Free Republic

We, perhaps, will never be able to reckon the entire extent to which the Environmentally ill and the EPA have caused the loss of life, limb, and monetary resources due to their obsessive love for Gaia, their Mother Earth. Frankly, I think they have done more harm to their Ma, than we could ever guess.New Mexico, as well as other western states, have been the latest victims of an out of control environmental policy as directed by out of control Democrats, especially in the Obama administration as of late. As Spain goes broke from going solar, as Obama works toward...

The Obama administration backtracked Wednesday and announced it will not declare the dunes sagebrush lizard an endangered species, saying voluntary efforts by New Mexico and Texas have headed off the need for the federal government to step in. The listing of the lizard as endangered become a major test case of the Endangered Species Act as energy companies and local residents battled the federal government for 18 months, declaring victory after the government said it wouldn’t invoke the act. Environmental groups criticized the move, saying the Interior Department ignored the science that shows the lizard’s habitat is threatened — which...

When Sacramento officials proposed putting solar panels on an old city landfill two years ago, they did so with the intention of providing clean energy to thousands of homes. However, in a twist that surprised many at City Hall, the people who might be expected to celebrate such a green venture ended up being the plan's loudest critics. Environmentalists and wildlife advocates argued that the field in Sutter's Landing Park – sitting atop a mound of buried trash that boasts majestic views of the downtown skyline – is a key feeding ground for the threatened Swainson's hawk. The hawks, a...

The Environmental Protection Agency held 12 hours of stacked hearings in Washington, D.C. and Chicago on Thursday in favor of a regulation that analysts have concluded would kill the building of new conventional coal plants in the U.S. Among the participants scheduled to testify in consecutive five minute blocks throughout the day were multiple representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and environmental activists from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace. The proposed rule, reported by The Washington Post in March, limits the amount of greenhouse gases emitted...

The stunning repudiation of Sen. Richard Lugar's, R-Ind., bid for a seventh term has sent shock waves through Washington's internationalist lobby. A former Rhodes Scholar, Lugar has spent his career promoting a globalist agenda, since he succeeded the late Jesse Helms as the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One day after Indiana Republicans handed Lugar his walking papers, an outfit called the Atlantic Council held a forum to promote the discredited Law of the Sea Treaty. As former Republican U.S. Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Warner beamed their approval, Obama's Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared that...

A sharp-eyed Power Line reader directed us to this C-SPAN video featuring Van Jones, President Obama’s short-lived “green jobs” czar, admitting around the 19:14 mark what is plain to anyone who pays attention, namely, that the environmental movement is basically an adjunct of the Democratic Party:

Deep-pocketed environmental groups are collecting millions of dollars from the federal agencies they regularly sue under a little-known federal law, and the government is not even keeping track of the payouts, according to two new studies. Under the Equal Access to Justice Act, or EAJA — which was signed into law by President Carter in 1980 to help the little guy stand up to federal agencies — litigants with modest means who successfully show government agencies wronged them can get their legal fees back from the taxpayer. But the act also covers 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including environmental groups that aggressively sue...

My apologies to the memories of the late Richard Llewellyn and late John Ford; but I just had to borrow their title for this post. This paragraph from a 2010 Telegraph article really says it all… Its 500,000 photovoltaic panels will generate 30 megawatts of electricity, enough, in the popular measurement, to power 9,000 homes. It is costing about $250 million to build, significantly less than a gas, coal or nuclear power station, which can easily exceed $1 billion. And it represents a sea-change in America’s energy business.America has been notoriously devoted to hydrocarbon fuels. Big Oil, Big Coal and...

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted. More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well. Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the...

Cove Point in Southern Maryland has become the latest flash point in the fight between the fossil fuels industry and its longtime foes in the environmental movement. Citing a unique Carter-era agreement, the Sierra Club says it will veto plans by energy giant Dominion to build the first natural gas liquefaction and export facility on the East Coast, a site that would handle booming supplies from the Marcellus Shale and other vast deposits for shipment to Asia and elsewhere. The 1970s legal settlement, the Sierra Club argues, gives it the authority to halt any project that would “change the footprint”...

