Free Republic

Leading activists with climate change protest group Just Stop Oil have admitted that they drive petrol cars, but still claim that this doesn’t make them hypocrites. Erm, okay then. “Dr Larch Maxey, 50, a climate scientist from the eco group, said some members still drive cars and fill up with petrol – but rejected the idea that it was hypocritical,” reports the Telegraph. According to activist leaders, they are “victims” of the “fossil fuel economy.” Maxey says that people who call for the oil industry to be shut down but then drive petrol cars shouldn’t be called out for hypocrisy...

“Let them eat cake,” famously attributed to Marie Antoinette by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has become universal shorthand for a monarch’s total disregard for her famished citizens stealing and wreaking havoc in the streets to survive. World leaders are making the same faux pas this week at their opulent stay in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for COP27, the United Nations’ climate change conference. While they eat the best food in the world and enjoy luxurious tourism opportunities, they will leave the conference telling billions of people that the only way to combat the “climate crisis” is to stop eating meat, stop production...

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not attend the COP27 United Nations Climate Conference, even though their nations are two of the world’s top three carbon emitters. Although China is responsible for more pollution than all other developed nations combined, Xi Jinping is not scheduled to attend the conference, which began Sunday in Egypt, according to Reuters. More than 100 heads of state are expected to attend COP27 before the conference officially ends on Nov. 18; however, no representatives from India, the world’s third-largest carbon emitter, are currently scheduled to attend the climate summit. Together,...

The hype about wind and solar energy keeps colliding with the hard reality of land-use conflicts. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Ohio, where 41 townships have rejected or restricted the expansion of wind and/or solar projects since last November. In addition, at least eight Ohio counties have implemented restrictions on Big Wind and Big Solar over that same time period. The soaring number of rejections – all of which are documented in the Renewable Rejection Database – brings the total number of solar rejections in the U.S. this year to 67. That total includes the October 12 unanimous...

Decarbonizing the United States by the year 2050, as many policymakers advocate and a strong majority of Americans support, would likely be the most challenging infrastructure overhaul in the history of our country. Frankly, the odds are heavily stacked against it happening. Though many support the idea in abstract, they may not necessarily grasp what such an energy transition would entail in practice. The International Energy Agency (IEA) and researchers from Arizona State University recently spelled it out in detail. Here is a summary of what a carbon-free United States might look like in 2050: The grid will be producing...

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wanted regulatory reform, in part to reverse some of the Biden Administration's reversals of Trump-era reforms intended to expedite permits for fossil fuel projects. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) needed Manchin’s vote in the 50-50 Senate to enact his latest spending extravaganza, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was primarily a massive climate and “green” energy subsidy arrangement. It gives Schumer allies some $370 billion in wind, solar, battery, and other funding, tax credits, and subsidies. In exchange, Schumer would offer a path for Manchin’s reform bill. Manchin voted YEA and promptly got bushwhacked. Once he’d helped...

With the 2022 midterm elections less than four months away, a New York Times/Siena College poll revealed that just 1 percent of registered voters viewed climate change as a “top priority,” let alone the most important issue facing the nation. The poll placed climate change far behind concerns about inflation, the economy, record crime rates, and the humanitarian crisis on America’s southern border. Even among voters younger than 30 -- the demographic that is typically most energized by debates about environmental policy -- the corresponding figure was a mere 3 percent. The same poll showed that public concern about climate...

What do you call an economic system where a relative few individuals own all the land and most of the people who live on that land do so at the sufferance of the landowner? It's feudalism. This was the economic system in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of the population was born into, lived and died in poverty. There was little hope for upward mobility unless one opted for a career in military service or the clergy. (From time to time, extraordinarily pretty peasant girls might be married off to a lesser lord.) The rise...

World leaders at the Group of 7 summit in Germany signaled they will turn back to fossil fuels despite their commitments to a green energy transition thanks to the ongoing energy crisis. The war in Ukraine is heavily restricting fuel imports, with Russia cutting off European access to the Nord Stream pipeline and the US imposing a fuel embargo on Putin. As a result, the U.S. and European countries are abandoning their climate agenda to return to fossil fuels. Amid skyrocketing fuel prices, the Biden administration has been forced to abandon certain planks of its climate agenda. Biden called for...

Greta Thunberg resurfaced on the world stage Saturday to condemn world leaders over inaction regarding climate change during a desperate plea at the Glastonbury music festival in the UK. The globetrotting 19-year-old climate activist warned of an imminent “total natural catastrophe” and demanded more vigorous action to save the planet as part of her surprise appearance at the festival, according to the BBC. The earth’s ecosystem is “not just changing, it is destabilizing, it is breaking down,” Thunberg told the festival’s audience while an electronic background displayed a graphic of increasing global temperatures. “This is not the new normal, this...

