Free Republic

Climate Change: Channeling King Canute, G-8 leaders agree to wreck the world's economy, and ours, by pledging to prevent temperatures from rising more than 4 degrees by 2050. What if the Earth has other plans?Canute was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. He was The One of his time. He once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. As the story goes, he was exercising his ego when in fact he was giving his followers a dose of reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. We were...

The EPA Is Wrong False Assumptions: Proponents of cap and trade point to the low cost estimates by the EPA and CBO as a reason to pass Waxman-Markey. The EPA underestimates that the bill would cost households an additional $140 a year. Based on Consumption: The EPA's numbers are based on consumption changes, which are typically less than income changes, as families respond to income losses by saving less. Uses Discounting: Discounting is a reasonable approach for comparing costs and benefits that occur at widely different times. However, costs of climate change rarely use a discounted rate this high. Without...

WASHINGTON -- Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's choice to be his climate czarina, served until last summer as a member of a socialist organization whose mission is to enact progressive government policies, including toward environmental concerns like climate change. Browner's name and biography have been scrubbed from the Web site of Socialist International, the umbrella group for 170 "social democratic, socialist and labor parties" in 55 countries. But a photo of Browner speaking in Greece to the group's Congress on June 30 remained in the site's archives. Browner, formerly the longest serving administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, having served...

Politics: Is anyone surprised that the would-be czarina of federal climate and energy policy has ties to a socialist group? The environmental movement's goal is to afflict the economy, not comfort the ecology.Carol Browner, who'll run the new White House office of climate and energy policies, isn't new to Washington. The public will recognize her name from the years she served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton. The public, however, knows little or nothing about her work with Socialist International, a group that describes itself as a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labor parties that envisions...

Despite denials from her soon-to-be former employers, the Albright Group, former Clinton EPA head and soon-to-be climate change czar Carol Browner served as a de facto lobbyist for Dubai Ports World, owned by the United Arab Emirate of Dubai, which arranged to buy a company operating six major U.S. ports, including New York and New Jersey. Browner told the Obama transition team that she never served as a lobbyist in her time in Washington, and her employer, the Albright Group, owned by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, also said that the firm does not lobby. But in 2006, when...

Yet another Clintonite has been wheeled out of the political morgue to serve in the Obama administration. Carol Browner, a neon-green radical who headed the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993-2000, is widely rumored to be the president-elect's choice for "energy czar." But an ethical cloud still hangs over Browner's EPA legacy. It doesn't take a team of Ivy League lawyers to figure out that this is one more headache the Hope and Change crew doesn't need. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, let me dust off the cobwebs and help out all the smarty-pants vetters on the Obama...

Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs "to put nothing in writing, ever" regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner's conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner "intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards." Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions, so instructing participants in...

Czar is the perfect title for Carol Browner, the person President Obama chose to rule over climate policy. The woman runs her kingdom like an autocrat, taking no prisoners and she has a history of demanding secrecy for example.....When working for the Clinton Administration, Browner had her files erased Against a court order, As Michele Malkin reported back in January: According to testimony in a freedom of information lawsuit filed against EPA by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a Virginia-based conservative legal watchdog group, Browner commanded a computer technician on Jan. 19, 2001: “‘I would like my files deleted. I want...

Here is video of Sen. James Inhoufe talking about his plans to question EPA officials today about an EPA report done by a longtime employee which calls into question the entire basis for Global Warming hysteria. The report was suppressed by the EPA, becoming public knowledge only after the House of Representatives had already passed the Cap and Trade bill based on the assumption that the world is in peril because of Global Warming. The suppressed report finds no basis for believing the earth is warming. In fact it says it has indeed been cooling. Inhoufe is calling for an...

We wrote here about the Environmental Protection Agency's scuttling of a report by one of its own scientists that says human activity has little or nothing to do with climate change. The Obama administration, the scientist's boss explained, "has decided to move forward on endangerment"--i.e., to make the false finding that CO2 emissions endanger human health and well-being--and therefore "your comments" can only have a "negative impact on our office."

EPA fugitive who shot at officers expected to change plea A Utah fugitive critically injured March 10 during a shoot-out with law enforcement officers in a Marathon trailer park is expected to avoid a trial by pleading guilty today.Larkin Baggett, 54, formerly of Salt Lake City, was shot in the neck and buttocks after he allegedly pointed an assault rifle at a Monroe County Sheriff's Office deputy and three U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agents.Baggett was the first man shot by EPA officers in that organization's history.A change of plea hearing is scheduled today in the courtroom of U.S. Judge Michael...

As research for an upcoming column on the many drawbacks of the cap-and-trade bill now before the Senate, I spent some time speaking with Christopher C. Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Horner is author of "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed." Our discussion went on at some length and Horner made many excellent points about the hype over the threat of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. That discussion can go on forever and I can't include much of it here. But I will point to an interesting little item that's...

Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it. Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned...

This is a follow up to my post from yesterday. I have asked the question "What the government doesn't want you to know?". I have to question why we are in such a headlong rush to enact the Cap and trade legislation?

