Free Republic

The former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin wrote in the Washington Post on July 27, 2014, “How ignoring climate change could sink the U.S. economy.” Not counting the non-enforced southern border and the hordes of new and lawless Democrat citizens who demand their fair share of the American dream now turned into a welfare nightmare, the national debt is most likely to sink the economy sooner than any other variable and that includes climate change that has been changing for millennia.

While the world is sizzling and percolating in conflicts and wars, and U.S. is roiling in manufactured crisis after crisis, real or imagined emergencies, overwhelmed by the constant invasion of illegal immigrants, The Washington Post writes on the front page, “Thinking inside the box on D.C. housing costs,” living in repurposed dinged freight shipping containers. Two days before, Deborah K. Dietsch featured “Thinking big in a small way.” (Michael Laris, July 21, 2014)

Aerospace giant Boeing finds itself in a fishy fight against Native Americans and environmentalists over pollution in the waterways -- a disagreement that could affect where Washington state's largest employer builds the next generation of planes. At the heart of the fight, which could impact thousands of jobs, is a peculiar question: How much locally caught fish do Washingtonians eat, and what are the health risks? Green groups, alone with Washington state tribes, have sued the Environmental Protection Agency to push for increased fish consumption rates -- currently set at six-and-a-half grams a day. If the number is set higher,...

The hardy honeybees are back, having returned from dark and mysterious places in the imaginations of the environmentalists. The latest numbers from the Agriculture Department are a stinging rebuke to the doomsayers who spread hysterical tales of a mysterious apocalypse of beedom. In the latest annual survey, federal bee counters reported the lowest rate of over-the-winter bee losses in nearly a decade. Beekeepers call a loss of 19 percent to the cold weather an acceptable mortality rate. The latest loss was not much higher at 23 percent, undercutting the dire storyline pushed by environmentalists that our fuzzy friends would be...

Here’s a way to cut 15,193 employees and $9 billion from the bloated Federal budget, while injecting $353 billion into the economy:  shutter the EPA. Actually, instead of simply eradicating it, it could be folded into Americorps, and renamed the National Corporation for Collective Guilt, and the 15,193 EPA employees converted into volunteers. If there’s ever been an agency of the Federal government with no evidence of doing anything, ever, it’s the EPA (with the Department of Education a strong runner-up, although it’s nefarious “accomplishments” are nothing to boast about).  Really…the EPA was organized around responsibility transfers from existing...

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events - or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries. Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign. Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at...

Agency officials coached tribes on how to oppose Alaska’s Pebble Mine. Obama has repeatedly urged that science guide environmental decisions, regulators inside the Environmental Protection Agency secretly worked with tribal and environmental activists to preempt a full review of an Alaskan mine and veto the project before the owners’ permits could be considered, internal memos show. Charged with being neutral arbiters, EPA officials instead began advocating for a preemptive veto of the Pebble Mine project in western Alaska as early as 2008, long before any scientific studies were conducted or the permit applications for the project were even filed, ......

Before today, the Obama administration had only approved six of the more than two dozen pending permit applications for natural gas export terminals for countries with which we do not already have free-trade agreements. In just the past few months, however, the Obama administration has tentatively signaled that they are finally ready to really recognize the boon the recent shale gas bonanza has been for boosting the economy as well as consider the potentially helpful long-term geopolitical benefits that could be reaped from allowing our domestically produced oil-and-gas to flow more freely into the world market — and even of...

The punishment for killing a golden or bald eagle in the United States comes at a hefty price. Simply having eagle feathers or parts in your possession will land you in prison with a heavy fine to pay. Felony killing of eagles comes with a fine of $250,000 and prison time. These penalties fall under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. This law, originally passed in 1940, provides for the protection of the bald eagle and the golden eagle (as amended in 1962) by prohibiting the take, possession, sale, purchase, barter, offer to sell, purchase or barter, transport,...

