'I think people need to focus on who’s really to blame,' Kennedy told POLITICO Wednesday. RFK Jr.: Fox, GOP killed climate bill

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blames Fox News and the “narcissistic hacks” in Congress for killing climate legislation.

There was plenty of handwringing after the sweeping energy and climate bill collapsed this year in the Senate, and some argued that the White House didn’t devote enough political muscle to get it passed. But Kennedy, a longtime environmental activist and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, said those accusations are misguided.


“I think people need to focus on who’s really to blame, which is Fox News and the Republican Party,” he told POLITICO on Wednesday.

“Pointing a finger at the president is typically what progressives do,” he added. “They have a firing squad and stand in a circle instead of pointing the finger at the real culprit in this, which is: How is it that the Republican Party can drive this country over a cliff?”

It’s not just Republicans that Kennedy finds troubling.

“There’s a lot of narcissistic hacks in both parties, and I think there’s a lot of corporate toadies in both parties,” he said. Although he did say there are some environmental “heroes” in Congress, including climate bill authors Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Ed Markey, both Massachusetts Democrats.

Kennedy also blasted the media, which he said failed to adequately inform the public about climate change. The news media is dominated by “extreme right-wing ideologues and Fox News and talk radio,” he said, and the mainstream media is simply an echo chamber.

He’s irked by the fact that climate skeptics are still getting play in the news. “Why are these people accorded any more respect than somebody who said that cigarettes aren’t bad for you ... or that the world is flat or that we didn’t really land on the moon?” he said. “It’s no more real than these global warming skeptics. And the news media gives them a platform.”

Kennedy cited the recent controversy over e-mails stolen from a prominent climate research unit in England — the so-called “ClimateGate” scandal — as an example.

“There was nothing there to start with. Fox News and Glenn Beck invented it as a news article,” he said. “Even intelligent reporters like you ask that question and are going to take up room in a story about it, then it gets recirculated and everybody just plays into the hands of the oil industry and Fox News.”

Investigative panels in Britain and the United States have since cleared researchers of any wrongdoing.

Kennedy said the media ought to stop saying, “is it real or isn’t it real, you make up your mind.” Instead, he wants them to focus on “what’s really important,” like the rapid decline in glaciers in Glacier National Park. “Did a bunch of people in England make that up?”

After all that, Kennedy credited the Obama administration with making progress in the face of Republican opposition.

“Despite the blocking of these really critical legislative initiatives to protect the planet ... the Obama administration has used its administrative and executive capacity to accomplish many of the things we need done,” he said. That includes funding a “new energy economy,” investing in the power grid and slashing air pollution.

Kennedy was in Washington, D.C., today for a screening of a new movie in which he appears, “Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk 3D.” The film focuses on the water shortages in the Western U.S.