Free Republic

Contrary to the conventional teachings of environmentalists, hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking) has at least one major environmental benefit: saving water. Although most Americans are disturbingly ignorant about fracking, it is an issue of critical importance not only with respect to the environment but also in foreign policy and the economy. Typically, the debate is framed around priorities. If you care more about the environment, you are against fracking; but if you care more about energy independence and domestic economic opportunities, you are for fracking. However, a new study out of the University of Texas at Austin - one of...

The Czech Republic’s environment ministry has come under fire for ordering 1,000 pairs of male and female underwear adorned with images of endangered animals as part of an end-of-year budget splurge. The environment ministry will use the beaver and cormorant pants as promotional materials for its Czech Nature campaign, which aims to encourage people to take an active role in environmental protection. With allegations of frivolous government spending on pants filling the press, the underwear spat even overshadowed controversy surrounding the environment ministry’s purchase of 130 new cars for its ministerial fleet.

TAN AN TAY VILLAGE, Vietnam (Reuters) - As John Kerry's boat winds its way along the turbid waters of the Cai Nuoc river in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, the U.S. Secretary of State is taken back to the time he spent here as a commander of an American patrol boat during the Vietnam War. But it is not only the past that brings Kerry to this remote part of the Mekong, the 12th largest river in the world. He is here to deliver a message about the growing threat of climate change and the impact it will have on the delta...

We have to kill eagles in order to save them. That’s now the official policy of the U.S. Interior Department. On Friday, the agency announced that it would grant some wind-energy companies permits that will allow them to kill or injure bald and golden eagles for up to 30 years without penalty. The move is an unprecedented gift to the wind-energy industry, which has been lobbying for the 30-year permit for several years. Shortly after the deal was announced, the wind-energy lobby issued a statement that would make George Orwell proud. An official with the American Wind Energy Association declared...

WASHINGTON — In a sprawling complex of laboratories and futuristic gadgets in Golden, Colo., a supercomputer named Peregrine does a quadrillion calculations per second to help scientists figure out how to keep the lights on. Peregrine was turned on this year by the U.S. Energy Department. It has the world's largest "petascale" computing capability. It is the size of a Mack truck. Its job is to figure out how to cope with a risk from something the public generally thinks of as benign — renewable energy. Energy officials worry a lot these days about the stability of the massive patchwork...

Electricians in bright yellow coats have been tending to rows of solar panels in recent days, patching together a complex network of equipment that will be the largest of its kind in the state when it's completed in about a month. But the project — dedicated Friday at a gathering of company and public officials — won't hold the top spot forever. A project four times the size of the Somers solar center that is planned in Sprague will knock it to second when it comes online in three years. These massive projects, as well as the thousands of smaller-scale...

At the last update, I think we were somewhere in “earlyish 2014″ territory (who can even keep up?) for the time frame in which the northern extension of the Keystone pipeline will be either approved or denied by President Obama, but by determinedly delaying on what should have/could have been a simple and bygone decision of his first term, the issue is now a ticking time bomb of highly publicized, faux-environmentalist outrageous outrage. I suppose that the dollars the president has been fundraising from well-monied, self-fancied “green” Democratic donors may have made the delay, delay, delay tactic worth it in...

The federal government announced on Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into two recent battery fires in the Tesla Motors Model S sedan. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s decision came amid public speculation over the electric car’s safety and the battery pack’s design after reports of three fires in six weeks. Two of the fires occurred on American highways when the cars hit debris in the road. A third, in Mexico, took place after a high-speed crash into a wall and a tree. The drivers in all three incidents were unhurt. Tesla also said late on Monday that...

No stranger to performances, SeaWorld must put on a very different kind of show today in what could be a make or break day for the aquatic entertainment giant. SeaWorld Orlando is asking a panel of three judges on a federal appeals court to overturn safety citations and a ban instituted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration restricting the ability of humans to interact with killer whales during performances. The injunction was instituted after the death of veteran trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, when Tilikum, the orca she had worked with for years, dragged her into the water and...

Back in September, the relatively conservative Liberal Party swept to power in the Australian national elections, booting the Labor Party out of the hot seat and bringing in brand-new Prime Minister Tony Abbot. He campaigned on promises of rolling back some of Australia’s profligately expensive green commitments and streamlining the government’s bureaucracy, and he immediately got to work by scrapping the country’s Climate Commission and freezing renewable energy funding.The oh-so-august bureaucrats gathering in Warsaw, Poland for yet another United Nations climate conference this week usually turn up their noses at such tacky, backwards notions as fiscal sustainability, but Australia is...

