Free Republic

"................The ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived,unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters...[SNIP]One may ask:Is there any way to stop this steamroller? There’s probably little hope that such an initiative can come from Europe;it may have to come from the United States. Somehow we would have to convince European leaders that their policies, based on global-warming fears, are mistaken. That job may prove to be...

WASHINGTON – Worried about collateral damage to whales, dolphins and other marine life, environmentalists are fighting the U.S. Navy in court in a bid to protect the creatures of the sea from war games in the Pacific Ocean. "The worst harm comes from the explosives going off," said David Henkin, an attorney for EarthJustice. U.S. Navy testing and war games are underway in American waters off the coasts of California and Hawaii. The drills amount to critical practice for the military and last through 2018, but environmental groups like EarthJustice say hundreds of marine mammals will die or get injured...

In what many pundits have described as a “wave election,” many candidates who embraced and campaigned on the principles of free-markets and limited government saw great success this past Tuesday. In contrast, however, the citizens of Denton, TX voted via referendum to ban the oil and gas drilling technique commonly known as hydraulic fracturing. Proponents of the ban cited contamination of groundwater and seismic activity associated with the disposal of wastewater as reasons to support the ban. Interestingly, there has never before been a proven documented case of hydraulic fracturing contaminating aquifers and the precise relationship between injection wells and...

President Obama, Ban Ki-moon and 300,000 others showed up in New York City this week to support the use of modern technologies and cleaner fuels. But at least four notable heads-of-state stayed home, each of whom is just as important in the battle against global warming. Missing: China, India, Russia and Canada. While it may seem hard to reconcile that some of the globe’s biggest polluters skipped the event — they still sent delegations as a show of respect — it is not necessarily a blow to the cause. That’s because of unconventional shale gas — and the wealth of...

Climate: Amid all the hoopla over the "world's largest march against global warming," one question went unasked: Why aren't the protesters carping about the real culprits behind the recent rise in CO2? It makes no sense. America is a global warming success story, for those who believe in such things. CO2 emissions are on the downtrend in this country. [snip] China is a completely different story.

Looking for something to do this weekend that will help those less fortunate than you? Better steer clear of the People’s Climate Change March. Set to start Sunday morning on the Upper West Side, the march includes everything from labor unions to synagogues, beekeepers to anarchists, anti-Zionists to anti-corporate groups. The thousands of marchers will, the Web site tells us, “take to the streets to demand the world we know is within our reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet; a world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world with good jobs,...

Record ice in Antarctica is more proof that Obama is a failure. Despite claiming to control the weather with both his genius intellect and the power of his superhuman Nobel prize, it's been apparent he is not succeeding. And weÂ’ve all noticed it for some time now.No matter the circumstances, every weather event is blamed on global warming in an attempt to cover up Obama's nefarious plot failure.Cold temperature? Global warming. Hot temperatures? Global warming? Snow? Global warming. Drought? Global warming. Hurricanes, tornadoes or the lack thereof? Global warming. There was even an attempt by a ditzy news anchor on...

America could literally become energy independent given its vast reserves of energy source Here in America and elsewhere around the world, Greens continue to war against any energy other than the “renewable” kind, wind and solar, that is more costly and next to useless. Only coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear keeps the modern and developing world functioning and growing. The most publicized aspect is Obama’s “War on Coal” and, thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, it has been successful; responsible for shutting down several hundred coal-fired plants by issuing costly regulations based on the utterly false claim that carbon...

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...