Is RFK Jr. still pushing Cap & Trade to curb carbon emissions?

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. has garnered support from freedom advocates with his activism against the government-pharmaceutical complex and has added to his reputation among patriots with his recent attack on climate extremists during an interview on the Kim Iversen Show.

Climate issues and pollution issues are being exploited by, you know, the the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates and all of these big, you know, mega billionaires. The same way that COVID was exploited to use it as an excuse to clamp down top down totalitarian controls on society and to and then to give us engineering solutions. And if you look closely, as it turns out, the guys who are promoting those engineering solutions are the people who own the IPs, the patents for those solutions. [Emphasis added].

Free market to the rescue?

But is Kennedy walking back his previous support for strict regulations to fight climate change or does he simply see growing government tyranny as the bigger threat leading him to focus almost solely on the need to rein in public corruption? Looking to his own words to answer this question, later in the interview Kennedy offered his solution to pollution: the free market.  

[T]he most important solution for environmental issues? Not top down controls. It’s free market capitalism.

RFK Jr. is not the originator of this idea. The Hoover Institution noted nearly a decade ago that there are many examples of government intervention with the free market that have led to environmental harm.

[I]t was below-cost timber sales that were clear cutting the national forests, subsidized hurricane insurance that was supporting development on the barrier islands protecting southeastern coastlines, and the government’s blanket aerial spraying of DDT that was killing birds.

Carbon as pollution?

In line with ineffective (at best) government interventions to "protect" the environment, the government heavily regulates a “theoretical pollutant” which has caused no discernible damage to government owned land or elsewhere — carbon. The government regulates carbon emissions through a scheme known as “cap and trade”.

Cap and trade

The Cap and Trade program is a system of government regulations that either tax or prohibit the emission of carbon by, for example, factories. Investopedia details the regulatory scheme.

A cap and trade program can work in a number of ways, but here are the basics. The government sets the limit, or "cap" on emissions permitted across a given industry. It issues a limited number of annual permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide and related pollutants that drive global warming . . .

The total amount of the cap is split into allowances. Each allowance permits a company to emit one ton of emissions. The government distributes the allowances to the companies, either for free or through an auction.

But the government lowers the number of permits each year, thereby lowering the total emissions cap. That makes the permits more expensive . . . Companies are taxed if they produce a higher level of emissions than their permits allow. They may even be penalized for a violation. 

Notwithstanding the government's anathema to carbon emissions, Oklahoma State University's Agriculture Department considers carbon to be quite useful in promoting food growth.

[D]oubling ambient CO₂ level (i.e. 700 to 800 parts per million) can make a significant and visible difference in plant yield.

That is not say that CO2 cannot be toxic. While prediction after prediction of carbon dioxide's damage to the environment have failed to materialize, the artificially increased CO2 levels in a face mask, which reach about 50 times the normal 400 parts per million (ppm), i.e., 20,000 ppm, far exceed the NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] regulations for 8 hours of exposure, potentially causing serious side effects.

Which carbon does RFK Jr. fear?

Is it the CO2 trapped in face masks that the Harvard educated nephew of President John Kennedy fears or is it the methane (CH4) that cows belch? Or both? We know about the former from an article RFK Jr. posted on his Children's Health Defense website entitled, “How Masks Make You Sick Instead of Protecting You”. We know about the latter from an article he penned for Rolling Stone back in 2007.

Cap and Trade One of the most effective tools for harnessing markets to save civilization is a mandatory cap on planet-warming pollution – one that begins by cutting emissions now and then reduces them eighty percent by 2050. Establishing mandatory limits in all industrial sectors would create a huge market for products and technologies that use less energy and emit far less carbon. 

In 2020 RFK Jr. again expressed support for this scheme, specifically calling for carbon taxes as well as backing AOC's Green New Deal .

I think the Green Deal is, and all of that stuff, is important. It's good. We ought to be pursuing it. My approach is more market-based than kind of top down dictates. You know, I believe that we should use market mechanisms, like, like carbon taxes.

Still?

RFK Jr. has not retracted his position on carbon taxes or on treating the element as a pollutant. At the same time, he has focused on proven pollutants — his campaign's webpage devoted to the environment fails to mention carbon at all, preferring to focus on actual toxins polluting rivers and stating vaguely, “the weather is wacky.”

One Twitter user, however, captured a short video clip from the Iverson interview with RFK Jr. in which he specifically refers to "climate chaos" and adds that he has not changed his mind on environmental policy:

[T]hey’ve given climate chaos a bad name, you know, because people now see that it’s just another crisis that’s being used to strip mine the wealth of the poor and, you know, to enrich billionaires. And, you know, I, for 40 years, have had the same policy on climate and engineering. You can go check my speeches from the 1980s . . . 

"Climate chaos" is a term used by climate change extremists when predicting carbon generated catastrophes. Nine years ago, for example, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius warned, "we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos." The non-chaotic passage of 3,000 days did not stop U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from offering his own fear inducing warning of impending "chaos”.

[O]ur planet is on course for reaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible and forever bake in catastrophic temperature rise … [The goal of avoiding significant climate change] is in intensive care.

Not just Pharma

RFK Jr. may yet receive the support of freedom advocates without a mea culpa on climate change, as his willingness to take on government agencies like the CIA, about which he minces no words, has brought him a measure of prestige in those circles.

The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d'état from which our democracy has never recovered.