Free Republic

Environmentalists' desired result: Destruction of food production to the point that food is no longer affordable. How to lessen the "surplus population"...Make sustenance so expensive they die of starvation Increasingly, city-dwellers seeking view lots or large acreage have been fleeing the metropolitan areas to build larger and even luxurious homes in rural America, often opposite agricultural operations. Once they’d invested in constructing homes and settled into their new digs, they were awakened to the realities of country living, including the sights, smells and sounds of working farms… and they didn’t like it. The offshoot was a plethora of nuisance suits...

The Sierra Club has adopted a position that would effectively require all electricity in Michigan to come from renewable sources such as wind and solar. This appears to have caused a rift between the environmentalist organization and Lansing’s public utility over the replacement of a coal-fired power station set to close in 2020. The Sierra Club opposes building a natural-gas powered plant to replace the coal-fired plant, the utility says. “I’ve given up trying to talk to them,” said Dick Peffley, the general manager of Lansing’s Board of Water and Light. The Sierra Club supported a natural-gas plant the utility...

Seemingly every day some politician or another, usually from the left of the political spectrum, calls for more infrastructure investment. In North Dakota there is a $3.7 billion infrastructure project under construction. This project received all the necessary federal permits and is 60% complete. But now the Obama administration, bowing to radical left wing protestors, has thrown the project into doubt with its unprecedented decision last Friday to halt construction on one section of the project. Apparently infrastructure investment is not the priority we were led to believe. The project in question is known as the Dakota Access Pipeline. It...

Klamath Basin Agreement proponents have lost not only their grip on reality, but also their traditional American common sense neighborly values Klamath Basin groups claiming to represent the majority of Klamath Basin residents, such as the Klamath Water Users Association (“KWUA”) and the Family Farm Alliance (“FFA”), have long perpetuated the lie that the Klamath Basin Agreements will benefit ALL Basin residents. The first two of these agreements had been initially proposed during the Bush administration in an effort assist Klamath irrigators resolve longstanding science and water delivery disputes with environmentalists and tribal communities. Now, these and several additional new...

A dream born by the environmental watermelon religion, green on the outside, red on the inside I saw the once verdant wheat fields of Eastern Europe covered with ugly wind turbines, slowly spinning their huge blades into the wind. A few funnel dust swirls were blowing the topsoil into the air. They did not appear to be connected to any storage station that would distribute the electrical power generated. I searched and found out that they were really not connected to any network, were not generating usable electricity, they were all for show to placate the “green growth” European bureaucrats...

As Corn Devours U.S. Prairies, Greens Reconsider Biofuel Mandate Bloomberg reports “As Corn Devours U.S. Prairies, Greens Reconsider Biofuel Mandate”. I can only say “What took you so long?” To wit: “Environmentalists who once championed biofuels as a way to cut pollution are now turning against a U.S. program that puts renewable fuels in cars, citing higher-than-expected carbon dioxide emissions and reduced wildlife habitat.”

A London-based advocacy group said Monday it documented 185 killings of environmental activists around the world last year, nearly 60 percent more than in 2014 and the highest since it began collecting data dating back to 2002. In a newly released report, Global Witness said Brazil topped the 16-country list with 50 environmental defenders slain in 2015, followed by the Philippines with 33 and Colombia with 26. The group says 116 were slain worldwide in 2014. Last year “was the deadliest year on record for killings of land and environmental defenders — people struggling to protect their land, forests and...

Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election. The rift developed after some in the labor movement, whose cash flow has dwindled and whose political clout has been increasingly imperiled, announced a partnership last week with a wealthy environmentalist, Tom Steyer, to help bankroll a new fund dedicated to electing Democrats. That joint initiative enraged members of the nation’s biggest construction unions, already on edge about the rising influence...

Long before he became one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate — and the target of Congressman Pat Toomey's GOP primary challenge — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania demonstrated a knack for notoriety. In 1964, as a member of the Warren Commission, he invented the "single-bullet theory" to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. Conspiracy junkies have obsessed over him ever since. (In Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Kevin Costner's character labels Specter "an ambitious junior counselor" behind "one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people.") Between serving on the Warren Commission and becoming a...