Regulation: Ignoring the first rule of holes, a bankrupt state passing out IOUs welcomes an EPA waiver allowing it to further kill its economy. Too bad the state can't stop the air pollution imported from a growing China. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday granted California its long-standing request — denied by the Bush administration — for a waiver to allow it to impose even more stringent air pollution rules than currently required by the federal government.The way is now clear for implementation of a 2002 state law requiring new cars to increase their fuel economy 40% by 2016....

The 1,400-page cap-and-trade legislation pushed through by House Democrats contains a new federal policy that residential, commercial, and government buildings be retrofitted to increase energy efficiency, leaving it up to the states to figure out exactly how to do that. This means that homeowners, for example, could be required to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes, if the cap-and-trade bill becomes law. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, directs the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop and implement a national policy for residential and commercial buildings. The...

According to a release from Senator John Thune (R-SD), he is joining Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) in calling for an investigation concerning the report casting doubt about anthropogenic global warming that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) buried before the cap and trade global warming tax vote last week. On the eve of the HR 2454 “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” vote last Friday it came to light that the EPA had in its possession a report which pointed to natural causes for planetary warming, but it refused to make that report public. What’s more, several emails regarding...

With the recent narrow passage of the controversial Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill in the House and the ongoing debate over global warming, one should expect balanced coverage of both sides of the issue. However, much of the media has neglected to report on the alleged “hush up” of an EPA research analyst whose report on global warming prompted his supervisor to warn it could have had a “very negative impact on this office.” At 8:45 a.m. EDT on the June 30 edition of "Fox and Friends," EPA Senior Operations Research Analyst Alan Carlin, told interviewer Steve Doocy that his...

Alan Carlin, the senior EPA research analyst who authored a study critical of global warming that was suppressed by agency officials, has broken his silence and spoken on Fox News about his situation. Carlin told "Fox & Friends" Steve Ducy and Gretchen Carlson that his most important conclusion in the study was that the U.S. should not rely upon recommendations of the UN in making policy decisions regarding global warming. "The most important conclusion, in my view, was that EPA needed to look at the science behind global warming and not depend upon reports issued by the United Nations, which...

As a follow up to my previous posting (Cap n Trade Bill: Where Will You Be When The Lights Go Out?), I have been reading the cap n trade bill. I know that I'm not the smartest person however I majored in Economics and I still don't understand this bill. How can an American be taxed on individual carbon usage based on some complex formula that depends on a tree being cut in a jungle in Brazil or how many trucks are on the road in India at any given time, not to mention the Chinese industrial output. This bill...

Climate Change: A switch of four Republican votes would have defeated Waxman-Markey, the Democrats' global warming legislation. But like the Clinton Btu tax, the bill could die in the Senate and turn the House over to the GOP. What were these RINOs thinking? The GOP is supposed to be the party of low taxes and free markets. Rep. Mike Castle, one of the eight offered an explanation right off of President Obama's teleprompter...Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who has senatorial ambitions to replace the choice of impeached former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sen. Roland Burris, demonstrates why GOP fortunes in the Land...

Cap and trade DOA in the Senate.

John Hinderaker of Poweline has alerted everyone to the release of the suppressed EPA Carlin/Davidson report along with incriminating emails by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  President Obama and his administration have again been appropriately exposed. Obama’s intent can no longer be in question, and his deceptive activities are instructive as to the role the United Nations will play in his plan to address the use of American wealth.Because the American news media has not properly and openly questioned Susan Rice about her deliberations with the IPCC, nor the U.S. intentions concerning proposed international “monies” related to CO2, you are obliged...

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has obtained an EPA study of the “endangerment” to human well-being ostensibly caused by carbon dioxide emissions, together with a set of EPA emails indicating that the study, which concludes that carbon dioxide is not a significant cause of climate change, was suppressed by the EPA for political reasons.

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments. On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing "an internal study on climate science which...

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages. ----snip------- Carlin's report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there's "little evidence" that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth's temperature.

By Richard Morrison Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide. The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new...

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill? This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump.Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact.

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump. Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey. The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact. It's what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security,...

If the cap and trade bill is shot down by Congress, it will hurt businesses more than it will hurt environmentalists. The plain, inescapable, fact is that Barack Obama and his adminstration plan on forcing businesses to cut their CO2 emissions. There's two ways this can happen. The easy way, through cap and trade, or the hard way, which involves the EPA laying the smack down. E&E Daily (sub.) : Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said a losing House vote does not bother him considering the Supreme Court has already granted U.S. EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases. "I had Henry...

My syndicated column below slams the EPA for suppressing inconvenient truths about Obama’s politicized global warming agenda. As I blogged early Wednesday afternoon, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released e-mails detailing how eco-bureaucrats stifled a senior researcher who challenged the agency’s reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas “public endangerment” finding. Breaking late tonight, CEI has released the draft version of the censored study that the EPA doesn’t want you to see. You can read the entire 98-page document here. Here is the preface, which begins, “We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries...

The Obama administration doesn't want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don't want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion, thousand-page "cap and trade" bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda. The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama's willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of "consensus." In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental...

