Free Republic

A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics. According to this view, having a child is a major contributor to climate change. The logical takeaway here is that everyone on Earth ought to consider having fewer children. Although culturally controversial, the scientific half of this position is fairly well-established. Several years ago, scientists showed that having a child, especially for the world’s wealthy, is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. That data was recycled this past summer in a paper showing...

While CO2 concentrations are now higher than they have been in at least 800,000 years, the gas still only accounts for a tiny 0.04% of our atmosphere. However, extracting carbon dioxide from well mixed air is not just technically difficult, it's expensive as well. A half-hour outside Zurich stands one of the frontline attempts to develop a commercial approach to sucking down CO2. On the roof of a large recycling centre at Hinwil stand 18 metal fans, stacked on top of each, each about the size of a large domestic washing machine. These fans suck in the surrounding air and...

There’s a wrinkle in how the United States talks about climate change in 2017, a tension fundamental to the issue’s politics but widely ignored. On one hand, Democrats are the party of climate change. Since the 1990s, as public belief in global warming has become strongly polarized, the Democratic Party has emerged as the advocate of more aggressive climate action. On the other hand, the Democratic Party does not have a plan to address climate change. This is true at almost every level of the policy-making process: It does not have a consensus bill on the issue waiting in the...

Women bear the heaviest brunt of global warming, and are less empowered to contribute to solutions. A new action plan agreed at the Bonn climate talks aims to reverse this inequality. The women of the Marshall Islands and the Pacific have been fighting colonialism and injustice for a long time. They bore the brunt of the long term effects of nuclear testing, and women leaders like Lijon Eknilang and Darlene Keju-Johnson brought these issues to the international stage. For women, fighting for justice – including climate justice – can be downright dangerous. Last year was one of the deadliest for...

Astronomers have found a cool, Earth-sized planet that's relatively close to our Solar System. The properties of this newly discovered planet - called Ross 128 b - make it a prime target in the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. At just 11 light-years away, it's the second closest exoplanet of its kind to Earth. But the closest one, known as Proxima b, looks to be less hospitable for life. Found in 2016, it orbits the star Proxima Centauri, which is known to be a rather active "red dwarf" star. This means that powerful eruptions of charged particles periodically...

The Government is to cut the controversial six-week wait for Universal Credit payments in the comings days in a bid to see off a Conservative rebellion. Universal Credit combines six benefits into one single benefit and is designed to simplify the welfare system and to "make work pay". It was the flagship welfare reform of David Cameron's coalition government, but has been plagued with delays since its inception and by criticism over its design. One flaw is the six-week wait time which has been criticised across the political divide amid concerns it is pushing claimants into arrears on rent and...

Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, received an immunity deal from the Justice Department during the year-long FBI investigation of Clinton's server. Two other State Department staffers, John Bentel and Heather Samuelson, were also given immunity agreements, bringing the total number of witnesses who were protected by deals to five. Bryan Pagliano, Clinton's former IT aide, and Paul Combetta, an employee at the firm hired to manage her server after she left the State Department, received such protection through deals that were reported previously. The immunity agreements given to Mills and Samuelson covered the evidence recovered from their...

After months of public and private pressure, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is giving President Donald Trump what he’s long demanded, going back to the days of “Crooked Hillary” and “lock her up”: an inquiry that could lead to a full-fledged investigation of his vanquished opponent and the Clinton Foundation. At a moment where Sessions’ leadership and credibility is being questioned – the president himself has openly pondered firing him, and Democrats are accusing him of lying about his knowledge of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign – the attorney general is giving the appearance that he’s bowing to the political...

Roy Moore is a Steve Bannon fantasy candidate. He’s an insurgent populist, a self-described renegade who shares Bannon’s arsonist attitude toward the Republican establishment and cares little for the proprieties of D.C. Or the basic standards of a civilized society, apparently, given that two women have accused Moore of criminal sexual assault and three more say he tried to “date” them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties. But to Bannon, who has returned to a leadership role at Breitbart since leaving the Trump administration, deviance is working alongside Mitch McConnell, not setting a conduct bar so...

In the continuing Roy Moore sexual misconduct allegations controversy, there are a lot of unknowns. But we do know one thing: Mitch McConnell can't lose. The rest of us? Not so much. The accusations against Moore and the nature of those allegations couldn't have come at a better time for McConnell, whose top priority is and has always been consolidating his personal power in the Senate. Politically, this works out well for McConnell because the news broke a few weeks after Moore defeated Senator Luther Strange in the Alabama special election primary. Strange was the candidate McConnell backed in the...