Never Trust The Doom-Mongers: Earth Day Predictions That Were All WrongEnvironmentalists truly believed and predicted that the planet was doomed during the first Earth Day in 1970, unless drastic actions were taken to save it. Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold many of the predictions in high regard. So this Earth Day, The Daily Caller News Foundation takes a look at predictions made by environmentalists around the original Earth Day in 1970 to see how they’ve held up. 1: (1970) “Civilization Will End Within 15 or...

Energy: The benefits of “fracking” have never been greater. Prices are lower and the country is emitting less CO2. Yet most people now oppose fracking. What gives?

What is an environmentalist to do these days? You can support windmills, so long as they don’t disrupt ridgelines, where the wind happens to blow. You have to approve of solar power, except when a solar power plant might disrupt efforts to restore migration routes for 100 sheep in the Mohave Desert. And you once were supposed to support natural gas as a “bridge fuel” between coal and something else, until you weren’t. Now the requirement appears to be that you must oppose fracking at all costs, even though it will likely mean increasing emissions of greenhouse gases.

The rapture was supposed to happen on September 13, 1988. A few fringe pastors were screaming that the end was nigh, that the righteous would soon disappear into the air while the rest of humanity was doomed to suffer a quite literal hell on earth. Forget the biblical admonition that no man knows the day nor hour of Christ's return, these men had figured it out. It was time to prepare yourself. I was a sophomore at a Christian college in Nashville, and it was the talk of the campus. No one likes to make fun of crazy Christian...

Groups question keeping Four Corners Power Plant open for 25 more years. A coalition of environmental groups has filed a notice of intent to sue the Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others over a July decision to allow the Four Corners Power Plant to operate through 2041. A coalition of environmental groups announced earlier this week its intent to take legal action against several federal agencies for extending operations at the Four Corners Power Plant and Navajo Mine just outside Farmington. On Dec. 21, San Juan Citizen Alliance, among other regional and national conservation groups,...

After Barack Obama’s totally predictable cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline project (for now, at least) there was great celebration among the environmental brigade of the Social Justice Warriors. The evil pipeline was dead, along with all the jobs it would bring and the opportunity for us to capture and process much of Canada’s wealth of energy rather than it being shipped to China. (Which it will be anyway when the Northern Gateway Pipeline is complete, whether we get some of it or not.) But as with all things in the liberal enclaves of the country, one victory is...

The Sierra Club should start printing retractions (something they’ve been getting a lot of practice doing), because researchers from Yale University have concluded that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, doesn’t contaminate drinking water! “[There is] no evidence of association with deeper brines or long-range migration of these compounds to the shallow aquifers” concludes the new study, which was published in the highly prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The study, the largest of its kind, sampled 64 private water wells near fracking sites to determine if they could be contaminated by fracking fluids. “[The chemicals] are likely not a...

The host of the Jacki Daily show has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics. Most recently, Jacki served as General Counsel to an engineering firm specializing in energy, national security and environmental cleanup. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as a corporate litigator, and as an Assistant Vice President for a national bank. She entered...

In a recent lecture at Cornell University entitled "Check Your Green Privilege: It's not environmentally friendly to allow millions to die," British Member of Parliament, the Rt. Hon. Owen Paterson exposed the deadly facts behind the "green" charades perpetrated by activist groups, exemplified by Greenpeace. Mr. Paterson scathingly castigates the rich "environmental" (green) groups that are funded by wealthy elites and foundations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Working Group (EWG), Friends of the Earth, and (especially) Greenpeace, for their baseless but well-devised campaigns to manipulate consumers' fears and spread suspicion and mistrust among the public. These well-heeled...

There's much more to California's drought than lack of rain. California is currently in the grip of one of the worst droughts in state history. Gov. Jerry Brown has signed an executive order that imposes water restrictions on residents, businesses, and farms across the state. While the state is clearly experiencing this drought, the extreme weather shortages are an ongoing and man-made human tragedy—one that has been brought on by overzealous liberal environmentalists who continue to devalue the lives and livelihoods of California residents in pursuit of their own agenda. It comes down to this: which do we think is...

This week, leading environmental groups cheered when the city of Los Angeles refused to buy electricity from a proposed new power plant. "The Sierra Club is delighted to see the city do the right thing and choose not to sign a power purchase agreement with this harmful project," Sarah Friedman, a senior campaign representative with the organization, told the Los Angeles Times. The Natural Resources Defense Council said it had "significant concerns" about the project. So what are we talking about here? A new CO2-spewing coal plant? Something that runs on "extraordinarily dirty" oil from the Canadian tar sands?