Kennedy is the senior attorney for the National Resource Defense Council, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a fixture in the liberal-leaning, politically progressive Colorado town of Aspen. You may have heard of it.

Roberts out of the gate asked Kennedy what backers of climate change/energy policy reform can and should be doing. And Kennedy started off by saying Congress may have failed but there’s plenty the Obama administration can do on its own:

“There are a lot of things that the federal government can do without going through Congress. Those are the lessons Bush and Cheney taught us. The Supreme Court has given the EPA the authority to put a price on carbon. We ought to be doing that. The administration also ought to be putting a cost on mercury from coal plants. They should altogether ban mountaintop-removal mining. They should try to force the carbon industry to internalize their costs the same way that they internalize their profits.

“Then the administration needs to help construct a national grid system that functions as a marketplace for renewable power. We need a marketplace that turns every American into an energy entrepreneur and every home into a power plant, that powers our country on what Franklin Roosevelt called “America’s industrial genius.” We need a national program like Eisenhower launched in the 1950s and 60s to reconstruct our highway system and have it reach every community in the country.

“Right now we have a marketplace for energy in this country that is rigged by rules that were written by the incumbents to favor the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most destructive, most addictive fuels from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, abundant, and wholesome fuels from heaven.

“We need a marketplace that does what a market is supposed to do: reward good behavior, which is efficiency, and punish bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste. If solar and wind and geothermal are allowed to compete, they will blow the competition out of the water — all they need is the infrastructure, which is the national marketplace that will allow them to sell that energy.”

But Kennedy’s best answer was reserved for Roberts’ next question about national policy failure:

“National climate policy is ultimately a victim of the national political calamity. What we’re looking at is the tragic collapse of American democracy. A lot of it has to do with what’s happening in the media. George Bernard Shaw said that a journalist is somebody who can’t distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. The Citizens United case was the collapse of civilization, but the media ended up covering the Ground Zero Islamic center and Juan Williams and Charlie Sheen and giving very little attention to the impacts of this momentous case.”

It should be noted that the Colorado Independent has dedicated far more space to climate change policy than the Sheen-anigans of the highest paid actor on TV, Charlie Sheen – even though most of Sheen’s allegedly alcohol- and cocaine-fueled activities have occurred in the aforementioned Colorado town of Aspen (that last bit was just for the search engines, Robert).

We are, after all, mostly a political and policy website. If, for instance, it turns out the office of Pitkin County District Attorney Martin Beeson — a Republican who initially threw his hat in the ring to take on outgoing 3rd Congressional District Rep. John Salazar — didn’t go after Sheen hard enough on domestic violence issues (shades of Ken Buck), then we’ll be all over that.

Last May, Kennedy helped move discussion of the national energy “smart grid” into public consciousness with a “manifesto” he published in Vanity Fair entitled “The Next President’s First Task.” Kennedy’s manifesto celebrated the boom that would follow the de-carbonizing the U.S. economy and urged Obama (or McCain) to enact an immediate cap-and-trade system to seriously reduce emissions. He called the American Midwest a “Saudia Arabia of wind” — a rhetorical formulation that has now become a cliche. He said that a revamped national power-transmission system would be a “strategic masterstroke,” the construction of which would “create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.”

In the thousand blog posts launched in response to Kennedy’s manifesto, the detractors included David Morris at Alternet. The author of three books on the national electricity system, Morris wrote that, in fact, smart-grid advocates are missing the point of green power — namely that it is local and renewable. The new national grid, he said, would serve mostly to keep non-renewable power plants in business and divert funds and research better spent elsewhere.

Kennedy, though, is still a major cheerleader for the grid and its place at the center of any economic recovery plan. Although he is scheduled to speak on the role natural resources play in our identity as Americans and on ways businesses can thrive by turning to green practices, event attendees will likely be interested to learn the specifics of how he sees construction of the grid playing out as part of the Obama stimulus package, and what that might mean for Colorado workers in particular.

The talk is open to the public and will be 10 a.m. to noon at The University of Denver’s Newman Center for the Performing Arts. The Daniels School events staff reports that roughly 800 attendees have registered as of today, Monday, and that the hall seats 1,000 people. Register here.

As a preview, here is Kennedy last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” reiterating (about six minutes into the YouTube) that “the most important investment” we can make to stimulate the economy right now “is to rebuild our grid system in this country.”

Palast, speaking at the Progressive Democrats of America gathering at a downtown Denver church during the DNC Tuesday, excused Kennedy’s absence to be with his uncle, Monday’s inspirational surprise speaker Sen. Ted Kennedy, and introduced a surprise replacement of his own, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.

Progressive investigative journalist Goodman asked a delegate to hold up a goody bag with sponsor logo from AT&T on one side and decried the influence of big corporate money on the modern American political process.

She talked about trying to get into a delegate gathering at Mile High Stadium Monday and being denied access by towering security guards. Goodman said delegates at a corporate party are in training for just how skewed by campaign contributions politics in America have become, and added that there can be no good reasons to keep the press out, only bad ones.

“When you’ve got money saturating politics, and even if you care deeply about the public good, you’ve got to see where the money is and that’s what this is about every four years,” Goodman said. “It’s about teaching (budding politicians) big-money politics.”

Goodman said AT&T’s sponsorship of the DNC is the Democrats’ reward for refusing to block a bill several weeks ago giving telecom companies retroactive immunity for facilitating domestic spying by the feds. She also urged support of independent media during both parties’ political conventions in order to limit and expose excesses by police against protesters in Denver and Minnesota.

Palast took back the microphone to talk up his project with Kennedy, which will be the subject of a feature in a major national magazine next month and which also will be released as a 24-page comic-book-style PDF illustrated by three top political cartoonists. The report will be available on the Web site www.stealbackyourvote.org.

Palast said former Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson has made the state the epicenter of the rampant practice of purging voter registration lists for alleged irregularities — a tactic now even more en vogue in the wake of new legislation backed by the Bush administration.

“Now under the Help America Vote Act the entire nation is Floridated, but the champ, [former Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris, ain’t got nothing on Colorado,” Palast said. “We’re sitting at purge ground zero. The reason that there’s a convention here is this is a swing state where Democrats are piling in, tens of thousands of new voters in Colorado at the top of the bucket, but at the bottom of the bucket the spread sheets are going (poof).

“What’s happening? Donetta Davidson, who had been secretary of state in the state of Colorado, removed 19.4 percent — one out of five voters in the state of Colorado, she removed their names. And what happens to Davidson as a result of this? The answer is George Bush made her head of the brand new Election Assistance Commission, where she can train all 50 secretaries of state in her purging ways. In fact, President Bush, instead of calling her chairwoman of the EAC, was going to call her the Purging General.”