Scientists think they have resolved one of the most controversial environmental issues of the past decade: the curious case of the missing frogs' legs. Around the world, frogs are found with missing or misshaped limbs, a striking deformity that many researchers believe is caused by chemical pollution. However, tests on frogs and toads have revealed a more natural, benign cause. The deformed frogs are actually victims of the predatory habits of dragonfly nymphs, which eat the legs of tadpoles.

Scientists think they have resolved one of the most controversial environmental issues of the past decade: the curious case of the missing frogs' legs. Around the world, frogs are found with missing or misshaped limbs, a striking deformity that many researchers believe is caused by chemical pollution. However, tests on frogs and toads have revealed a more natural, benign cause. The deformed frogs are actually victims of the predatory habits of dragonfly nymphs, which eat the legs of tadpoles.

On the very same day that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) announces: “US Rises to No. 1 Energy Producer”—thanks to the shale boom made possible through a technology known as hydraulic fracturing—an environmental group released a report calling for a complete ban of the practice, which would effectively shut down the oil-and-gas industry (and all of the jobs and revenues it creates) and increase dependence on foreign oil. Coincidence? I don’t think so. You probably haven’t heard about either, as most news coverage, on October 3, centered on the government shutdown—eclipsing all else. Why would Environment America choose to release...

Rubin rose before Chief U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Portland, where she pleaded guilty to a dozen crimes – in Colorado, Oregon and California – as part of the underground Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. ... Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen F. Peifer recounted Rubin's crimes as part of the largest group of eco-saboteurs ever taken down by the FBI. They called themselves The Family and committed an estimated $40 million in damage from 1996 to 2001. ... the terms of the highly structured plea agreement sets limits on the number of years Rubin will spend in prison....

Humans are the enemy! A new study published in Ecology and Society claims that longer life expectancy for us is bad news for the planet. From the study by Aaron Lotz and Craig R. Allen: We found a positive relationship between life expectancy and the percentage of endangered and invasive species in a country…The overall trend in high-income countries with improvements to the Human Development Index, which includes human life expectancy as one of its variables, is toward a disproportionately larger negative impact on a country’s ecological footprint. However, some lower-income countries have a high level of development without a...

Events have failed to fulfill the prophecy. Preachers have suddenly been struck dumb by uncertainty. Believers are understandably nervous and some, under their breath, are abandoning the dogma. These sentences could have been written at the end of the day on October 22, 1844, about the Millerites, a religious sect started in upstate New York. Preachers had told their followers that Jesus would return to earth that day. He failed to show. But the subject here is not Millerism, but another kind of religious faith: the faith of the global-warming alarmists. And while it’s not likely to have the impact...

The Connecticut legislature extended the two-year ban on wind turbines, striking down regulations that would have allowed for the construction of the renewable energy projects. The legislature's Regulation Review Committee on Tuesday voted 10-3 to reject the proposed wind regulations by the Connecticut Siting Council. The members were concerned about who would dismantle the structures if the owners ever went out of business. This is the third rejections of the proposed regulations since the state placed a moratorium on wind turbine development in 2011. It also marks the first rejection since June, when the legislature passed a comprehensive energy strategy...

It’s now been just over five years since TransCanada first filed an application for a presidential permit to build a cross-border pipeline, but that hasn’t done anything to temper the radical eco-lobbies’ relentlessly combative campaign based on nothing more than untenable arguments and outrageous outrage. Points for their steadfast commitment, I suppose, but those points are completely negated by these out-of-touch green groups’ and millionaire donors‘ refusal to contend with the facts that the southern portions of the Keystone pipeline are already in operation or nearly complete, that the pipeline will be used to ship domestic oil too, and that...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s recently announced decision to, in effect, ban the construction of traditional coal-fired power plants in the United States is a non-solution to a hypothetical problem, enacted upon a legal basis that is shaky and an economic basis that is nonexistent. The cost-benefit analysis is almost entirely one-sided: The costs will be very high, and the benefits the EPA hopes to secure will remain out of reach. The EPA is demanding that new U.S. plants that will use coal to generate electricity must meet standards that today are met by no commercial coal-fired plant operating anywhere in...

Ruth Patrick, whose studies of freshwater ecology in the 1930s helped galvanize the later environmental movement and whose success in a profession dominated by men charted a course for other female scientists, died Sept. 23 at a retirement community in Lafayette Hill, Pa. She was 105.