Free Republic

During the nasty September 29 presidential “debate,” candidate Joe Biden proclaimed “I am the Democratic Party.” He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren’t so sure – about that, about what his views actually are, or about how far to the left he would be pushed, prodded and pressured by Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Antifa mobs, and coastal and blue city governing, academic and technology elites. Mr. Biden has pledged to eliminate the Trump tax cuts but has refused to say whether he supports single-payer nationalized healthcare, Second...

On a recent episode of my podcast District of Conservation, environmentalist Mike Shellenberger shared what’s on his mind regarding the current state of environmentalism. An admitted moderate Democrat, the bestselling author of the summer breakout book, Apocalypse Never, discussed his findings from the book and why he’s speaking out.Unbeknownst to many, the Environmental Progress founder and president had a reckoning about climate alarmism and apologized for contributing to any past fear mongering. In a June 29th blog post entitled, On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare, he wrote: On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate...

Fracking (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) has unleashed bounties of US oil and natural gas, dramatically reduced energy prices from their historic 2008 peak, saved families and industries billions of dollars annually, helped create and sustain millions of American jobs, made the United States stronger militarily and turned it into a net energy exporter. Those fixated on alleged climate dangers from fossil fuels don’t care. In fact, they are aghast and angry about this oil and gas renaissance. Unable to stop all production, they have focused on blocking pipelines. If companies can’t get oil and gas to markets, they reason...

Was the power on in your house this morning? If so, thank fossil fuels!A few parts of America do get energy from other sources. Washington state has fast-flowing rivers that allow Washingtonians to get most of their electricity from hydroelectric power. Iowa now gets about 40% of its electricity from wind.But most of us get power from the much-hated fossil fuels, primarily natural gas and coal.Burning them does pollute, although government-mandated controls like scrubbers in smokestacks have nearly eliminated the dangerous pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide. (Yes, government has done some useful things.) But fossil fuels still emit greenhouse gasses, and...

As of May 20, the United States had more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of Wuhan Coronavirus. US deaths related or attributed to the virus topped 92,000 (though many were really due to old age and related co-morbidities). Because of COVID, much of the US economy has been shut down since late March. More than 36 million American workers have now filed for unemployment insurance, while tens of millions more have been furloughed or seen their hours and/or salaries reduced severely. With infections, cases and deaths declining, lockdowns and stay-home orders are finally easing, though only slightly and slowly in...

At least some journalists and scientists appear finally to be admitting that many people promoting the theory that humans are causing a climate crisis have been wildly exaggerating the likelihood the most extreme climate harms will occur. Prior to the of the release of the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the purported human causes of climate change, researchers developed four different scenarios, referred to as, “Representative Concentration Pathways” (RCPs), to describe how carbon emissions might change through 2100. The most extreme of these scenarios, RCP8.5, projected a 500 percent increase in the use...

Greta Thunberg, in her latest opinion column for The Guardian, has called for an end to today’s business as usual. She believes current economic activity is a crime against humanity as it increases the global warming rate. As a citizen of a developing country, I protest!Greta and other schoolchildren camped at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Their primary objective was to peddle lies, demand economic suicide, and ridicule world leaders who are trying their best to uplift economies.In her brief column, written as a forerunner to the World Economic Forum, Greta outlined her demands.“We demand that at this year’s...

Editor's Note: This piece was co-authored by Duggan Flanakin.  “We are all born ignorant,” Benjamin Franklin once said, “but one must work very hard to remain stupid.” Greens are incensed over suggestions that anything but fossil fuels and climate change might be turning green California and Australian ecosystems into black wastelands, incinerating wildlife, destroying homes and killing people. The notion that they and their policies might be a major factor in these fires gets them so hot under the collar that they could ignite another inferno. But the facts are there for all to see. PG&E certainly failed to maintain, upgrade and...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did no favors for the climate alarmism movement this afternoon, after the panel of judges in San Francisco threw out a lawsuit against the government based on climate change. The suit was filed in 2015 by a group of young climate alarmists, insisting that the government is solely responsible for creating climate change via cooperating with the fossil fuel industry. The suit claims that the government turned a blind eye to the potential for damage via carbon emissions. Lawyers serving both Presidents Obama and Trump asserted that the government is not at fault because a...

"How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!" insisted teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations. "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction!" Many people say that we're destroying the Earth.It all sounds so scary.But I've been a consumer reporter for years, and I've covered so many scares: plague, famine, overpopulation, SARS, West Nile virus, bird flu, radiation from cellphones, flesh-eating bacteria, killer bees, etc. The list of terrible things that were going to get us is very long.Yet we live longer than ever.Now I'm told global warming is different.The Earth's average temperature...

