Wil Shipley posted an interesting item on his blog, linking to a speech by Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The speech was made when Kennedy recieved an award for his environmental campaigning, including his recent book Crimes Against Nature: Standing Up to Bush and the Kyoto Killers Who Are Cashing In on Our World.

The speech is well worth reading, and includes some pretty shocking statistics, for example:

A couple of months ago, EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state [because of] mercury contamination. We know where the mercury is coming from — those same coal-burning power plants. In 48 states, at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat. In fact, the only two states where all of the fish are still safe to eat are Alaska and Wyoming, where Republican-controlled legislatures have refused to appropriate the money to test the fish. In all of the other states, at least some, most, or all of the fish are unsafe to eat.

Some of the other amazing statistics are drawn from a report by PIPA (Program on International Policy Attitudes) that compared what Bush supporters believed compared to Kerry over international issues, and the Iraq war in particular. The PIPA press release can be found here, Kennedy quoted the following:

The PIPA Report asked people who voted for Bush and who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. They found that the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic values as those who didn’t; they were just misinformed. Seventy percent said that they believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center. Seventy percent believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. Sixty-four percent believed that President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our foreign treaties, and on and on.

All of the figures possibly go towards explaining the election result last year that mystified me as much as the rest of the world it seems.