Free Republic

"......................One wonders whether wealthy liberals even understand that the green diktats they favor [impose] regressive taxes on the poor. Do they care? Environmentalists used to fantasize that their policy mandates would lead to “green jobs” for working men and women, but that bubble popped awfully fast. Just ask the Germans, who are ditching expensive green wind and solar projects as fast as they can to save their flagging economy. The Left’s opposition to domestic energy production in America—and more broadly, a carbon-based industrial economy—offers conservatives and Republicans a once-in-a-generation opportunity to win back the old Reagan Democrat swing voters, perhaps...

This week marks the 44th anniversary of Earth Day. In years past, the day has been marked with great media fanfare and attention. This week, it marched by with little mention. This is not so much a reflection of any lack of interest in the Earth, but a reflection of how mainstream and ongoing the topics of recycling, reclaiming and sustainability have become. They are now part of our daily lives, rather than a topic to be raised once a year. For the first Earth Day, in 1970, the Keep America Beautiful organization ran a commercial that portrayed what...

Osborne Reef is an artificial reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida constructed of concrete jacks in a 50 feet (15 m) diameter circle.[1][2] In the 1970s, the reef was the subject of an ambitious expansion project utilizing old and discarded tires. The project ultimately failed, and the "reef" has come to be considered an environmental disaster[3][4]—ultimately doing more harm than good in the coastal Florida waters.

In a stunning admission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy revealed to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) that the agency neither possesses, nor can produce, all of the scientific data used to justify the rules and regulations they have imposed on Americans via the Clean Air Act. In short, science has been trumped by the radical environmentalist agenda. The admission follows the issuance of a subpoena by the full Committee last August. It was engendered by two years of EPA stonewalling, apparently aimed at preventing the raw data cited by EPA as the scientific...

On Saturday, I wrote about the standoff at Bundy Ranch. That post drew a remarkable amount of traffic, even though, as I wrote then, I had not quite decided what to make of the story. Since then, I have continued to study the facts and have drawn some conclusions. Here they are. First, it must be admitted that legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on. The Bureau of Land Management has been charging him grazing fees since the early 1990s, which he has refused to pay. Further, BLM has issued orders limiting the area on which Bundy’s cows...

Over the past several months, while most of the political world has been focused on the election and the ensuing struggle over the fiscal cliff, a little story appeared that is worthy of much more attention. It concerns the efforts of the British Columbia–based Haida native-American tribe to restore the salmon fishery that has provided much of their livelihood for centuries. Acting collectively, the Haida voted to form the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, financed it with $2.5 million of their own savings, and used it to support the efforts of American scientist-entrepreneur Russ George to demonstrate the feasibility of open-sea...

As head of his village, Prajob Naowa-opas battled to save his community in central Thailand from the illegal dumping of toxic waste by filing petitions and leading villagers to block trucks carrying the stuff—until a gunman in broad daylight fired four shots into him. A year later, his three alleged killers, including a senior government official, are on trial for murder. The dumping has been halted and villagers are erecting a statue to their slain hero. But the prosecution of Prajob’s murder is a rare exception. A survey released Tuesday—the first comprehensive one of its kind—says that only 10 killers...

Guess who's all of a sudden standing up for law and order? Why, it's radical environmentalists, who despite their general disdain for lawful behavior have felt compelled to speak out in support of the Bureau of Land Management's attempts to round up Cliven Bundy's cattle and ultimately force the Nevada rancher to abandon his family's century-old business. Martin Griffith at the Associated Press relayed the comments of one such group in a Sunday report in the aftermath of the BLM's abandonment of its roundup efforts, in Griffith's words, "after hundreds of states' rights protesters, some of them armed militia members,...

There are many environmental reasons to eat insects. But first you have to get past the ick factor. You have to be careful not to overcook scorpions. The exoskeleton traps steam, and they're messy when they pop. "But get it right," said "Bug Chef" David George Gordon to the swarm of curious faces gathered to watch him work, "and they taste like soft-shell crab." It was Halloween night. I'd trekked across Portland, Oregon, for a bug-cooking demonstration at Paxton Gate, a store that owner Andy Brown describes as "a natural history museum where everything is for sale." Feats of...

Forty years is roughly the length of a working lifetime—and long enough for history to have taken some unexpected turns. And to have proved that long-term forecasts based on extrapolations of existing trends usually end up wide of the mark. The list of failed prophecies from the 1970s is rather long. The conventional wisdom of the time was more than usually unreliable. Example: the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report in 1972, predicting that the world was running out of oil and other natural resources. For a while that seemed right, as the 1973 and 1979 OPEC oil price...

