Free Republic

The media is touting a new study claiming global warming could be, at least in part, to blame for the "diabetes epidemic" sweeping the globe. "When it gets warmer, there is higher incidence of diabetes," Lisanne Blauw, a Ph.D. candidate at the Netherlands-based Einthoven Laboratory and the study's lead author, told The Huffington Post Tuesday. "It's important to realize global warming has further effects on our health, not only on the climate," Blauw said.

Cheerios cereal brand is under fire for sending out billions of potentially disease-spreading seeds in an attempt to help save bees from extinction. The brand recently announced that it would mail out free wildflower seeds as part of its "Save the Bees" campaign. The seeds, once planted, were meant to provide more nectar for the declining bee population. As of Friday, Cheerios had sent out 1.5 billion seeds, according to General Mills, which owns the cereal brand. There's one problem with Cheerios' charitable effort, however: some of the wildflower species included in the packet of seeds can do serious...

Monday, on “PBS NewsHour,” while discussing President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt saying carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change, environmental activist former Vice President Al Gore said, “We’re seeing every night on the television news now a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”(snip)

Federal contractor hauls off 835 dumpsters of trash and debris from protest sites The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrapped up its $1.1 million cleanup of the Dakota Access pipeline protest camps on federal land in North Dakota, hauling away 835 dumpsters of remaining trash and debris. The site, once occupied by thousands of environmental demonstrators, is now vacant. [Snip] Corps Capt. Ryan Hignight said a total of 8,170 cubic yards of debris was removed from the three camps — Sacred Stone, Oceti Sakowin and Rosebud - all within the flood plain on federally managed land. "In total, there were...

DENVER — Each morning Yadira Sanchez and her three children awaken to the roar of traffic and the plumes of exhaust that spill from the highway that cuts through their neighborhood. Now, Ms. Sanchez and her family are confronting a plan to triple the width of this state’s main east-west artery, sending tens of thousands more cars by their door. Denver was the fastest-growing large city in America in 2015, with a population of nearly 700,000, and the scene of a tech and marijuana boom that has drawn 1,000 new households a month. But as in other cities, its highways...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) -- All expanded polystyrene products used for packaging food products, including foam carriers, could be banned from all Maryland food businesses if pending legislation is passed in the General Assembly this session. The legislation, sponsored in the House by Delegate Brooke Lierman, D-Baltimore, will prohibit a person or business from selling or providing food in an expanded polystyrene food service product beginning Jan. 1, according to a Department of Legislative Services fiscal analysis. The bill, which has also been cross-filed in the state Senate, also bans the sale and use of loose fill packaging.

A corporation called Apex Clean Energy has proposed building as many as 60 wind turbines in Shiawassee County — some up to 600 feet tall. That is about 20 percent higher than the tallest wind turbines currently in Michigan, which are 494 feet tall. It’s also just about the same height as The Guardian building, which is listed at 495 feet tall, in downtown Detroit. The expansion of wind farms into many Michigan communities is being driven by a mandate in the state’s utility regulation law.

The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule — Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’...

The Amazon has long been held up as an example of untamed wilderness. But people have lived in the world’s largest rainforest for thousands of years, hunting, gathering and farming1. For years, researchers have debated how much of an influence human activities have had on the Amazon. And now, a study describes the extent to which ancient peoples changed the distribution of trees in the forest around them. The paper2, published on 2 March in Science, finds that many domesticated trees and palms are five times more likely to be over-represented in the Amazon than are non-domesticated ones. The researchers...

March 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Ridding the world of 6 billion people to bring the population down to 1 billion would have an “overall pro-life effect,” a pro-abortion population control advocate told the press two days before delivering his speech at a Vatican-run conference on saving the natural world. “A world population of around a billion would have an overall pro-life effect,” The Guardian indirectly quoted Sanford biologist Paul Ehrlich as saying. “This could be supported for many millennia and sustain many more human lives in the long term compared with our current uncontrolled growth and prospect of sudden collapse,”...

March 1 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will target a handful of Obama-era green regulations, including a federal coal mining ban and an initiative forcing states to cut carbon emissions, in an executive order as soon as next week a White House official told Reuters on Wednesday. Trump and his fellow Republicans who control Congress are seeking to unravel former Democratic President Barack Obama's initiatives to combat global climate change, which they say are costly for U.S. business and have hampered drilling and mining without providing any clear benefits.