A Peruvian farmer won a small but significant legal victory on Monday when a German court said his appeal against energy giant RWE, which he accuses of contributing to climate change that is threatening his Andean home, had merit. After hearing oral arguments from both sides, the higher regional court in the western city of Hamm said Saul Luciano Lliuya’s demand for damages from RWE was “admissible”, paving the way for the case to proceed. Luciano argues that RWE, as one of the world’s top emitters of climate-altering carbon dioxide, must share in the cost of protecting his hometown Huaraz...

A new study for the journal of the American Geophysical Union, Earth’s Future, looked at global annual temperature records from 1861 to 2005 which indicated there were 17 record hot years over that period. Then experts examined whether or not those temperature records were being broken more frequently and if so, whether humans were to blame for that rise. The findings show human influence has greatly increased the likelihood of record-breaking hot years occurring on a global scale. Without human-caused climate change, there should only have been an average of seven record hot years from 1861 to 2005, not 17....

Elections in 18 separate nations were influenced by online disinformation campaigns last year, suggests research. Independent watchdog Freedom House looked at how online discourse was influenced by governments, bots and paid opinion formers. In total, 30 governments were actively engaged in using social media to stifle dissent, said the report. Educating users to spot fake news and making tech firms police their networks could combat the manipulation, it said. The different tactics used to influence online speech included: * automated bots that echoed official messages * armies of paid commentators that swamped discussions with pro-government views * false news sites...

WASHINGTON - The federal government began its new budget year with an October deficit of $63.2 billion, up sharply from a year ago. The Treasury Department reported Monday that the October deficit was 37.9 percent higher than the $45.8 billion deficit recorded in October 2016. Both government receipts and spending were up for the month, with receipts climbing 14.3 percent to $235.3 billion, a record for the month of October. The larger spending figure was up a sizable 11.6 percent to $298.6 billion. The deficit for the 2017 budget year, which ended on Sept. 30, totaled $666 billion, up 13.7...

One of the major, untold stories of our time is the rapid movement toward global oligarchy, in which just a handful of billionaires now own and control a significant part of the world economy. This massive level of wealth and income inequality, and the political power associated with that wealth, is an issue that cannot continue be ignored. We must fight back. Thanks to the so-called Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of documents analyzed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its collaborating news outlets, we now have a better understanding of how the largest corporations and...

The Democratic Party certainly did well in last week’s elections. In one place after another, voters seemed to reject President Trump’s hateful, lawless politics. The results have further energized progressives for 2018, which will be a vastly more important referendum on Trump than 2017. But if Democrats are going to succeed next year and beyond, they can’t focus only on last week’s positive signs and start believing their own spin. The reality is, the Democratic victories occurred almost entirely in areas that had voted for Hillary Clinton last year. In Trump country, Democrats continued to struggle. Outside of highly educated...

During the next five weeks, the CalPERS board, custodian of $326 billion in assets needed to fulfill retirement promises for 1.8 million California public employees and beneficiaries, will make decisions affecting government budgets for decades to come. The problem is, despite their fiduciary duty under the state Constitution to “protect the competency of the assets” under their absolute control, CalPERS is roughly $153 billion short of fully funding the retirement promises earned to date. How did CalPERS dig this huge hole? During the last decade, they manipulated actuarial assumptions and methods to keep employer and employee contribution rates low in...

More than 400 American millionaires and billionaires are sending a letter to Congress this week urging Republican lawmakers not to cut their taxes. The wealthy Americans — including doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and chief executives — say the GOP is making a mistake by reducing taxes on the richest families at a time when the nation's debt is high and inequality is back at the worst level since the 1920s. The letter calls on Congress not to pass any tax bill that “further exacerbates inequality” and adds to the debt. Instead of petitioning tax cuts for the wealthy, the letter tells...

From the Everglades in the US to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, climate change is destroying the many of the greatest wonders of the natural world. A new report on Monday from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reveals that the number of natural world heritage sites being damaged and at risk from global warming has almost doubled to 62 in the past three years. Those at high risk include iconic places from the Galapagos Islands to the central Amazon and less well known but equally vibrant and unique sites such as the karst caves of Hungary...

The burning of fossil fuels around the world is set to hit a record high in 2017, climate scientists have warned, following three years of flat growth that raised hopes that a peak in global emissions had been reached. The expected jump in the carbon emissions that drive global warming is a “giant leap backwards for humankind”, according to some scientists. However, other experts said they were not alarmed, saying fluctuations in emissions are to be expected and that big polluters such as China are acting to cut emissions. Global emissions need to reach their peak by 2020 and then...