When Concord’s Town Meeting voted to ban the sale of bottled water Wednesday night, one of the ban’s supporters told her fellow Condordians, “We’re not gonna solve all the problems of the world, but this is our one chance to make a really huge statement to the world.” And she’s right, they made a huge statement: “Hello, World! If you’re looking for the dumbest voters in the United States of America, you found us!” The town of Concord — not state, county or even city — is waging war on the evil of convenient, easily-portable water by outlawing something many...

Vandals are responsible for at least $300,000 in damage at a property owned by Chesapeake Energy in Bradford County, according to state police. Troopers said someone sliced cuts in a polyethylene liner of a water holding tank sometime over the weekend at a Chesapeake facility near Towanda. There was no water in the holding tank at the time. Anyone with information about the vandalism is asked to call state police at Towanda at 570-265-2186

........."If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then theWarmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then theWarmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future. It’s an exaggeration, but that’s what debates over the proper role of man tend to become. We don’t fight wars over temperature gradients. The passions...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says new rules to manage nearly 200 million acres of national forests will protect watersheds and wildlife while promoting uses ranging from recreation to logging. The new rules, to replace guidelines thrown out by a federal court in 2009, are set to take effect in early March. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the rule change on Thursday. Vilsack said in an interview that the rules reflect more than 300,000 comments received since a draft plan was released last year. The new rules strengthen a requirement that decisions be based on the best available science...

It’s been a few days since our last Global Warming Quote of the Day, and because our readers probably have yearned for another, we bring you without further ado, today’s Global Warming Quote of the Day. “I don’t pursue the electrification of the automobile out of any fear I might have of planetary meltdown. . .

The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) left the BlueGreen Alliance on Friday, citing a disagreement with the group’s members over the Keystone XL pipeline. LIUNA, a vocal Keystone supporter, took aim at other unions for opposing the project. “We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women,” LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan said in a statement. The BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions, confirmed LIUNA’s exit Friday afternoon. “The...

A review of Love Your Monsters, a collection of essays on a new kind of environmentalism. Environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus famously proclaimed The Death of Environmentalism in 2004. Now they're back with an ambitious new collection of essays titled Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Their goal is to dismantle the neo-Malthusian environmentalism of sacrifice and collapse and replace it with a new environmentalism that celebrates human creativity and technological abundance. Hooray! In their introductory essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus make the case that technological progress and economic growth is the road to salvation, not the highway to...

I confess I am not a zealous football fan, and until a month ago, I hoped Tim Tebow would don a Colorado Rockies uniform so I could get really excited about him. But like the other five million residents of Colorado, I have come to love the amazing Broncos quarterback who does not hide his evangelical Christian faith. According to a poll by a national sports magazine, Tebow is today the most popular American athlete, ahead of Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning, and (no surprise here) Tom Brady. Tim Tebow has made believers out of millions in more ways...

Sir Fred Hoyle Vindicated (Via Dr. Benny Peiser of the GWPF) According to new research to be published in Nature Geoscience  (embargoed until 1800 GMT/10AM PST, Sunday 8 January 2012), the next ice age could set in any time this millennium where it not for increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are preventing such a global disaster from occurring. The new research confirms the theory developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in the 1990s that without increased levels of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere ‘the drift into new ice-age conditions would be inevitable.’Hoyle and Wickramasinghe...

The recent killing of an aggressive Mexican gray wolf by federal agents at a ranch near Winston could lead to a reassessment of the already struggling recovery effort for that species. The wolf was reportedly shot by agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division on Dec. 14, after it paced across the porch and gazed through the window of John and Crystal Diamond’s Beaverhead Ranch home. The Diamond residence is located in Catron County, although near enough to Sierra County to be in the Winston mailing area. The wolf was killed just weeks after the Arizona Game...