Free Republic

Shell joins BP in corporate exodus from membership of the conservative, free-market lobbying group, which continues to deny the science of climate changeRoyal Dutch Shell have announced they will end their membership of the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) because of its continuing denial of the science of climate change. In a statement released on Friday, a Shell spokesman said: “Alec advocates for specific economic growth initiatives, but its stance on climate change is clearly inconsistent with our own.” Shell joins fellow oil major BP in a corporate exodus from the conservative, free-market lobby group. Shell’s decision comes...

European wind and solar industries have welcomed US President Barack Obama’s new climate plan while European politicians see Washington’s move as a positive signal ahead of UN climate talks in Paris. "We have a moral obligation to leave our children a planet that’s not polluted or damaged", said Obama on Monday (3 August). The Clean Power Plan establishes for the first time national standards for limiting carbon pollution from American power plants and aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. It also says that renewables should account for 28 percent of US energy...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending millions on green energy projects for farms, including putting solar panels on the tops of chicken coops.The federal agency announced Friday that its Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) will spend $63 million on solar panels and wind turbines for the farming industry.One project, totaling $16,094, was awarded to Blue Sky Poultry, Inc., of Bainbridge, Ga., to “install a solar array on the roof of poultry houses.”Other projects announced by the USDA included $18,000 for solar panels for a fruit farm in Ohio, and $19,750 for a wind turbine for a farm...

Gov. John Hickenlooper has pledged that Colorado will comply with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, but this effort to cut so-called “CO2 pollution” could come at a dear price to the state’s coal industry. ... Colorado is among the top states in coal production and consumption. In the year 2013, 64 percent of energy produced in Colorado came from coal, 20 percent from natural gas, and around 15 percent from various renewables including hydroelectric, biomass, solar and wind. The history of Colorado’s coal mining industry stretches over the past two centuries. Not to mention, coal jobs have a multiplier effect...

Industry blasts suggestion as harmful to the country. A conservation group that has succeeded in dealing recent legal setbacks to western Colorado coal mines called Thursday for a phase-out of federal coal leasing to help combat climate change. “It’s time for the Interior Department to shut it down,” Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. The group outlined a plan for ending the federal coal program over 10 to 25 years through a moratorium on leasing publicly owned coal, retiring existing leases that aren’t producing, honestly reporting the climate impacts of the...

No, this isn’t about sex. It’s about carbon footprints -- yours, mine and that of just about every other living creature that walks, crawls or flies over the face of God’s green earth. Once the California state legislature passed America’s first full-blown cap and trade law, we Californians all became very hot stuff indeed! I know because I just took the Nature Conservancy’s online test for my personal carbon footprint. Identifying myself as a single person living alone in a one-bedroom apartment who hasn’t done much of anything special to control his energy use, I learned the cost of my...

SUNNYVALE (KPIX 5) — In a Silicon Valley research lab, scientists are working on what might be considered the option of last resort for global warming. “It’s an insurance policy,” said researcher Sudhanshu Jain. It’s called the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, and it’s designed to fight global warming by making clouds over the ocean thicker and brighter so they reflect more sunlight and cool the planet. The Sunnyvale team has reached a milestone with this high-pressure nozzle that uses salt water and looks like a normal water spray. But it took scientists a year to come up with the exact...

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered. As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, "key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials," the Washington Times reported yesterday. Collusion between the EPA and the green's isn't exactly breaking news. They've been doing it for years, but...

This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama's Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he's trying to impose it without...

It turns out that because of the emissions of extraordinarily potent greenhouse gases NF3 and SF6 and energy during the manufacture of solar modules, solar energy ends up being worse for the climate than burning coal (assuming the global warming hypothesis is valid). A Swiss engineer has made a thorough analysis of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the manufacture, transport and operation of solar panels. His conclusion: Ferrucio Ferroni writes here how China is the number 1 manufacturer of solar panels globally and that the production of solar panels there requires immense amounts of electricity, which in China is...

