \\u201cWe built, in this country, more wind and solar last year than all the incumbents combined. That is a critical milestone in the adaptation of disruptive technologies,\\u201d he says. \\u201cNobody notices it because the other one is so dominant in the market.\\u201d This is going to happen with clean energy, he says, not because government tells it to, but because the market is going to drive it there. \\u201cWe can produce electric cars that cost six cents a mile to drive over the life of the car versus an internal combustion car that costs 60 cents. How long can they maintain that?\\u201d This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on June 16, 2011\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'