Dramatic new footage has been released of the moment a Greenpeace ship was raided by the Russian authorities following a protest against oil drilling in the Arctic. The footage, shot on 19 September, shows a Russian helicopter hovering over the deck of Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise. Armed men drop on to the deck, while members of the Greenpeace crew are seen with their hands in the air. The footage also shows the ship being towed towards Murmansk, where the 30 people on board were taken ashore and arrested. The families of all six UK nationals being held by the Russian authorities...

As the Global Warming gang has done in recent years, over the centuries the Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) have destroyed the lives of perhaps millions of people with their bogus “predictions” of the end of the world. Both have fooled people into radical changes in their lives to avoid the phony Armageddon they have been preaching. It has been painful to watch and listen to these poor deluded people regardless of which hoax was destroying them. Nevertheless, as destructive as the JW’s phony predictions have been to individuals at least the rest of us have not been forced by some government...

Not all scientists are panicking about global warming — one of them finds the alarmism “hilarious.” A top climate scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lambasted a new report by the UN’s climate bureaucracy that blamed mankind as the main cause of global warming and whitewashed the fact that there has been a hiatus in warming for the last 15 years. “I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,” Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies...

Why don’t people behave in more environmentally friendly ways? New research presents one uncomfortable answer: They don’t want to be associated with environmentalists. That’s the conclusion of troubling new research from Canada, which similarly finds support for feminist goals is hampered by a dislike of feminists. Participants held strongly negative stereotypes about such activists, and those feelings reduced their willingness “to adopt the behaviors that these activities promoted,” reports a research team led by University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir. This surprisingly cruel caricaturing, the researchers conclude, plays “a key role in creating resistance to social change.” Writing in the...

“I do not come here to lose my freedom; I beg you-get out of Seven/50. Do Not Destroy Our Freedom,” a political refugee from Romania pleaded with the St. Lucie County (FL) Commissioners recently.(1) In chilling details she told the silent room what it was like to live in the Communist country under the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu during the l980s. General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, Ceausescu “maintained strict controls over free speech and the media; internal dissent was NOT tolerated,” according to Wiki. His violent, repressive, brutal regime was overthrown in December of...

Well done to Australia's new Prime-Minister-Elect, the conservative Tony Abbott. He pledged, as his two top priorities, to stop the tide of asylum seekers to the country and to scrap the highly unpopular tax on carbon emissions. Both very admirable intentions. Cutting CO2 does nothing for the environment but a lot for the economy: it destroys it. The environmentalist movement is fundamentally socio-communist. It has proclaimed itself the only saviour of the earth, but the reality is that one does not need to agree with its pseudo-scientific, highly ideological theories or belong to it to care about the environment. Being...

When it opened its timber doors three years ago, this £7million ‘eco primary school’ was applauded for its environmentally friendly credentials. It was heated by solar power and its plumbing system relied on rain collected from the roof, which was made of locally grown sweet chestnut. Sadly, the zero-carbon building is not quite as sustainable as the designers had hoped. In fact, thanks to a series of water leaks and mouldy walls, pupils are now being taught in tents erected in the school grounds. The local authority in Devon has already spent £250,000 to investigate the problem, and plans to...

The more vegetable oil used for biofuel production, the less there is for food use. The report lays out forecast consequences for three proposed EU restrictions on the use of crop-based fuels.

Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.The event page for the “Climate Change Day of Action Rally” disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones: ZERO PEOPLE at the OFA rally at the Georgetown Waterfront this...

Nineteen firefighters died fighting a forest fire in Arizona earlier this summer. Curiously, almost no one is talking about why it happened, only that it was a tragedy. Arizona Deputy State Forestry Director Jerry Payne has been the only one to speak out about the cause, and he backtracked immediately afterwards, apologizing for what he said. He claimed that the superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots violated wildlife safety protocols while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30th, 2013, 60 miles north of Phoenix. According to Payne, the superintendent’s violations allegedly included not knowing the location of the fire,...

Environmentalist killjoys pretend that this is the worst time in history to live on Earth. By Jonah Goldberg You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others were simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about the apocalypse itself.