When candidate Barack Obama boasted back in 2008 that his radical climate change policies would "bankrupt" coal-fired power plants, he was for once telling the wretched truth. On Monday Mr. Obama accelerated the timetable in his war on coal, with new EPA regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. The White House openly admits that the goal is to use much less coal and force utilities to consume far costlier and less reliable "renewable" electric power. Whether these feel-good regulations imposed on America's domestic industries will impact global carbon emissions and climate...

If you’re constantly bundling up against your office building’s air conditioning, blame Povl Ole Fanger. In the 1960s, this Danish scientist developed a model, still used in many office buildings around the world, which predicts comfortable indoor temperatures for the average worker. The problem? The average office worker in the 1960s was a 40-year-old man sporting a three-piece suit. But fear not, those for whom the “work sweater” has become a mandatory addition to office attire: Researchers say they have built a better model.The biggest problem with Fanger’s approach—which assumes a 21°C (70° Fahrenheit) office would be the most comfortable—is...

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has stated that he doesn’t believe in the science behind global warming. In a forum hosted by Freedom Partners on Sunday evening, a key cog in the political network of the Koch Brothers, the Texas senator stated that “the data and facts don’t support” that global warming is occurring. The moderator of the forum described Cruz’s stance as “full out denial”. The Texas senator did not disagree with that characterisation. Cruz has previously compared those who believe in global warming to “flat-Earthers.” Cruz also criticised the new regulations, set to be unveiled by the Obama...

Today, the EPA is expected to finalize its regulation of carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. An EPA administrator will sign the rule later today. In light of this change, the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council (ERCC), a group of energy companies working on common sense energy and environmental policy, has prepared a document answering ten questions about the final EPA carbon rule. The report, published July 31, follows the council’s previous report: The EPA’s Clean Power Plan: A Clear Threat to Electric Reliability, which cites the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) findings that the rule would add “strains” to...

Alpha Natural Resources has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On Monday, a statement from the company said: "The Board of Directors of Alpha Natural Resources authorized the filing of the Chapter 11 cases to enhance the company's future as it weathers a historically challenged coal market." "The relief provided by Chapter 11 will allow the company to reorganize and emerge as a financially viable business that is better positioned to compete in dynamic energy markets." Bloomberg reported last Thursday the company had been planning to file today. The coal industry is in turmoil. Demand for natural gas is surging, and...

Washington (AFP) - With one eye on his legacy, US President Barack Obama will Monday unveil what he called the "biggest, most important step we've ever taken" in the fight against climate change. The White House will release the final version of America's Clean Power Plan, a set of environmental rules and regulations that will home in on pollution from the nation's power plants, setting limits on power-plant carbon emissions for the first time. Plants will have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, in an ambitious drive which will boost the renewable-energy sector...

Part of President Obama's new plan is to cut carbon pollution from power plants by 32 percent by 2030. President Barack Obama will Monday unveil what he called the “biggest, most important step we’ve ever taken” to fight climate change, a sensitive issue central to his legacy. The White House will release the final version of America’s Clean Power Plan, a set of environmental rules and regulations that will home in on the pollution from the nation’s power plants, setting limits on power-plant carbon emissions. Laying out how climate change was a threat to the health, well being and security...

President Barack Obama will impose steeper cuts on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants across the country than previously expected, senior administration officials said Sunday, in what the president called the most significant step the U.S. has ever taken to fight global warming. The Obama administration is expected to finalize the RULE at a White House event on Monday, a year after proposing UNPRECEDENTED carbon dioxide limits. Obama, in a video posted on Facebook, said the limits were backed up by decades of data and facts showing that without tough action, the world will face more extreme weather and escalating...

The EPA may be making some major changes to its carbon dioxide emissions regulatory scheme, the details of which have been leaked to the media just days ahead of its expected release date. The EPA will be getting rid of its energy efficiency building block of its Clean Power Plan over legal concerns the agency was overstepping its bounds by controlling how efficiently people used their electricity, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Journal also reported the Clean Power Plan will encourage nuclear power production. An EPA spokeswoman would not confirm the reported changes to the rule as it has...

GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush says that he believes human activity is contributing to climate change, and that the U.S. is obligated to do something about it. “The climate is changing; I don’t think anybody can argue it’s not. Human activity has contributed to it. I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” Bush said in an interview with Bloomberg BNA published Thursday.