Free Republic

Georgetown, Texas is a town of about 70,000 residents north of Austin. In 2012, the city committed to moving its energy grid to 100% renewables, a combination of wind and solar. Ever since then it has been touted as a model for the future and was even featured in the sequel to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. But it turns out Georgetown residents aren’t thrilled with how things are working out in their town. When Georgetown committed to renewables it bought enough that it could cover peak summer usage plus a little extra for future population growth. It locked in 2012...

FULL TITLE: WRONG AGAIN: Obama and Gore Said Global Warming Would Cause More Severe Tornadoes – 2018 Was First EVER with NO VIOLENT TORNADOES Remember this? Back in January 2013, Barack Obama blamed climate change/global warming for “raging fires, crippling drought and more powerful storms” during his second Inaugural speech. Peace award winner Al Gore supported his comments. But Obama and Gore were wrong again. According to the NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center the total number of tornadoes during 2012 was just 936 – a ten year low. And 2018 was the first year ever with no violent tornadoes in the...

Woodward: Dinner with Al Gore 'unpleasant' By DYLAN BYERS | 4/5/13 12:32 PM EDT The Washington Post's Bob Woodward has described a dinner he had with former Vice President Al Gore was both "taxing" and "unpleasant." Speaking to a crowd at Ohio's Youngstown State University on Thursday, Woodward said he was sitting next to Gore at a dinner when the former vice president asked him why he hadn't been harder on President George W. Bush over the Iraq War, according to a report in the Youngstown Vindicator. Woodward said that Gore, who had been a journalist in his younger days,...

Gore: Trump not yet as damaging to environment as he feared By Associated Press Published: 16:38 EDT, 13 August 2018 | Updated: 16:59 EDT, 13 August 2018 REENSBORO, N.C. (AP) - Former Vice President Al Gore says the Trump administration has made some dangerous changes to environmental policy, though so far it's having less of an impact than he initially feared. In an interview Monday with The Associated Press in Greensboro, Gore cited the Paris Climate Accord as one example of the Trump administration failing to change environmental rules as quickly as it might want. While the United States withdrew...

A coalition of conservative and free market think tanks are heaping praise on an anti-carbon tax resolution that was recently introduced in the lower chamber of Congress. Americans for Tax Reform, along with more than 20 like-minded organizations, issued a joint statement Thursday in support of a House resolution that explicitly condemns a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. Majority Whip Steve Scalise and West Virginia Rep. David McKinley introduced the nonbinding resolution. The one page resolution states that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”...

Climate change triggering ‘flying rivers, rain bombs’, Gore warns Former US vice-president tells GESF delegates in Dubai large areas in Middle East could become uninhabitable Dubai: Bizarre weather such as “flying rivers” and “rain bombs” are just some of the recent effects of climate change, warned former US vice-president Al Gore at the Global Education and Skills Forum (GESF) in Dubai on Sunday. Gore, who is the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a non-profit establishment “devoted to solving the climate crisis”, told GESF delegates global weather is becoming “extreme” and “disruptive”, mainly because of global warming. Gore...

Last week, a congressional committee released a jarring and persuasive report on Russian meddling in American politics. Despite a media feeding frenzy over anything tangentially connected to questions of Russian interference, this report went largely unnoticed. The U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s “Russia’s Social Media Meddling in U.S. Energy Markets” details Russian funding of U.S. environmental groups, which used resources to protest the process of fracking and the existence of the Keystone pipeline. Russia, the world’s largest oil producer, figures to watch the U.S. surpass it within five years. Killing fracking and the pipeline stand as two ways...

The shrinking in size of two national monuments in Utah by President Trump through executive order was a long overdue rebuke to federal land grabs that have given federal control to vast swaths of American land, particularly in the West. As the New York Times noted in 2016: The United States government owns 47 percent of all land in the West. In some states, including Oregon, Utah and Nevada, the majority of land is owned by the federal government. Of course, it used to own nearly all of it... East of the Mississippi…the federal government owns only 4 percent of...

CO2 is only a bit-player in the drama of world climate, while the main characters are ice, dust and albedo....Ice age cycles have something to do with precession: the slow wobble of the axis of the Earth. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew of precession and called it the Great Year, because it gives warm and cool seasons over its approximate 23,000-year cycle. But there is a problem with invoking the Great Year as the regulator of ice ages, because we should really get an interglacial warming every 23,000 years or so. And we don’t – they only happen every...