It has become quite clear over the past several months that placing a cap on carbon emission--via rationing, taxing, and eliminating consumer choice--will have major implications for American families and the economy. An analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill (as reported out of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce) by The Heritage Foundation found that unemployment will increase by nearly 2 million in 2012, the first year of the program, and reach nearly 2.5 million in 2035, the last year of the analysis. Total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion. The national debt would balloon as the economy...

I've been trying to grasp for a truth that is so obvious that all of us know it. But it's not a polite truth, so we don't talk about it. Yet I think it's important to say it out loud, because it is a truth that haunts our national discourse. As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the...

Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide. The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future...

"CEI Releases Global Warming Study Censored by EPA Public Shouldn’t Be Kept in the Dark by an Agency Supposedly Committed to Transparency" by Richard Morrison June 25, 2009 Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

THE Obama administra tion doesn't want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And it doesn't want you to hear them, either. As House Democrats rush to pass a $4 trillion, thousand-page "cap and trade" bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda. The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington has obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama's willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of "consensus." In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his...

Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide. The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future...

A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2. The source, who chooses not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said that Carlin was rebuffed in his attempt to introduce scientific evidence that does not accord with the EPA's view of global warming, which largely relies on IPCC reports. The source also saw Carlin's report and said that it was 'based on 8 points of peer-reviewed, recent and relevant scientific publications' that...

Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump...As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million. Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once...

WASHINGTON – Millions of people living in nearly 600 neighborhoods across the country are breathing concentrations of toxic air pollutants that put them at a much greater risk of contracting cancer, according to new data from the Environmental Protection Agency. The levels of 80 cancer-causing substances released by automobiles, factories and other sources in these areas exceed a 100 in 1 million cancer risk. That means that if 1 million people breathed air with similar concentrations over their lifetime, about 100 additional people would be expected to develop cancer because of their exposure to the pollution. The average cancer risk...

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has obtained internal EPA e-mails that show the agency willfully and recklessly disregarded scientific data that undermined the bureaucracy’s global warming zealotry. This information is especially relevant as Congress rushes to pass the cap-and-trade nightmare on Friday. -----snip---- The email notes the quantity of peer-reviewed references in the study, and defends its inclusion of new research as well. It states Mr. Carlin’s view that “the critical attribute of good science is its correspondence to observable data rather than where it appears in the technical literature.” It goes on to point out that the new studies “explain...

Obama campaigned on it and even managed to talk about it a full week into office, issuing an executive order on January 23, 2009, promising to create "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" and "establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." As usual with the words that float so effortlessly from politicians, they were just words. Undoubtedly, they will be paraded about from time to time like a USSR military review--whenever it's convenient to do so. One very important place where transparency is being hidden behind closed doors involves the very inconvenient science behind charging the EPA...

For the last several years, I've been warning you the whole global-warming nonsense is nothing more than a huge power grab by governments around the world.

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency for the first time has declared a public health emergency in a contaminated community, targeting a Montana town Wednesday for immediate federal attention. The declaration by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson involving Libby, Mont., will not result in an evacuation, but will require an extensive cleanup and better health protections for residents with asbestos-related illnesses. -- Asbestos contamination from a now-closed vermiculite mine near Libby has been cited in the deaths of more than 200 people and illnesses of thousands more. Jackson said the public health emergency declaration was the first time the EPA has...

Environmentalists and industry representatives pleaded their case with federal regulators Tuesday over rules that would slash toxic emissions from cement kilns, the top source of mercury emissions in California. The Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed regulations for Portland cement kilns earlier this year, after more than a decade of pressure from environmental groups. The rules aim to reduce the industry's mercury emissions by an estimated 81% to 93% annually, as well as cut emissions of hydrocarbons, particulate matter and hydrochloric acid.

Confusion over classification of nanomaterials under the Reach chemicals legislation has led to two groups of companies using different criteria to submit data on carbon nanotubes to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). Currently there is so much uncertainty about dealing with nanomaterials under the Reach regulations (which came into force in 2008) that different groups of companies are forming separate data-gathering bodies, called substance information exchange forums (SIEFs), to deal with carbon nanotubes (CNTs).  One group is setting up its own SIEF for carbon nanotubes to register them as distinct chemicals with their own safety profile. Another much larger collection of CNT...

In the aftermath of last December’s the massive coal ash slurry spill in Tennessee, EPA conducted a study that identified 44 coal ash storage ponds in 26 communities it considers a high hazard. As EPA was readying the report for release, the Army Corps of Engineers sent a letter to the EPA telling them the locations of the sites should not be made public for national security reasons ... What is also unusual is a significant number of the hazard sites are most likely owned and operated by the Federal government, namely the Tennessee Valley Authority. Is this a conflict...

The Obama administration has decided to keep secret the locations of nearly four dozen coal ash storage sites that pose a threat to people living nearby. The Environmental Protection Agency classified the 44 sites as potential hazards to communities while investigating coal ash waste storage sites after a spill at a Tennessee power plant in December. The classification means the waste sites could cause death and significant property damage if an event such as a storm, a terrorist attack or a structural failure caused them to leak into surrounding communities. The sites have existed for years with little or no...