For years in their quest to claim "green" energy status, European leaders have shut off their own domestic production of oil and gas in favor of a pipeline from Russia. Their goal has been to lower emissions and claim energy moral superiority while rejecting the reality that modern societies cannot function without fossil fuels. Now, as Russia wages a war on Ukraine and uses gas production as a weapon against the West, European countries are starting to see their so-called "green" energy revolution backfire in spectacular fashion. "Germany will restart coal-fired power plants and offer incentives for companies to curb...

U.S. petroleum refining capacity has declined and few plants have been built thanks to the projected decline in fuel demand and increased burdensome regulations. “There was already some contraction happening in the industry as a result of projected declines in U.S. gasoline demand into the future and companies just deciding that the assets were better used as other projects or shut down completely,” said Geoff Moody, the vice president of government relations at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers. “They just throw lots of red tape at these folks,” Dan Kish, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research,...

There is a concerning precedent emerging within conventional American politics that mistakenly asserts a direct correlation between functional results and incremental regulation exists. Reality shows instead that regulation does not provide the strategic blueprint required to formulate long-term solutions and radical innovation. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission groundbreaking proposed climate change disclosure rule does not reflect that lesson and misses the mark. If passed, the 512-page proposal would mandate public companies to disclose an audited set of greenhouse gas emissions data from their direct operations, energy use, and value chain (i.e., Scope 1, 2, and 3, respectively). This proposal...

The bureaucrats at the United Nations desertification agency are blaming us for droughts, as the Associated Press reports: Climate change to make droughts longer, more common, says UN The frequency and duration of droughts will continue to increase due to human-caused climate change, with water scarcity already affecting billions of people across the world, the United Nations warned in a report Wednesday. The U.N. desertification agency, which is currently hosting a conference of parties in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, estimates that roughly one third of the world’s population — 2.3 billion people — is already facing water scarcity, with that...

It is Earth Day 2022 — always falling on Lenin’s birthday, amusingly enough — the official theme of which this year is Invest In Our Planet™. As with every previous Earth Day, we will be bombarded with innumerable web sites both infantile and mendacious, crude propaganda exercises, myriad pleas for networking, virtue signaling as a central dynamic, mindless recommendations for localism and other useless, wasteful, and environmentally destructive silliness. And — of course — there will be the usual shameless groveling by a long queue of spineless corporate officials and public relations gasbags desperate to advertise their environmental bona fides...

Europe is not going to achieve a competitive energy transition with the current interventionist policies. Europe does not depend on Russian gas due to a coincidence, but because of a chain of mistaken policies: banning nuclear in Germany, prohibiting the development of domestic natural gas resources throughout the European Union, added to a massive and expensive renewable rollout without building a reliable backup. Solar and wind do not reduce dependency on Russian natural gas. They are necessary but volatile and intermittent. They need backup from nuclear, hydro, and natural gas for security of energy supply. Dependency on these backup sources...

Americans in the lower to middle income brackets are in pain these days because of energy costs – the surging per gallon price of gasoline hits a store clerk much harder than a megamillionaire Washington politician or a movie star. But leftists believe it's not hitting hard enough yet. How do we know? Former Obama Treasury official Mark Mazur told us so. In fact, as the gasoline prices in America reach levels never before seen, there's been discussion of a holiday from the federal gas tax – to cut the costs for consumers. No, said Mazur. That, in fact, "undercuts...

For the past hundred years, the public has been warned of an existential threat that the Arctic ice would soon be gone and coastal cities would be devastated. This is from 1922 in the Washington Post by the Associated Press. The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer The only time the media deviated from saying that the ice was melting fast was in the 1970s, when they said we were under an existential threat that there was a coming ice age. Somehow, all the things we are constantly told cause warming, including coal, oil, humans, cars, CO2,...

When was the last time you were stuck in an elevator due to a power blackout? Or patients at your local hospital were put at risk for the same reason? These are very common occurrences in the energy impoverished Third World. And they could become a reality for many in the West if deluded leaders there continue down the path of “green-energy” decarbonization. A rare inconvenience usually associated with bad weather in the West, power blackouts are everyday events in the East. In my southern India hometown, I recently had to climb the stairs of a multi-story apartment not once...

While some of the recent energy price rises have been due to international market factors, part is the direct result of government policy. I mentioned the role of carbon pricing a few months ago in pushing up the cost of electricity. Since then carbon prices have jumped even higher to £84.50 per tonne. Two years ago they were trading at below £15/tonne (via the EU scheme). This increase has been deliberately engineered by government, in order to push up the cost of fossil fuel generation so as to make expensive renewables competitive. The policy is also to track EU carbon...