Cenk Uygur, host of 'The Young Turks,' discusses the results of an unscientific (but large) poll of his audience showing that about 80% of his mostly-Sanders-supporting audience would NEVER vote for Hillary Clinton. "I don't want to speak for you guys," Uygur said of his audience -- the largest single online news show on YouTube -- "It was not a small amount of people voting. Over 20,000 votes on our app and @YouTube - over 80% of our audience saying they'd never vote for Hillary. I'm shocked by that result.

1988 was a barn-burner year for climate alarmists. Then-Sen. Al Gore’s steamy congressional hearing trumpeted a planet on fire, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to produce pseudo-scientific evidence blaming it on unfair capitalist industrial prosperity-spawned CO2 emissions. Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart explained the real cause for urgency. She told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Stewart was wrong. Consequences of that phony science...

Ten years after the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore is concerned that a potential Donald Trump presidency could roll back progress in the fight against climate change. "He has said some things on the climate crisis that I think should concern everyone,'' the former vice president told Anne Thompson in an exclusive interview on TODAY Monday."I'm not Pollyanna-ish, but I do think that there is still some basis for hope." In "An Inconvenient Truth,'' Gore used charts and graphs to make the connection between increasing carbon emissions and the changing climate. To mark the 10th anniversary of...

There was a time in America — and it wasn't even so long ago — that liberals cared a lot about working-class people. They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions — e.g., raising the minimum wage — but at least their hearts were in the right place. Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. Radical environmentalists took control of the Democratic Party. These leftists care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these...

Al Gore is back in the news, prominently seen in a March 29 press conference led by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, where Schneiderman and his fellow AGs announced the latest effort to use racketeering laws to prosecute ‘climate change deniers.’ Minutes after first thanking Gore for attending and noting how his 2006 movie galvanized the world’s attention about the urgency to act on climate change, Schneiderman spoke of how the group was working to find creative ways to “enforce laws being flouted by the fossil fuel industry and their allies in their short-sighted efforts to put profits...

Hillary Clinton owes Bernie Sanders’ campaign an apology, the campaign said Friday. Clinton on Thursday accused Sanders’ camp of “lying,” alleging that his campaign has been claiming Clinton accepts money from the fossil fuel industry — a statement she forcefully rejected when confronted by an environmental activist. “I think she probably owes the senator an apology for that because the senator is not lying about her record,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told MSNBC. “He’s talking about her record. He’s talking about her practices. She obviously doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it lying because you don’t like it.”...

If all the countries do their bit then the total reduction in global warming – by the year 2100 will be 0.170 degrees Centigrade. As a climate sceptic friend of mine pointed out at the time, you’d experience a bigger temperature increase than that just walking down from the top to the bottom of the Eiffel tower. So there’s your deal folks: you – and taxpayers like you – are paying $1.5 trillion a year to reduce the world’s temperatures by the end of this century by 0.170. It’s so perfectly ridiculous it’s almost funny. And I suppose on a...

Take a look at this abstract from the journal Progress in Human Geography: ………………………………………………………………………Glaciers, Gender, and Science:A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY: framework for global environmental change research Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, Jaclyn Rushing ABSTRACT Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging...

Renewable energy advocates like to point out that the cost of renewable fuels, like solar power, have dropped substantially in the last few years. The cost of solar power for instance has fallen by more than two-thirds since 2009. Yet for all the excitement about renewable power, the reality is that the entire energy sector has essentially been in a state of deflation for the last decade. The notable drop in oil prices over the last two years aside, costs of producing oil both in the U.S. and in many parts of the world have fallen dramatically. The phase out...

Washington could become the first state in the nation to impose a direct tax on carbon emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and natural gas. A ballot measure before the state Legislature would create a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton of fossil fuel emissions burned in Washington, while reducing taxes. ...

Wood Mackenzie's report, cited by the energy news service Platts, said about 3.4 million barrels' worth of oil a day was not profitable below $35 a barrel. According to the International Energy Agency, the world's supply is 97.07 million barrels a day. While today's oil prices are below this threshold, the report suggests the price at which US shale and other producers would be forced out of the market is lower than previously thought. As Platts writes, "For many producers, being cash negative is not enough of an incentive to shut down fields as restarting flow can be costly and...