Green New Dealers have convinced themselves that our planet faces an imminent, existential, manmade climate cataclysm – that can be prevented solely and simply by replacing fossil fuels with biofuel, wind, solar and battery energy. They achieve this state of absolute certainty largely by propagating constant scare stories while ignoring and suppressing contradictory evidence and viewpoints.They deliberately and deceptively talk about “carbon pollution.” Carbon is soot – what our cars, factories and power plants now emit in very small quantities. The honest, accurate term is carbon dioxide: the colorless, odorless, invisible gas that we exhale and plants need to grow, by...

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has published a new paper, "Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions." Keep in mind that many of the grossly wrong environmentalist predictions were made by respected scientists and government officials. My question for you is: If you were around at the time, how many government restrictions and taxes would you have urged to avoid the predicted calamity? As reported in The New York Times (Aug. 1969) Stanford University biologist Dr. Paul Erhlich warned: "The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you're dead....

The manifesto that the El Paso shooter posted before his deadly rampage reveals that, along with hate for immigrants, he held a radicalized view of mankind’s relationship to nature. The manifesto itself was titled “The Inconvenient Truth About Me,” an apparent homage to the many false narratives presented in Al Gore’s climate “documentary.”  The first two sentences pretty much sum up the four-page screed: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The Christchurch reference embraces the manifesto of the killer of 51 Muslims who called himself...

Many of my friends have long referred to environmentalists as “watermelons” — green on the outside, red on the inside. The idea being, because communism and socialism (interchangeable political/economic systems in practice) have failed everywhere they’ve been imposed, doctrinaire socialist zealots have embraced environmental causes as a Trojan horse. Their goal is simple: use environmental policies as a backdoor way to implement socialist policies in the Western democracies. After all, who doesn’t care about the environment? A recent admission by Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) chief of staff, about the much-hyped Green New Deal (GND) reinforces the view socialists...

The scandal that I call “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the alteration of official world temperature data by a small number of government employees in the US and the UK. Uniformly, the alterations have the effect of lowering temperatures early in the record, and raising recent temperatures, in order to create and enhance a warming trend that does not exist in the data as originally reported. The purpose of the fraudulent data alteration is to support the continuation of the “global warming” climate scare. To read the prior 22 posts in this series, go to this link.

It’s time to challenge the steady diet of bias, false information and alarmism on climate change that students are fed in and outside of their classrooms. Science and public policy analyst Dr. David Wojick has launched an important new project to do exactly that. From kindergarten onward, our young people are repeatedly told that they, our wildlife and our planet face unprecedented cataclysms from manmade climate change, resulting from our fossil fuel use. The science is settled, they are constantly hoodwinked, and little or no discussion is allowed in classrooms. They thus hear virtually nothing about the growing gap between computer model...

In the past two months, the news media was filled with pictures and articles about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Unfortunately, to their dismay, the sensationalists’ dream of a Greenland melt was halted when the ice levels jumped back up to record highs.This is just one of the countless incidences in which climate doomsayers have hijacked weather phenomena and used them to push their climate doomsday theories.Greenland is a massive island covered mostly in ice. Many consider it a good indicator of the global warming trend due to its proximity to the Arctic and its being the only...

Those who argue human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change regularly point to rising seas as one of the most certain and devastating impacts on human communities.According to environmental activists, mainstream media outlets and some scientists—who routinely cite Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports—unless governments take drastic action to transform the world’s economic system, including ending the use of fossil fuels for energy in a very short period, entire island nations will disappear beneath the seas and low-lying coastal cities will be swamped, forcing a great migration of populations inland.The threat of rising seas to various communities...

You often hear climate change described as a global conflict with existential consequences. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once put it, "This is our World War II." It would be interesting to know what survivors of, say, Guadalcanal or the Bataan Death March think of that comparison. But never mind. Let's take the hyperbole seriously. If global warming is a war, who is our enemy? Who are we fighting? First on the list would have to be double agents. These are the people who pretend to be on the side of righteousness but in fact are doing the work of dark...

Actress Dame Emma Thompson has been defending her decision to fly from the US to attend a climate change protest in central London. Speaking to reporters from the Extinction Rebellion campaign group's pink boat, she said did not fly as much as she used to - and planted a lot of trees. Ms Thompson also compared the protest to the campaign of disruption by the Suffragettes.