Free Republic

President Obama has opposed any expanded oil drilling off American shores largely on environmental grounds, turning a deaf ear to conservative cries of "Drill, Baby, Drill." But now Obama may start hearing cries of "foul" after the U.S. Export-Import Bank promised Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil company, $2 billion in loan guarantees to help finance lucrative drilling off the shores of Rio De Janeiro. Some see a contradiction in an executive branch agency, independent but with board members appointed by the president, facilitating abroad the very kind of energy exploration Obama opposes domestically.

And yet Dems block offshore oil production in the U.S. Two pieces of information here. Connect the dots: 1. The Obama Administration is offering billions in loans for oil drilling off the coast of Brazil. 2. George Soros, the Dems top money man has a huge financial stake in the offshore drilling company. Obama Underwrites Offshore DrillingToo bad it's not in U.S. watersWall Street Journal AUGUST 18, 2009 You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil. The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance...

Chuck DeVore discusses the hypocrisy of the Obama administration on offshore drilling http://chuckdevore.com/ - The Obama administration recently lent $2 billion to Brazil to help in their off-shore drilling efforts ignoring the revenue potential here in the US. Chuck DeVore describes the details behind this pathetic decision. VIDEO

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal broke a story regarding Americans funding off-shore drilling…in Brazil. According to the paper, the United States is loaning Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, $2 billion in the form of either a direct loan or loan guarantees. Even more bizarre, we obviously don’t have $2 billion sitting around; we are taking out a loan to make a loan, something similar to speculators and day-traders who put their house at risk to borrow to play the stock market. The implications here are staggering. First, there is the environmental implications. Aren’t we arguing over cap-and-trade because we are...

Former United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged the world's richest nations to take the lead in tackling the impact of global warming on developing countries. Annan said attempts to forge a global agreement on climate change by the end of the year should focus on the "overwhelming destruction that climate change is causing and will continue to cause" on the world's 50 poorest nations. Yet the least developed countries account for just one percent of greenhouse gases, according to a recent report by Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum. "It is this injustice -- as well as the urgency and...

The Prime Minister last night saw off a concerted attempt to make him quit by promising to change his leadership style. In an unprecedented humiliation for a serving Premier, several former ministers demanded his head at a make-or-break meeting of Labour MPs. They said Gordon Brown was leading the party to disaster after it suffered its worst poll results since 1910, gaining just 15 per cent of the vote in the European elections. But former Labour leader Lord Kinnock rode to the Prime Minister's rescue, telling MPs that disunity would cost the party the next General Election. The majority of...

(CNSNews.com) - President Obama has asked Congress to authorize $100 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help create a $500 billion global bailout fund. If passed by both the Senate and the House, the bill would allow the IMF to borrow up to $100 billion from the U.S. and increase the U.S. fiscal contribution to the IMF by $8 billion. “It’s a new appropriation,” Rob Blumenthal of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, the committee that drafted the bill, told CNSNews.com. But the move is questioned by some lawmakers who are skeptical about lending money when the...

WASHINGTON — The debate on global warming and energy policy accelerated on Tuesday as two senior House Democrats unveiled a far-reaching bill to cap heat-trapping gases and move the country quickly from dependence on coal and oil. But the bill leaves crucial questions unanswered and as of now has no Republican support. For those reasons, it marks the beginning, not the end, of debate in the current Congress on how to deal with two of President Obama’s top priorities, climate change and energy. The draft measure, written by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts,...

The joint media availability in the White House Rose Garden was dropped Monday because the nation's capital was blanketed in snow, but administration officials didn't explain why the event was not moved inside, The Times of London reported Tuesday.

Gordon Brown will seek to make common cause with President Obama next week over the best way to take the world out of recession. The Prime Minister aims to use a two-day trip to Washington to bond with the US President over the issue on which Mr Brown has staked his damaged political reputation: the massive state-funded stimulus packages to the world’s stricken economies. One Downing Street aide described their White House meeting as an attempt to present a united front against the “forces of global conservatism”. Mr Brown’s trip will include a rare address to a joint session of...