There is no practical rationale behind any federal agency having a private army to bully, extort and ultimately endanger American citizens. When it comes to disparate groups of protesters who claim to value the land, the line is drawn definitively between the raucous, violent rabble that descended upon the Cannonball River in North Dakota and the orderly numbers that arrived at Malheur Wildlife Refuge and the Bundy Ranch in Nevada. Let’s list the differences, shall we?

The Trump administration plans to propose a one-forth to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget, a plan that would end up laying off 20 percent of the agency’s staffers, according to reports. Trump officials will propose a $6.1 billion for the EPA next year, a $2 billion cut from current levels, according to reports in E&E News and Politico , citing sources. The agency’s staffing levels would fall to 12,000 workers, from 15,000 currently, according to the reports. An EPA spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment from The Hill. The proposed spending levels at the EPA...

In the "Dune" science fiction series, the enemy "Ix" civilization wields a stealth weapon called a "no chamber" on the battlefield of pharmacologically augmented psychic warfare, shielded rooms and space ships into which "spice" enhanced ESP is unable to see.  Ixian No-Ship The Vatican Workshop on Biological Extinction has become a "no chamber", an occult population-control enclave closed to the press. Nefarious activities of secret societies revealed during the early American Republic caused public scandal during the 1790s. In 1826, whistle-blower William Morgan of Batavia NY disappeared and was presumed murdered in a Masonic, extrajudicial coup.  William Morgan The past...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened Wells Fargo bank for its investment in the North Dakota Access Pipeline. In a February 17 letter to Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan, de Blasio said he wanted to “express my deep concern about your involvement, and the involvement of other banks, in financing the Dakota Access Pipeline,” noting his concern is partly based on being a Mayor of a “coastal city threatened by climate change.” De Blasio claimed the pipeline would violate “human and tribal rights of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation” and would have “negative environmental consequences” to the land...

A Look Into the Opaque Crystal Ball for Infrastructure Initiatives in the First 100 Days of the Trump Administration President Donald J. Trump's "America's Infrastructure First" plan is one of the Trump Administration's priorities during his first 100 days in office. Throughout the campaign, President Trump heralded his plan to build and restore highways, tunnels, airports, bridges, and water systems across America and promised a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure sector over a 10-year period. Leaders from both parties acknowledge the nation's deteriorating infrastructure, and there have been expressions of support from both sides of the aisle for some...

As the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee moves closer to a vote on sending President Trump’s nominee to lead the EPA to the full Senate, the battle over Scott Pruitt’s record is being reinvigorated. His Jan. 18 hearing and the responses to his written testimony were predictably combative and just as predictably hyperpartisan. Earlier today, Senate Democrats took a strong stance against Pruitt when all ten members of the Environment and Public Works committee boycotted the vote in an attempt to stall his nomination process. Those watching Pruitt’s seven-plus hour hearing in mid-January might have hoped to see senators...

A number of news outlets claim the near collapse of the Oroville dam's emergency spillway in California is a glimpse of what man-made global warming could bring. "Oroville Is a Warning for California Dams, as Climate Change Adds Stress," the New York Times reported. "Broken California Dam Is a Sign of Emergencies to Come," reads an article published in Scientific American, adding that "[c]limate change is leading to more extreme rainfalls that can overwhelm infrastructure."

Rep. Phil Phelps, D-Flushing, says it took months for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to respond to his Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the Flint water crisis. The department initially said the documents did not exist, but months later the lawmaker received tens of thousands of documents the agency had withheld. Phelps sent a request in early September 2015 to the DEQ as well as the Michigan Department of Treasury and the city of Flint. Phelps said his FOIAs asked for any documents relating to officials knowing that Flint River water was safe for use...

Eco-terrorism, which has caused tens of millions of dollars in property damage over several decades, was the focus of a recent panel discussion at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) held in Philadelphia early this year. Cal-State Fullerton assistant professor of English, Nicole Seymour, discussed an eco-terrorist cult classic movie "Silent Running," claiming that eco-terrorism protects the environment. Seymour's sympathized with aspects of eco-terrorism, such as comparing property to life. In her words, "it's] something incredibly naïve' to distinguish the two" and the term eco-terrorism is "both accurate and unethical." She wondered if academics should be "proving some human lives...