Free Republic

The sky is always falling. If the new ice age doesn’t do us in, the ozone hole will. The instant DDT is banned, aerosols must follow. Global warming is replaced by climate change is replaced by “global weirding.” And what is the solution to these often-contradictory scenarios? We anachronists who retain a bias toward the hard sciences would employ very different measures to prevent a freezing ocean and a boiling one. To an engineer, soldier or plumber, this is obvious. But how do leaders of the environmental left address these opposing doomsdays? By raising taxes, increasing government, impeding capitalism and...

Climate change is a "catalyst for conflict" and a "threat multiplier" posing a growing national-security threat to the U.S., a new report finds... Global warming presents the U.S. with several security threats and has led to conflicts over food and water because of droughts and extreme weather, says the report, which was written by a dozen retired American generals and published by the Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board on Tuesday.

Scientists in the Philippines have discovered a plant that can absorb large amounts of metal without itself being poisoned, a species called the Rinorea niccolifera, that can be used to clean up polluted soils and harvest commercially viable metals. The plant is one of only 450 species, known as hyperaccumulator plants, of 300,000 known vascular plants that can absorb significant amounts of metal though their roots. The lead researcher and author of a new study on the plant, Professor Edwino Fernando, from the University of the Philippines, said the leaves of the Rinorea niccolifera can absorb up to 18,000 parts...

We see a lot of buildings being built with LEED Green Building standards. Often these are built with public money. Even the Federal Government has realized there is a limit to much of this outcome driven politicized regulation and has limited public funded projects to Silver level if Gold or Platinum will result in added cost. The surprising thing about the Green Building craze is that they are often energy hogs and they often become so-called "sick buildings" dispite their aledged intent under the LEED standards. How is that possible? First let's discuss energy usage. While Green Standards mandate 30%...

Global-warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.[snip] ".......Biologists have always known that carbon dioxide is essential for plant growth, and of course without plants there would be very little animal life, and no human life, on the planet. The climate alarmists have done their best to obscure this basic scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as “pollution” — which, whether or not they warm the planet they most certainly are not — and deliberately mislabeling forms of energy that produce these emissions as “dirty.” In the same way, they like to label renewable energy as “clean,”...

Chicago lawmakers’ decision to ban plastic bags in chain stores next year goes beyond the arguments over the city’s economic and environmental conditions. The measure that’s set to take effect a year from August touches on everyday decisions people make. People walking along Michigan Avenue on Wednesday said it will affect a range of habits, such as how they pick up after their dogs and line the trash cans in their bathrooms. Maiwand Mayar, 22, said that he uses them to transport his laundry and, like “anyone in every society,” his trash can. He couldn’t immediately think of how he...

1. Fresno-Madera, Calif. 2. Visalia-Porterville-Hanford, Calif. 3. Bakersfield, Calif. 4. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif. 5. Modesto-Merced, Calif 6. Pittsburgh-New Castle-Weirton, Penn.-Ohio-W.Va 7. El Centro, Calif. 8. El Paso-Las Cruces, Texas-N.M. 9. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Ariz. 10. St. Louis-St. Charles-Farmington, Mo.-Ill. COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE: http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/04/30/the-10-most-polluted-cities-in-america/2/

After making great strides in air pollution over the past decade, the United States took a small step backwards. Forty-seven percent of the U.S. population lived in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution, slightly higher than last year. According to the American Lung Association’s 2014 “State of the Air” report, the Fresno, Calif., metro area was the most polluted city, moving ahead of Bakersfield, Calif. The ALA’s report measures cities based on low-lying ozone pollution, as well as both short- and long-term particle pollution. These particles, just 1/30th the diameter of a human hair, are capable of getting past...

The pristine natural world has been gone for a long time; get used to it. Nearly all of the earthworms in New England and the upper Midwest were inadvertently imported from Europe. The American earthworms were wiped out by the last Ice Age. That's why when European colonists first got here, many forest floors were covered in deep drifts of wet leaves. The wild horses of the American West may be no less invasive than the Asian carp advancing on the Great Lakes. Most species of the tumbleweed, icon of the Old West, are actually from Russia or Asia. The...

This spring put climate change back on the mainstream media radar. It started in March, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science released a report on climate change titled What We Know to kick off an initiative to raise awareness on the issue. It makes clear that not only is human-caused climate change real and happening, but that we need to take quick and direct action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions to avert likely catastrophe. Now the the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a grim report acknowledging that global carbon emissions have continued...

The Department of Energy is looking to regulate two types of household lamps. The Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced Monday in the Federal Register it is considering new energy conservation standards for general service fluorescent lamps (GSFLs) and incandescent reflector lamps (IRLs). The Energy Department estimates the rules will save the public billions in energy bills over the next three decades and have substantial environmental benefits. But the agency also expects the rules will cost manufacturers more than $90 million, which could lead some to close up shop and cut jobs. It is weighing the...

Should President Barack Obama give approval for the Keystone XL Pipeline project? Or should he continue to oppose the venture that would undoubtedly grow business, increase jobs and create new wealth for middle class working Americans, all for the sake of saving the planet from “global warming?” If the President did the former, he’d be fulfilling the wishes of increasing numbers of Democrats and a majority of Republicans in the U.S. Congress and, according to a new ABC-Washington Post poll, some 65% of the American population. If he continues to prevent the Keystone expansion, he’ll be satisfying the wishes of...

A top US academic has dramatically revealed how government officials forced him to change a hugely influential scientific report on climate change to suit their own interests. Harvard professor Robert Stavins electrified the worldwide debate on climate change on Friday by sensationally publishing a letter online in which he spelled out the astonishing interference. [snip] His comments follow a decision two weeks earlier by Sussex University’s Professor Richard Tol to remove his name from the summary of an earlier volume of the full IPCC report, on the grounds it had been ‘sexed up’ by the same government officials and had...

Green campaigning today is totally unsuited to political and economic realities. Where is the vision in environmental radicalism? Only by thinking very big will we save the world. It’s natural to see US inaction on climate change as another symptom of our broken politics. The United Nations’ climate change panel has announced the world needs major US emissions controls on greenhouse gases to avoid global catastrophe. It didn’t happen when the Democrats controlled Congress, and it isn’t any more likely in this Congress, which is well stocked with climate-change deniers. That isn’t the whole story, though. The whole story is...

Junk Science: How can a company as smart as Apple be so dumb about the environment? That's worth asking now that CEO Tim Cook has embarked on a massive push to make the company more "green." On Earth Day, Apple ran a full-page ad about how it has "set some pretty ambitious goals for reducing our impact on climate change ... and conserving our planet's limited resources." Apple's website features a field of solar panels and the promise to "leave the world better than we found it." But amid all this bragging about Apple's green credentials, nowhere is it mentioned...

The White House is pushing back against a Rolling Stone magazine story that cites two "high-level" Obama administration sources saying President Obama intends to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. "Nobody who knows POTUS' thinking on Keystone is talking and nobody who is talking knows," White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said on Twitter Wednesday evening. In the Rolling Stone story published online Wednesday, veteran climate writer Jeff Goodell writes that the unnamed administration sources told him Obama has "all but decided to deny the permit for the pipeline," although the piece notes "no final decision has been made." Later, the story...

"......................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...