Revelations that the US Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting deadly experiments on unwitting volunteers have surfaced. According to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the EPA’s experiments exposed individuals to pollutants in quantities up to 50 times greater than the levels the agency deems safe. The OIG findings were dismissed as “exaggerated scaremongering” by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. “The number of individuals exposed to these toxins are but a tiny fraction of the population. Those criticizing the Agency are overlooking the potentially larger gains to the vast majority of the country that may be achieved by the sacrifice...

Harry Reid and his Senate Democrats held an all-night session last month to draw attention to the fierce urgency of now on anthropogenic global warming — without, of course, bothering to offer any legislation on the issue. After this infomercial, Gallup noted that global warming/climate change fell to almost dead last among 15 issues polled; only race relations polled lower. “Even among Democrats,” I wrote at the time, “climate change only gets 36% mention in a non-exclusive list of concerns — ranking far below the economy (54%), health care (57%), hunger and homelessness (53%), and unemployment (52%).” Environmental issues in...

Reports this past week that hospitals in the United Kingdom have been burning aborted babies to save on fuel costs for heating the buildings appalled some, but not all. US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Gina McCarthy, urged that “once you get beyond the initial ‘gag-reflex,’ the idea has significant environmental positives. First, it almost goes without saying that adding more human beings to the population is a definite stress to the environment. So, abortions make a substantial contribution to lessening this source of stress.” “Once the abortion is completed what do we do with the ensuing medical waste?” McCarthy continued....

Forget building this city on Rock and Roll and try Fracking instead. Just don’t try building it on solar power, wind power or pixie dust. The U.S. metro area with the lowest unemployment rate is a shale oil boomtown. The one with the highest unemployment rate houses the world’s largest solar plant.According to data released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Midland, Texas, has a 2.9 percent unemployment rate, the lowest in the country. Midland sits above the Permian Basin Shale, a massive formation that constitutes a large chunk of Texas’ booming shale oil industry.The West Texas...

“Now, I love the Redwoods and vacation there and think they're a jewel of our nation, but we've got to expand the idea of who are the environmentalists,” Ellison added. The African-American community is disproportionately affected by climate change because more black people live in urban areas that face the greatest exposure to air and water pollution, said Ellison, who was joined by Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.). The two lawmakers, both members of the Congressional Black Caucus, plan to encourage young African-Americans to take a greater interest in fighting climate change as part of a six-college tour organized by the...

Flows of money towards climate adaptation projects are becoming increasingly unpredictable, making it difficult for vulnerable countries to prepare for the hardships caused by global warming. Future fundraising tactics would have to be “extremely aggressive” in order to raise enough money to continue their work, according to board members of the UN-run Adaptation Fund, the primary finance provider for adaptation projects around the world. “We are essentially going with our hands out to everyone,” Philip Weech, the board member from the Bahamas representing the Latin American and Caribbean regions, told RTCC. “We take funds from anyone, any inch, but the...

Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent? Lawrence Torcello, PHILOSPHY professor thinks so. "The importance of clearly communicating science to the public should not be underestimated. Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.

.................Premier Li Keqiang last week declared war on pollution, which is expected to speed up the process of turning China's limited environmental levy into a full-blown tax targeting the nation's major polluters. But the all-out efforts to combat China's disastrous pollution levels might get in the way of plans to tax carbon dioxide emissions in a bid to stunt the rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions, Zhu Guangyao, the vice environment minister, said...... A carbon tax is increasingly controversial among lawmakers, said Zhu, adding that an environment tax would be easier to push through without carbon in the mix. The...

All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling eight-acre Wyoming farm. He and his wife Katie spent hours constructing it, filling it with crystal-clear water, and bringing in brook and brown trout, ducks and geese. It was a place where his horses could drink and graze, and a private playground for his three children. But instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor, the Wyoming welder says he was harangued by the federal government, stuck in what he calls a petty power play by the Environmental Protection Agency. He claims the agency is now...

Climate change skeptics are headed the way of Christians in Egypt and the left is readying the machetes and torches. Yesterday Harry Reid declared “Climate change deniers still exist. They exist, I’m sorry to say, in this Congress. … Climate change exists and it’s time to stop denying it.” That's pretty clear. The skeptics must be eliminated. Not one to be outdone in logic fallacy, Chuck Schumer added: “If you went to 100 doctors and 98 of them said you were sick and should take medicine but two told you that you were find, what would you do?” Sen. Chuck...