Free Republic

Thanks, Environmental Protection Agency! You've required sewage treatment plants, catalytic converters on cars and other things that made the world cleaner than the world in which I grew up. Good work. Today, America's waterways are so much cleaner that I swim in New York City's once-filthy Hudson River -- right beside skyscrapers in which millions of people, uh, flush. The air we breathe is also cleaner than it's been for 60 years. In a rational world, environmental bureaucrats would now say, "Mission accomplished. We set tough standards, so we don't need to keep doing more. Stick a fork in it!...

A pair of bald eagles joined the Alcoa Davenport community in Iowa in 2009. They built their 7-foot nest on our 400-acre facility in a tree near the Mississippi River. In the spring of 2010 they fledged a pair of eaglets and later that year we installed our first Eaglecam. We recently launched a new camera with improved video streaming. Employees and the community helped name the eagle pair Liberty and Justice. In April 2011, an online poll named the single eaglet they fledged this year “Freedom”.

Consider yourself lucky. It could be much, much colder outside -- like ice age cold. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have used powerful computer climate models to show that, were it not for a rise in global temperatures that started thousands of years ago with the first clearing of European forests, we would be entering another ice age. Glaciers would be growing instead of melting. Your back would be even more sore from shoveling.

Climate change has brought new opportunities to Greenland that could secure its independence from Denmark Lasse Bjerge lives in a remote, sub-Arctic valley that is flanked by barren mountains, 20 miles by boat from the nearest town and perishing cold even on a bright September day. There, for the past two years, he has cultivated one of the world’s most improbable market gardens. As a bitter wind whistles past his red wooden cottage, Greenland’s first commercial vegetable farmer proudly lifts the synthetic sheeting protecting his crops to reveal rows of cabbages, cauliflowers and – appropriately – iceberg lettuces. This summer...

Cap and trade, drilling, no nukes, and tax credits for all At their conventions this past month, the Democrats and Republicans each laid out their differing solutions to our nation's energy and climate troubles. Energy and climate change are intertwined because burning fossil fuels that power the modern world produces carbon dioxide emissions that are warming the planet. In addition, higher oil prices have raised concerns about the nation's energy security. Combing through both platforms, it appears that the Republicans endorse a far more sweeping set of energy and climate change policies than do their Democratic counterparts. The GOP platform...

SANTA ROSA, Texas — During a recent afternoon storm, brothers Angel and Salvador Badillo sat under a tin roof with a couple of friends, sipping beers as the open drainage ditch in front of their clapboard house filled like a moat. Soon, neighbors' septic tanks could begin to overflow, creating a smelly and potentially disease-ridden mess. The homes in Grande Acres - a colonia, or slapped-together neighborhood, on low-lying land 12 miles north of the Rio Grande - were supposed to get sewer service years ago through a nearly $4 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. But the city...

The US Conference of Mayors on Monday passed a resolution calling for a phasing out of bottled water by municipalities and promoting the importance of public water supplies. (snip) The mayors, meeting in Miami, approved a resolution proposed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom along with 17 other large-city mayors to redirect taxpayer dollars from bottled water to other city services.

ANNAPOLIS (AP) — A $10 million plan to bring less-expensive high-speed Internet access to rural parts of Maryland is on hold because of a bureaucratic dispute that critics say is a case of red tape getting in the way of progress. State lawmakers voted two years ago to set aside the money to build a "spine" of fiber-optic cable in three rural regions of the state — Southern Maryland, the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland — where Internet-service providers don't always provide high-speed access. At the time, supporters said the Maryland Broadband Cooperative would bring big-city Internet access to underserved...

GRAPE growers have been warned that global warming will push the best winegrowing regions south to Tasmania and New Zealand, threatening Australia's best-loved wine regions.West Australian winemaker Peter Pratten, who has 200ha of vines in the south of the state, intends to act now to ensure the quality of his vineyards. "Global warming is very serious -- I think it is upon us," Dr Pratten said. "If we stay where we are we will have to think about warmer-climate varieties ... or else we will have to start thinking about where in Australia can we grow the cool-climate wines."As chief...

Oil Platforms May Be Used for Fish Farms Sun Apr 3,10:19 PM ET By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer NEW ORLEANS - Thousands of oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico could be converted into deep-sea fish farms raising red snapper, mahi mahi, yellow fin tuna and flounder, under a plan backed by the Bush administration. For years, marine biologists and oil companies have experimented using the giant platforms as bases for mariculture, but commercial use of the platforms as fish farms never got off the ground because of the federal government's reluctance to open up the...

