Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said the “false choice” between environmental regulation and economic prosperity has hindered action on climate change for too long.

Supporting one includes the other and America’s prosperity will require capitalizing on that connection, he insisted.

“Subsidies to the coal industry have prevented other forms of energy from entering the economy,” Kennedy said recently during a speech at Northwestern University in Evanston. “We have a system of irrational rules, and it creates irrational behaviors.”

Kennedy, 55, is the son of Robert F. Kennedy and an environmental attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper in New York and for the Natural Resources Defense Council. A frequenter speaker on environmental issues, Kennedy sat down for an interview after his recent talk.

You know, I think it’s too bad that of the tens and thousands of scientists who have been involved, that there was a couple who were not adhering to scientific methods. But I don’t think it affects the debate. All you have to do is go outside to see that the climate’s changing. Go to Alaska. Every glacier in the world is now shrinking. You know, I was recently in Glacier National Park which at the beginning of the century had 127 [glaciers]. Now there’s 11 left. So, you’d have to stick your head in the sand. You don’t need a scientist to tell you. It’s like Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.” And you don’t need a scientist to tell you that global warming is threatening global ecosystems.

I think the most important thing we can do is to rationalize our marketplaces here in this country so that they encourage good behavior — which is efficiency — and punish bad behavior — which is inefficiency and waste. The renewables industry is poised right now to beat the incumbents — oil, coal and gas — in the marketplace, and we can provide energy right now much cheaper than they can if we simply have a rational market and eliminate a lot of the externalities. I think that’s even more important than getting a strong treaty.

The first thing that should be done is we should change the dispatch rule. The dispatch rule, which we have in every state, requires utilities to dispatch coal before natural gas. We have a lot of natural gas capacity in this country — we have about 450 gigawatts — and only 320 gigawatts of coal. But the natural gas plants sit idle 70 percent of the time, while coal plants burn 95 percent of the time. So if there’s a coal plant across the street from a natural gas plant, the gas plant is sitting idle 70 percent of the time because there’s a bad rule that requires the utilities to dispatch the coal first.

So if nationally you just said, no, we’re going to dispatch natural gas — which is cleaner, which has only 40 percent of the carbon, none of the mercury, none of the acid rain, none of the ozone and particulates, and which does not destroy the Appalachian Mountain chain — [if you said] let’s dispatch the gas first, then immediately you’d get rid of 78 percent of the coal-burning power plants in our country. You’d get rid of 20 percent of the carbon without having to build a single new power plant. You could do it overnight. That’s the best solution, and the fastest.