Any doubts about just how serious the Obama administration would treat global warming were obliterated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named Todd Stern Climate Envoy for the State Department. In the June 2007 issue of the American Interest, Washington lawyer Todd Stern and think tank executive William Antholis wrote a memo to the next president. Addressed from the "United States Department of Brainstorms" to "The 44th President of the United States," the action memorandum laid out the case for "creating the E-8" -- a novel international group uniting leading developed nations and developing ones for an annual gathering focused...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday appointed a special envoy for climate change, vowing that the Obama administration would restore U.S. credentials and leadership in shaping environmental policy. Pledging that the United States would play a primary role in international efforts to stem global warming, Clinton named Todd Stern, a former White House assistant who was the chief U.S. negotiator at the Kyoto Protocol talks in her husband's administration, to the post. "American leadership is essential to meeting the challenges of the 21st century, and chief among those is the complex, urgent and global threat of climate change,"...

That didn’t take long. The big ruse during the transition was that so many of Barack Obama’s appointments were not as far left as he. This was supposed to prove that those of us who feared he might lurch left of left once in office were hysterical idiots. Well, this idiot likes to get his savant on and explain how things really are. There are just enough radical left components to President Obama’s vision for America to drag us so far that we’ll end up standing just to the left of Denmark in the New World Order class photo. Climate...

LONDON (AFP) — Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday the financial crisis must not be an excuse to retreat into protectionism and instead be viewed as the "difficult birth-pangs of a new global order". In a speech, he will urge countries to avoid "muddling through as pessimists" and "make the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting the new rules for this new global order", according to his office. Official data confirmed Friday that Britain is in recession. Days earlier, the government unveiled a new package of measures to help the flow of credit in the economy, but Brown...

LONDON (Reuters) - A new advisory firm launched on Monday seeks to boost carbon emissions trading in sub-Saharan Africa and raise the continent's lagging profile in the $120 billion global carbon market. CarbonStream Africa, a joint venture between South African state-owned CEF Carbon SA (Pty) and Nordic company GreenStream Network Plc, offers advisory services for firms seeking to trade greenhouse gas offsets in Africa under the Kyoto Protocol. "Africa is really lagging behind, but I really believe it has the strongest potential," said Deven Pillay, CEO of CEF's carbon trading arm and chairman of CarbonStream Africa. "It's where we need...

Change we can all believe in? How about the same song and dance, but just a different day? In opening remarks at her confirmation hearing on Jan. 13, President-elect Barack Obama’s Secretary of State designate Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations committee she would use the office to shape foreign policy that would fight climate change “You Mr. Chairman [Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.] were among the very first in a growing chorus from both parties to recognize that climate change is an unambiguous security threat,” Clinton said. “At the extreme it threatens our very existence. But well before that...

(CNN) — Senate Foreign Relations Committee [chairman] John Kerry expects a "fair and expeditious" hearing for the nomination of Hillary Clinton to secretary of state, a Kerry spokesman told CNN. Frederick Jones, director of communications for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the financial information disclosed by Clinton and her husband has not highlighted any problems, though there are some areas where "additional clarification is needed."

COPENHAGEN (AFP) – The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming. "Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a...

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...

I as I write this, I look outside and think where are the man-made global warming theorists right now? Are they sitting in some cozy location thinking of ways to cover their butts on new data that contradicts the theory that oceans will rise, the gates of weather hell will be unleashed and we will all be wearing some triple numbered SPF lotion? What is interesting is a new study that came out and was published in Science on January 2nd, 2009, has not made the rounds in the media. The meat of the study: A paper published by Science...

How does $8-a-gallon gas sound? Few Americans would want to see that happen. Unfortunately, President-elect Barack Obama’s choices for the government’s two highest energy posts have expressed a surprising level of comfort with sky-high gas prices. As if that weren’t bad enough, the incoming Obama administration and new Congress have suggested that they might reverse the pro-domestic oil drilling measures enacted since last summer. It is starting to look as though the change coming to Washington will bring bad news at the pump in the years ahead. As gas prices topped $4 a gallon last July, President George W. Bush...

