Free Republic

Silly me; I thought all the new, jazzy paper straws showing up everywhere from Ikea to Walmart were strictly a party fashion trend to help you coordinate your dinnerware with your beverage containers. I should have known better; as it turns out it’s a sign that the sun is setting on the plastic straw, a commodity that has proved itself to be, like the plastic grocery bag, problematic, polluting and worthy of our shunning despite its inherent utility.Apparently there is a world-wide effort afoot to remove these menacing instruments of the suck from public life. The movement started in Britain...

The White House plans to withdraw Kathleen Hartnett White's nomination to head the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House official confirmed to CNN Saturday. Hartnett White, who would have overseen environmental and energy policies across the government, had described the belief in "global warming" as a "kind of paganism" for "secular elites" during a September 2016 interview on "The Right Perspective," an online conservative radio show. She has also said the goal of climate activists and the United Nations was an all-powerful, one-world government and "planetary management," KFile reported. President Donald Trump announced Hartnett White's nomination in October and...

As record lows gripped many parts of the U.S. and Canada, the global warming elitists scrambled to announce to the world that climate change was the driving force behind the freezing weather. Inevitably, their claims have exposed the hypocrisy of the global warming cult that has instilled fear among the public. Temperatures in many parts of the Atlantic U.S. went down drastically last week. Canada was not an exception, with record lows registered in many provinces since November last year. While some forecasts in December predicted a colder than usual winter due to the polar vortex inversion, the drop in...

The Trump administration says it will no longer criminally prosecute companies that accidentally kill migratory birds. The decision reverses a rule made in the last weeks of the Obama administration. A legal memo from the Department of the Interior posted Friday declares that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act applies only to purposeful actions that kill migratory birds, and not to energy companies and other businesses that kill birds incidentally. "Interpreting the MBTA to apply to incidental or accidental actions hangs the sword of Damocles over a host of otherwise lawful and productive actions, threatening up to six months in jail...

Families in a Washington state community have noticed an uptick in coyote sightings lately. Within a 24-hour span, the city of Snoqualmie received seven reports of coyotes in the area—including an attack on a 3-year-old girl while she was on her porch, according to KCPQ. Douglas Lucas says his daughter was attacked by a coyote who came up to the front porch of their home and pounced on the child on Thursday. “It bite me,” said 3-year-old Sophia about her encounter with a coyote. The little girl was outside with her father on the front porch of their home. Lucas was up on...

FULL TITLE: Is California about to be hit by the 'Big One'? Fears of a massive earthquake rise after 134 mini-tremors rattle the San Andreas fault in just one week Fresh fears have been raised that a huge earthquake is about to hit California after a swarm of recent tremors. In the last week 134 earthquakes have hammered a three-mile stretch around Monterey County on the San Andreas fault. Of those earthquakes, 17 were stronger than 2.5 magnitude and six of them were stronger than 3.0, with more tremors expected in the coming weeks, experts warn. It follows fears raised...

The Evil of the Scarcity Meme In order to avoid misunderstanding, let us make clear from the outset that scarcity is an unavoidable fact of life – it is the very thing that impels economic activity. If all material human wants were satisfied and we were living as immortals in the Land of Cockaigne, there would no longer be a reason to plan for the future, to save and invest, and to weigh the opportunity costs of different choices. In this hypothetical scenario, people may for a while engage in the pursuit of various pleasures, many would probably indulge in...

Environment: Most everyone knows about how celebrity climate change activists like Leonardo DiCaprio don't care enough about saving the planet to give up their massive yachts, private jets and energy-sucking mansions. Turns out DiCaprio and Co. have set the standard for the hoi polloi. DiCaprio, while accepting his Oscar, called climate change "the most urgent threat facing our entire species," and told viewers that "we need to work collectively and stop procrastinating." Collectively, but not if it inconveniences DiCaprio, that is. His fabulously glamorous lifestyle has a carbon footprint that is bigger than dozens of middle class families put together,...

Who we are Paganism is a family of spiritual paths rooted in ancestral religions throughout the world and predating recorded history. As explained by the Pagan Federation, Paganism includes polytheistic and pantheistic nature-worshipping religions, and often includes deities of all genders, ancestor veneration, and celebrations in tune with our Earth. A full discussion of the many varieties of Paganism is beyond the scope of this statement, but we, the signatories, value life and the natural world as sacred. Thus, Pagan thought leads us to live in harmony with the rhythms of our great Earth. Nature is sacred We receive, acknowledge...

