Free Republic

As many as half of British households may be facing fuel poverty because of the inexorable rise in energy prices, EDF, the French utility that also has business in the UK, has warned. .... The UK's energy market regulator Ofgem is set to announce the latest energy price cap this week, which will see electricity bills for millions of Britons rise considerably. The price cap, aimed to protect households from excessively high bills by capping the price increases that providers can pass on to them, normally gets adjusted twice a year. In April this year, the cap was raised by...

Climate activist James Murdoch has used his foundation to funnel more than $14 million to a leftist group that crusaded against America’s so-called “environmental racism.” Murdoch, the estranged son of News Corporation Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, is notorious for being a hardcore eco-warrior. His Quadrivium Foundation gave a whopping $14,250,000 at least to the leftist Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) between 2013-2019. The funding to EDF is characteristic of James and his wife Kathryn’s leftist bent. The couple also represents the epitome of climate hypocrisy. James has shown particular interest in taking carbon-emitting flights on a corporate jet and the couple...

A French nuclear firm said it’s working to resolve a “performance issue” at a plant it partially owns in China’s Guangdong Province, following reports that U.S. authorities have been assessing a report of a possible leak at the facility amid warnings of an “imminent radiological threat,” according to reports. Framatome, a division of French power group EDF, told France 24 in a statement on June 14 that it’s “supporting resolution of a performance issue” at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant, which is a joint venture between EDF and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), located around 84 miles west of...

The European Defense Fund (EDF) moved closer to becoming reality this week in Strasbourg when MEPs gave it the green light. However, some uncertainties persist as a legal expert opinion obtained by EurActiv suggests that establishing the fund could be violating EU law. […] In the run-up to the vote in the plenary, however, the Left party in the Parliament commissioned a legal opinion to assess whether the EDF is compatible with European Union law. According to Andreas Fischer-Lescano of the University of Bremen, who drafted the legal study, the Lisbon Treaty explicitly prohibits the financing of military or defense...

Arena Profile: Peter Goldmark Peter Goldmark currently directs the Climate and Air program for Environmental Defense Fund. Prior to joining Environmental Defense, he was Chairman and CEO of the International Herald Tribune. Peter has had exceptional careers in both the public and private sectors. His public service was highlighted by his tenure as Budget Director for the State of New York during the 1970s city- and state-wide fiscal crisis where he was an architect of its rescue; and as Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey through to 1983. He served as president of the...

A coach full of English Defence League supporters was pelted with missiles after it broke down in east London. The coach was carrying 44 EDL members when it stopped in Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets. About 100 Asian teenagers then pelted it with bricks and stones, according to a BBC reporter at the scene.

When the Environmental Protection Agency said in late June that it would force Western coal-fired power plants to install haze-reducing pollution-control equipment at a cost of $1.5 billion a year, it said it had to in order to settle a lawsuit by environmental groups. One organization involved in the suit, the Environmental Defense Fund, has a long history of taking the EPA to court. In fact, a cursory review finds almost half a dozen cases in the past 10 years. The odd thing is that the EPA, in turn, has handed EDF $2.76 million in grants over that same period,...

Environmental Defense has been promoting catch shares as market solution to fishery issues, while EDF Vice President David Festa urged as early as 2009 investors to begin buying catch shares, which he predicted at a Milkin Institute conference that spring could produce profits of 400 percent of better.

In January, the documentary Gasland won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary attacked the process of “fracking,” which involves pumping a solution that is 99 percent sand and water, plus a few trace chemicals, underground at high pressure. This creates fractures in the rock formations that allow oil and gas to flow to collection points. The film claimed that the process pollutes groundwater with devastating consequences. (For more on Gasland and fracking, see this article from the Examiner’s “Big Green” series in September.) Multiple EPA studies have shown fracking is safe and effective, but the...

Meg Whitman and the Delta Smelt Meg Whitman’s charitable foundation, established ostensibly for charitable purposes, inexplicably gave at least $300,000 to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Center For Rivers and Deltas. In 2007, Meg Whitman’s foundation gave $100,000 to EDF. Not content with that amount, Meg Whitman doubled down in 2008 by donating $200,000. The water crisis is affecting jobs in the Central Valley, with most cities and towns hovering near a 15% unemployment rate. The EDF has continually sided with the fish over the farmers and Meg Whitman’s $300,000 donation helped fund these efforts. Over the past few years, EDF...

Taxes fund environmental suits - Environmental law firms reap billions in fees to fund lawsuits October 15, 2009 The federal government has paid out billions of dollars to environmental groups for attorney fees and costs, according to data assembled by a Cheyenne, Wyoming, lawyer. Karen Budd-Falen of Budd-Falen Law Offices [main@buddfalen.com or 307-632-5105] said the government between 2003 and 2007 paid more than $4.7 billion in taxpayer money to environmental law firms -- and that's just in the lawsuits she tracked. The actual figure, she said, is far greater. "I think we only found that the iceberg exists," she said....

PARIS, Oct 8 (Reuters) - French state-controlled electricity utility EDF (EDF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) will order at least six gas turbines and associated services from GE Energy (GE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) for more than 530 million euros, equivalent to $750 million, the U.S. group said in a statement on Monday. "In addition to the contracts announced today, EDF has signed options to purchase additional gas turbines and services from GE. If those options are exercised, the total value of EDF's agreements with GE could exceed EUR 900 million ($1.2 billion)," the statement said. It said the initial six turbines would...

Millions of deaths (mostly women and children) Illness (billions sickened), and poverty (over a trillion dollars in lost GDP, and counting). Who is responsible for this decades-long catastrophe, and will the perpetrators be held responsible? Last week’s announcement that the World Health Organization lifted its nearly 30-year ban on the insecticide DDT is perhaps the most promising development in global public health since… well, 1943 when DDT was first used to combat insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria….. Rachel Carson kicked-off DDT hysteria with her pseudo-scientific 1962 book, “Silent Spring.” Carson materially misrepresented DDT science in order to advance her...

...With insufficient fossil fuel reserves, our country very early on invested in energy alternatives. The two oil crises of the '70s convinced us to accelerate the construction of facilities to produce safe and economically profitable nuclear energy. That strategy paid off: In 30 years, France's energy independence has risen from 30% to 50%. While turning toward nuclear energy might have seemed unusual 60 years ago, I believe that it was an especially visionary choice. The development of nuclear energy enabled us to meet several objectives: energy independence and security of supply, and competitive, stable energy prices. This nuclear option is...

Senator John Kerry often bashes President Bush as to how Enron and other power companies have influenced the administration's energy policy. Kerry has used Enron as a pejorative adjective to describe dubious policies. Moreover, he gave $1000 to an Enron worker's relief fund because it had originated as a campaign donation from a wind company which was an Enron subsidiary. On the campaign stump, he charges corporations with having adversely impacted American democracy. NonprofitWatch.org agrees with the Senator regarding his critiques of Enron and corporations, but suggests that this criticism should also be directed at his wife Teresa Heinz. For...

Here's another major federal government scandal crying to get legs in the press. Under a law known as the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, the federal government "lends out" 1,200 to 1,500 well paid federal bureaucrats to left-wing non-profit organizations each year.(1) If anyone wonders how the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) fit in with the federal government's regulatory agencies, there is a simple answer: They often trade employees back and forth -- most of whom are on the federal payroll. A while back, we reported that the relationship between eco-whacko groups and United Nations NGOs and federal agencies, like the EPA,...