Free Republic

<p>Americans’ concern about several major environmental threats has eased after increasing last year. As in the past, Americans express the greatest worry about pollution of drinking water, and the least about global warming or climate change.</p> <p>Despite ups and downs from year to year in the percentage worried about the various issues, the rank order of the environmental problems has remained fairly consistent over the decades. Americans express greater concern over more proximate threats — including pollution of drinking water, as well as pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and air pollution — than they do about longer-term threats such as global warming, the loss of rain forests, and plant and animal extinction.</p>

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release) — On Wednesday, U.S. Congresswoman Aumua Amata participated in a House Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs hearing entitled: “Funding Priorities for and the United States’ Responsibilities concerning Indians, Alaska Natives, and Insular Areas in the President’s FY 2016 Budget Request for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, Office of Insular Affairs, and Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians.” Amata, a Republican who serves as the vice chairwoman of the subcommittee, addressed Esther P. Kia’aina, the assistant secretary for insular areas, Department of the Interior on many of...

Editor’s Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace... Human Emissions Saved Planet Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts...

In budget discussions, Senator Jeff Sessions asks EPA head Gina McCarthy some simple questions about the climate hoax. She is unable to answer, but basically says, her facts matter and others do not.

Unafraid of his critics, whose baseless charges were systematically and comprehensively eviscerated by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley on Breitbart.com last week, Soon wrote, “I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.”

A drought from 2006 to 2010 was among the triggers for the current uprising in Syria, according to a new study. And climate models and the observational record suggest that the drought was amplified by a century-long, human-forced warming and drying trend.

"I am under 'investigation,'" professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder posted on his blog Wednesday. The top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, sent a letter to university President Bruce Benson that asked the school to provide its financial disclosure policies and information on how they apply to Pielke, as well as any drafts and communications involving Pielke's testimony before Congress between Jan. 1, 2007, and Jan. 31, 2015. In 2013, Grijalva explained, Pielke told the Senate that it is "incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with...

In the anti-fracking film Gasland, producer Josh Fox proclaims that the process of extracting previously inaccessible oil and gas from shale pollutes water supplies, increases the incidence of cancer and leads to higher levels of seismic activity, despite ample contrary evidence. This self-proclaimed environmental watchdog and anti-fracking crusader has led extensive efforts to end or prevent fracking throughout the United States by obfuscating the truth and stopping communities from reaping the benefits of America's shale boom. Josh Fox and others like him are uninterested in looking for improvements in fracking technology and safety. Instead they seek to shut down shale...

A solar-power project set to open next month in Nevada has fried 130 birds during tests and will soon join another solar farm in California in avian incineration. If as many birds being burned by solar power farms built in the U.S. were to wash up on our beaches soaked in crude oil from a leaking offshore well, the outrage would be deafening. But as with the wind turbines that now cover acre upon acre of former "pristine" countryside, what amount to avian Cuisinarts slicing and dicing everything that flies, including endangered species, only the crickets are chirping. House Minority...

More than 100 birds have been injured during testing of a new solar power farm. Biologists say 130 birds caught fire mid-air while entering an area of concentrated solar energy created by the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project near Tonopah, Nevada. Experts believe the birds may have been attracted by the glow of the farm’s tower, but the project’s owners, SolarReserve, say they have found a way to reduce the fatalities. The solar project is close to being completion and is set to go launch next month. Thousands of mirrors focus sunlight onto one central tower to melt salt...

“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen must...

Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory “czar” and one of the smartest and most devious thinkers on the left, has a highly revealing Bloomberg column out this week reporting on the results of a study of the way China has attempted indoctrination in its school system. This column and the underlying study (it’s an NBER paper, behind a paywall unless you have academic access) are useful as background reading for everyone who is rightly concerned about how Common Core standards will likely become the means of nationalizing a liberal school curriculum. (What? You mean you aren’t reassured by the promises from...

I have been asked to mentor a high school student who thinks she wants to be a lawyer. During our initial conversation, we were discussing various practice areas. Since she had also expressed an interest in engineering, I mentioned Oil & Gas Law. Her response was that she wanted to "protect the environment" and wouldn't be interested in that. I sense an educational opportunity here. Can anyone recommend a short article or book written at high school level that will challenge her attitude? Thanks much!

When the temperature dips below freezing, reliable electricity becomes more than a matter of convenience but a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, the reliability of our electric grid is at-risk due to EPA regulations that are shutting down America’s coal plants.Existing EPA regulations already have led to the scheduled shutdown of nearly 20 percent of the U.S. coal fleet. EPA’s newest carbon regulations being finalized this summer will lead to even more shutdowns. With coal responsible for generating nearly 40 percent of America’s electricity, these shutdowns will further strain our nation’s electricity grid and could leave many Americans in...

While much of the debate over climate change surrounds whether or not it is occurring, one glaciologist and retired professor says the real issue is that the topic is being used as a political pawn to siphon money and votes. Dr. Terry Hughes, in an interview with The College Fix, said researchers want to keep federal funding for climate change alive, and politicians want to earn environmentalist votes, and both predict global pandemonium to that end. Hughes, a professor emeritus of earth sciences and climate change at the University of Maine, said for years his colleagues urged him to be...

Although man-made global warming has been thoroughly exposed as an embarrassing scam, the green movement is strangely expanding, not retreating. A member of Congress privately told me this is because the green movement is completely driven by money, not idealism. The rhetoric about saving the earth is nothing more than propaganda to pad the pockets of the one percent at the top who are profiting from it. Last year, a committee in the U.S. Senate conducted an investigation and discovered that a handful of radical left-wing billionaires, millionaires and their foundations are behind the green movement. Contrary to the misperception...

Pope Francis continues his groundbreaking progressive approach to Catholicism with plans to expand next year on one of his favorite causes: climate change and protecting the environment. The pope is expected to make climate change a large part of his leadership efforts throughout 2015, according to ThinkProgress.org, using the papacy to encourage the 1.2 billion Catholics to protect the environment as “God’s creation.” Pope Francis has even gone as far as to call the destruction of the rainforest a sin, and cautioned Catholics and non-Catholics alike that protecting the environment is a sacred matter, going as far as back as...

Despite environmentalists’ worries, cattle don’t guzzle water or cause hunger—and can help fight climate change People who advocate eating less beef often argue that producing it hurts the environment. Cattle, we are told, have an outsize ecological footprint: They guzzle water, trample plants and soils, and consume precious grains that should be nourishing hungry humans. Lately, critics have blamed bovine burps, flatulence and even breath for climate change. As a longtime vegetarian and environmental lawyer, I once bought into these claims. But now, after more than a decade of living and working in the business—my husband, Bill, founded Niman Ranch...

Representatives from the U.S. and 195 other countries are meeting in Lima, Peru for the 20th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, hoping to lay the foundation for a major treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But evidence shows this is the wrong approach to address climate change and negotiators would be better off focusing on market competition and innovation, which have proven able to reduce emissions intensity and promote economic growth. The U.S. is seeking an agreement based on voluntary reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by each nation. In an attempt...