My response to New York Magazine’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” is to remind you of these bogus doomsayer predictions from the first Earth Day in 1970 On July 9, 2017, New York Magazine published this article, which is called, “The Uninhabitable Earth.”On July 14, 2017 – just five days later – New York Magazine said that the article “… is already the most-read article in New York Magazine’s history.”My response to this article is to remind you of the following bogus doomsayer predictions that were made during the first Earth Day in 1970:* Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for the first Earth...

House lawmakers want the Trump administration to investigate reports that a wealthy foundation used an offshore shell company to give millions of dollars to environmental activists opposed to U.S. energy development. “If you connect the dots, it is clear that Russia is funding U.S. environmental groups in an effort to suppress our domestic oil and gas industry, specifically hydraulic fracking,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday. Smith and Texas Republican Rep. Randy Weber asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to investigate whether or not environmentalists were funneling money to U.S. environmental groups through a Bermuda-based shell company. Republicans are pitching...

Mann is the Penn State climatologist famous for inventing the "hockey stick" graph promoting the notion that planetary temperatures spiked in the 20th Century after a Golden Age of stasis...What Mann did was splice two separate data sets to create the illusion of spiking temperatures.

The first official trailer for An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power was released on Tuesday. The timing of the clip's release comes at a crucial point for climate change discussion, with its release coming the same day Donald Trump signed an executive order to rescind Obama's Clean Power Plan and a host of other climate-related regulations.

I Don’t Believe in Science The mad theology of environmentalists who love science to death. June 9, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. Governor Brown has been touring Communist China to denounce America. Americans, unlike the Chinese Communists whose cities are unbreathable, don’t care about the environment and won’t implement phony ecocratic measures whose real purpose is to transfer money from working families to Brown’s big green business pals and Chinese solar panel manufacturers. Congress “doesn’t believe in science”, Governor...

One of the many reasons I love frugality–beyond, you know, the money it saves me and the financial independence it brought me–is the fact that its application in my life has made me a more environmentally conscious person. I’ve always respected natural resources, been a fan of mother nature, and loved the outdoors, but it wasn’t until I became a frugal weirdo that I began living a holistically environmental life. I’ll say right now that I know there’s more I could do in the arena of environmentalism–deeper changes I could make and countless ways I could further reduce my carbon...

Does watching a movie nowadays leave you with the feeling that you’ve just been preached to? Quite likely it’s because you have. The whole Hollywood industry has abandoned its primary cause of entertainment and moved into the field of social conditioning. And the agenda is not in our interests; it’s in the interests of the big corporations and the liberal elites. Consider one example: Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 blockbuster Elysium. The human race lives in two divided societies, one in the space station Elysium, where all is clean and diseases are miraculously cured, and the other on the poor, polluted planet...

Few things pollute the earth more than when leftists gather to protest. Let’s reminisce for old time’s sake. Leftists described the 2011 Occupy Movement as a breath of fresh air, although movement trash rats deposited their bowel movements on police cars and Zuccotti Park doorsteps. They also left tons of foul rubbish on streets. Democrats are all about handouts, so maybe they should have handed out doggie doo bags. How about Earth Day 2014? Leftists worried about global warming trashed the protest grounds, then left others to worry about the mess. It should have been called a “garbage march.” Did...

It should be the obligation of older citizens to try to improve the prospects for their successors. But, here in California, as seen in a new report issued by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, we seem to have adopted an agenda designed to make things tougher for them.Millennials everywhere face many challenges. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that, even when working full-time, they earn $2,000 less than the same age group made in 1980. Nationwide, a millennial with a college degree and college debt, according to a recent analysis of Federal Reserve data, earns about the same as...

Recent science and climate marches demonstrated how misinformed, indoctrinated, politicized and anti-Trump these activists are – and how indifferent about condemning millions in industrialized nations and billions in developing countries to green energy poverty. Amid it all, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole helped illustrate how the marchers became so ignorant, insensitive and intolerant. It’s always amazed me how frequently academics, journalists, politicians and students confuse poisonous carbon monoxide (CO) with plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide (CO2). But Professor Cole’s April 17 article in The Nation presents unfathomable ignorance from the intellectual class that is “educating” our young people, while displaying...

"Mankind is considered (by the radical environmentalists) the lowest and the meanest of all species and is blamed for everything.""Well tended garden is better than a neglected wood lot.""Reporters no longer ask for verification, thus they print charges no matter how outlandish they may seem, and once having done that, when the truth comes out, it's buried in the back page or never makes it on the air at all.""The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.""The...