“We need to design a system that allows people to get rich by serving the public interest rather than a system that forces people to get rich by abusing our people and, in short, our environment.” -Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Sarah Collins/Neon Tommy)

Despite descending from a long line of politicians, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke candidly on government problems during a Vision & Voices speech at the University of Southern California Thursday. Speaking to a full house, Kennedy addressed current environmental woes and outlined the steps necessary to supersede global warming and achieve a greater economy in the process. 

“If we want to meet our obligation as a generation, as a civilization, as a nation,” he said, “we need to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for enrichment, prosperity and good health as the communities that our parents gave us.” 

To ensure that bright future, the environmental activist argued, we still need energy, though not the type that dominates America’s grids today. 

“We have one of the best solar potentials here in the United States in the world,” he said. “In fact, we could power the entire U.S. energy grid from an area 75 miles by 75 miles in the desert Southwest. We’re number one in the world in wind. North Dakota is the windiest place at sea level on Earth. We can power the entire North American Canadian West country grid just from the harnessed wind in North Dakota, Montana and Texas.”

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Kennedy, son of assassinated Attorney General Robert "Bobby" Kennedy, and nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, took the audience through the costs of building oil and coal plants. Solar plants, he then countered, have the initial construction costs but are essentially free thereafter, thanks to the photons hitting the earth on a daily basis that can then be harnessed into usable energy. 

To make this idea a reality, however, the country needs to circumvent skewed politics and self-interested companies. To do this, he urged Americans with the will and ability to run for public office of any size. To overhaul corporate influence, he said, the key is changing the way the nation does capitalism, which will, in turn, restore the nation to its former true democratic state. Only then, he argued, can effective environmental recovery be made. 

“We need to design a system that allows people to get rich by serving the public interest rather than a system that forces people to get rich by abusing our people and, in short, our environment.” 

The reason for this, said Kennedy, is because America's economic marketplace isn’t living up to its name.

“We don’t have free market capitalism in this country. A true free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste. But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They dig their hooks into a public official to privatize the commons and take the air, the water, the wildlife and make their living by polluting it so that nobody else can use it.” 

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Kennedy said lowering energy costs can regenerate America as an industrial power again, this time with a greener environment and economy.

"Despite all the depressing stuff I see on a day-to-day basis, I retain my optimism, because this is so close if we just have leadership and commitment and political will,” he said.

Kennedy pointed to Iceland, Sweden, Brazil and Costa Rica as examples of countries that successfully decarbonized their energy systems and have seen economic prosperity follow. All America has to do now, Kennedy believes, is treat energy as we do the Internet and telecommunications—as a low-cost, common resource—and create a unified power grid electrified by the sun, the wind and the earth's own geothermal energy. 

Contact Reporter Sarah Collins here. Follow her on Twitter here.