Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Quotes

When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

The oil market is the biggest failure of the free market because it did not take into account the environmental damage.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.

If we are really serious about protecting the environment, the discharge pipes and stacks of industry would all plug directly into their intake side, and costs would not be externalized to a voiceless environment.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.

China is bearing the environmental cost for much of the world because China is the factory of the world.

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Everyone realizes that we have to clean up the environment, but no one likes the cost.

The downsides of fossil fuels, notably their geopolitical and environmental risks, are not fully reflected in their market prices.

I have always seen pollution as theft.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment.

Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it.

The fact of the matter is that today, stuff-selling mega-corporations have a huge influence on our daily lives. And because of the competitive nature of our global economy, these corporations are generally only concerned with one thing - the bottom line. That is, maximising profit, regardless of the social or environmental costs.

The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet's capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world ... we need to reflect on our accountability before those who will have to endure the dire consequences.

Pollution should never be the price of prosperity.

Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke - my poor swomee swans, why they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat.

Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill.