Environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr. has a lot to say, and he won’t waste a second of his allotted speaking time.

Save for a quick drink of water, the son of the late senator and attorney general didn’t leave time for dramatic pauses or even the customary joke at the beginning of his speech about the environment Thursday at the 16th Convocation of Critical Issues at Missouri Western State University.

Mr. Kennedy, who has been critical of the former White House administration, kept politics out of his talk on how America can follow the success of other countries in going carbon-free, saving money, and saving the environment in the process.

The M.O. Looney Sports Complex, nearly full of Western students, faculty and community members as well as bus loads of high school students, listened to Mr. Kennedy’s story about his father’s admonition that strip mining in east Kentucky and West Virginia is flattening the Appalachian mountains in that area.

“He said, ‘They are permanently impoverishing those communities,’” Mr. Kennedy said of the conversation they had when he was 14. “‘There is no way they can regenerate the economy with the barren moonscapes that have been left behind.’”

Mr. Kennedy, a trial lawyer and head of two environmental organizations, concentrated most of his thoughts on turning away from oil and coal and looking to wind, geo-thermal and solar forms of energy, a process called de-carbonization.

He accused oil industry-funded propaganda for putting a kink in America’s progress toward a greener form of energy production. He said “phony think tanks” persuade Americans that “seat belts are bad for you, cholesterol is great for you, whales like being harpooned, and there is no such thing as global warming.”

Pointing to other countries that have experienced success in de-carbonizing and seeing huge profits, Mr. Kennedy said Iceland went from the poorest nation in Europe to the fourth richest when it focused on an abundance of geo-thermal resources for its energy. Sweden also saw a leap to No. 6 after going green in 1996. Brazil, he said, is enjoying the longest and most robust economic expansion in South American history after taking carbon out of the equation.

“The Midwestern states are the Saudi Arabia of wind,” he said, adding that North Dakota, Montana and Texas have enough wind resources for 100 percent of America’s power needs, even if every American drove an electric car.

The problem lies in creating a grid to transport that power throughout the lower 48 states. But if a national grid for power was created (estimated cost of $200 billion) like the grid for communications, the price of power would no longer be significant.

Mr. Kennedy met with President Barack Obama and his staff less than two weeks ago, and said that following health care, energy is on deck as an issue to address.

“This is something that is coming,” he said. “And it will leave our children with clean and prosperous, wholesome lives that they deserve.”

Jimmy Myers can be reached

at jimmym@npgco.com.