Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is warning that President Donald Trump’s climate change policies are “turning America into a petrostate” in an interview with CNN, adding “it’s hard to see a good end for our country from those kinds of policies.”
Speaking with CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront,” the environmental activist and son of late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy said, “it surprised me how much he turned the nation over to coal and oil interests, but it’s a bad path for our country.”
“I think he’s turning America into a petrostate,” Kennedy said. “He named the most notorious oil man in the country to run the State Department, Rex Tillerson, the head of Exxon.”
Kennedy added that many of Trump’s other Cabinet choices “are so deeply rooted in the ideology of fossil fuels and promoting mercantile interests of those industries ahead of the American people, and it’s hard to see a good end for our country from those kinds of policies.”
Kennedy singled out new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who he claimed has no background for the post, and that “his only qualification is that he sued EPA 14 times, and he has publicly declared that he wants to see the abolition of the agency. “
Kennedy also called out Trump for signing an executive order this week to undo many of President Barack Obama’s climate change regulations.
“The abolition or the destruction of the clean power rule is not going to bring back a single coal job in eastern Kentucky or southern West Virginia, it’s just not gonna happen,” he said. “The only people who are going to benefit from that are going to be the billionaires who own the utilities and the big carbon interests.”
