According to a Steve Milloy-inspired blog, Robert Kennedy Jr. said the following at this past weekend of activism on behalf of the climate in Washington DC:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said at today’s Capitol Climate Action rally that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship “should be in jail… for all of eternity.”

Kennedy also said that coal companies Massey Energy, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal are “criminal enterprises.”

I'm unable to confirm this right now (write me if you can), but it sounds quite plausible. It also sounds juvenile, immature, and ridiculous.

I don't trust vaunted leftists like Kennedy Jr., who I suspect is only trying to keep his career in the media going, any more than I trust the noted climate skeptics on the right.

If, for example, the power in Kennedy Jr's home in Massachusetts or wherever it is were shut off because all the coal power plants in the US were suddenly terminated, he'd be one of the most prominent (if warbly) voices on the radio bitching for investigations and criminal convictions and who knows what else.

He is a blowhard whom I just cannot respect.

Sure, coal is bad for the climate, compared to other energy sources. That hardly means you have to demonize the people providing it. I grew up in a house with a coal furnace, and for many years remember my mom and my dad taking turns going down into the cellar to shovel coal into the furnace at 3 am in the morning. It kept us warm.

Yes, we need to transition to non-carbon energy sources, and we need to move away from coal. But calls like Kennedy Jr's are just arrogant and stupid, and are exactly why I cannot and will never be an activist. There are no grays in their world, only sharp divisions of black and white. And worse of all, Kennedy Jr. well knows this and deliberately chooses to ignore it for the sake of his personal publicity.

(Let's not even get in to his opposition to the wind farm off Cape Cod, or his extremely misleading article in Salon about vaccines and autism.)

The extreme left and RFK Jr. and Bill McKibben and 350.org and all those people are never going to accomplish anything at this rate. Their language is so inflammatory it is easily written off. Aren't there any adults in their movement?