<p>As you contemplate those numbers spinning by on the gas pump, here is another number to remember: 1976.</p> <p>That was the last time an oil refinery was built in the United States, thanks largely to the Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome cultivated by an environmental movement that has successfully anathematized all things chemical and carbon. There are, of course, other reasons for the latest spike in gasoline prices -- prominently including a return to robust economic growth and a desire by oil producers to protect themselves from recent declines in the dollar -- but even if oil supplies could be suddenly expanded, refiners would have a tough time churning out more gasoline.</p>

<p>The global warming controversy took a new twist this week. Global warming handwringers are now trying to make it a "jobs" issue.</p> <p>"Investing in renewable energy such as solar, wind and the use of municipal and agricultural waste for fuel would produce more American jobs than a comparable investment in the fossil energy sources in place today," a new report from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley states. The report was accompanied by a call from a coalition of environmental activist and labor groups for a 10-year, $300 billion program to increase the nation's use of renewable energies.</p>

TRE ARROW SPEAKS OUT & INFO ON DEFENSE FUND Reply to: frontline@rocketmail.com Frontline Information Service   - TRE ARROW SPEAKS OUT & INFO ON DEFENSE FUND -  03/22/04 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Tre Arrow Speaks Out TRE ARROW URGES EVERYONE TO FOCUS ON THE REAL ISSUES 19 March 2004 VICTORIA, BC -- Tre Arrow, well known forest and animal rights activist, ledge sitter, and congressional candidate, urges the media to...

LOS ANGELES Dec. 25 — A mudslide swept over a Greek Orthodox youth camp Thursday, trapping at least 15 people as heavy rains triggered flooding in areas ravaged by wildfires last month, authorities said. At least seven people were rescued from the Saint Sophia Camp in Waterman Canyon, just north of San Bernardino, and needed medical attention, authorities said. Details about the victims, the extent of their injuries and the status of the other eight people were not immediately available. Flood waters in the area were getting worse, forcing officials to pull back some emergency personnel, county fire officials said....

Green Civil War By Iain Murray Wind power may well be the least environmentally-friendly idea ever proposed by environmentalists. That certainly seems to be the verdict of those who live near proposed and actual wind farm developments in both the US and UK. Conservationists as committed as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) and British television personality Dr. David Bellamy have come out against proposed uses of the technology. As a result, a degree of civil war has broken out in the environmental movement, with accusations of "NIMBYism" (the acronym refers to an aversion to new infrastructure projects, standing for Not In...

Investors demand information on global warming By Mark Turner at the United Nations Published: November 23 2003 19:52 | Last Updated: November 23 2003 19:52 Representatives of leading US institutional investors have announced an environmental "call for action", demanding that regulators, corporate boards and Wall Street firms make provision for the disclosure of risks posed by climate change. At a meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the comptrollers of New York state and city, and the Treasurers of California, Oregon, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont and New Mexico, launched an "Investor Network on Climate Risk" on Friday, before an...

<p>SAN BERNARDINO -- The images are nearly as searing as the flames: Neighborhoods obliterated. An area larger than Sacramento County left charred and scarred. A former fireman who helped save his family's home. A fireman who gave his life for others.</p>

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - A gasoline additive once lauded for cleaning up the air is being phased out because it's also contaminating drinking water. Now its producers want Congress to protect them against what could be billions of dollars in cleanup costs.</p>

Sierra Club wins settlement from developers Land developers have agreed with the Sierra Club to pay a $1,200 air quality mitigation fee for each housing unit built in housing tract 6137. The fee will be used to offset pollution caused by the new homes. “We didn't want to file a lawsuit,” said Sierra Club spokesman Gordon Nipp. “We would much rather go through the usual citizen route, but when they don't pay attention to us, we don't have much choice. We filed the lawsuit and that gave us the leverage we needed.” Other settlements of the suit include use...

Science Steals a Base By Ronald Bailey TCS"Experimental models incorporating both anthropogenic and natural factors are consistent with the new analysis showing tropospheric warming," claims the press release heralding a new paper being published today in Science. This paper is supposed to be a knockout blow against the satellite dataset that has consistently and annoyingly (for the global warming alarmists) shown that the earth's atmosphere is NOT warming nearly as much as the computer climate models predict. The new analysis, meant to prove finally that dangerous man-made global warming is real, was done by a team led by long-time global...