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. -- George Santayana Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical. -- Friedrich NietzscheMillions of gullible world citizens have surrendered all sanity and skepticism to worship at Reverend Albert Gore's altar to Gaia. Meanwhile, here are quotes from some of the world's leading scientists to remind us that the science is not "settled," nor is there a consensus. Both very unscientific terms, by the way: “I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” -...

...Physicist John Holdren, who received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1970, spent his early years working in magnetic fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before apparently being hit by a piece of the sky while at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1996, he has spent his time as an activist professor of environmental policy at both UC, Berkely, and Harvard (partially funded by the Teresa and John Heinz Foundation), advocating for radical action against CO2 emissions and calling for a vast redistribution of global wealth.

As reported in the August 2007 issue of Foundation Watch ("Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade: The Money and Connections Behind It," by Deborah Corey Barnes), with help from friends at Goldman Sachs, including Hank Paulson, the investment bank’s former CEO who is now the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Gore has created a web of organizations to promote the so-called climate crisis.

Global governance here we come! For more than 20 years, the politically correct liberal elitists have ridiculed the "black helicopter crowd" whenever the words "world government" were uttered. Global governance, however, is a perfectly acceptable term the U.N. says is somehow different from world government. According to the U.N., "Governance is not government – it is the framework of rules, institutions and practices that set limits on the behavior of individuals, organizations and companies" (UNDP Human Development Report, 1999, page 34). Any institution that has the power to issue rules and that limits the behavior of individuals, organizations and companies...

Al Gore has a competitor for title of America's climate crusader. His name is Barack Obama, and of all his immediate foreign policy changes none will mark as big a shift from the Bush administration as his approach to cutting carbon emissions, the leading cause of global warming. "President Obama will be like night and day compared to President Bush," Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told reporters this week at U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Poznan, Poland.

Barack Obama doesn't have a mandate for his global warming policies. He doesn't even have a mandate from his most fervent supporters.Last month, President-elect Obama promised to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 — approximately a 16% cut — and then to cut them an additional 80% by 2050. That's a 68% cut from today's levels and would mean trimming U.S. carbon emissions to roughly where they were in 1905. Think about 1905 for a minute. There were just 77,988 registered vehicles in the U.S., compared to over 250 million today — or just one vehicle...

The husband of Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's presumed pick for a new White House energy adviser post, has lobbied on energy and environmental issues, with clients including Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Keyspan Energy. Ms. Browner is married to former New York Rep. Tom Downey, who founded the Downey McGrath Group Inc. in 1993. The two wed in June 2007. Ms. Browner, a principal at The Albright Group LLC, a consulting firm headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton. In the Obama White House, she is expected to...

Everyone on the planet could get identical greenhouse-gas emission rights as part of a drive to halve emissions by 2050, according to a study by Chinese scientists. The work was presented on the sidelines of a UN conference on fighting global warming that is currently taking place in Poznan, Poland. It would force nations such as the US, which have used the most fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution to buy emission rights from poor nations. "Developed countries [should] take the lead in reducing emissions," said Su Wei, head of climate change at China's National Development and Reform Commission. The...

Poor nations to get funds to fight climate change Negotiators at a U.N. climate conference broke through red tape and freed up millions of dollars Friday to help poor countries adapt to increasingly severe droughts, floods and other effects of global warming. "This could be the one thing to come out of Poznan," said Kit Vaughan of WWF-Britain. The decision in the final hours of the two-week conference could begin to release some $60 million (euro45 million) within months, according to delegates and environmentalists following the closed-door talks. "This is an important step," said delegate Mozaharul Alam of Bangladesh.

After the selection of a largely centrist economic team, liberals have been asking when President-elect Obama would give them a seat at the table. Well, now we know, and Americans should strap themselves in. Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters. It's striking that the moderate in this bunch may be Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped as Energy Secretary. Though a political unknown, Mr. Chu is the respected director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the...

It's been a while since we have agitated all you global warmers out there. In case you all didn't know, the UN is having a little climate conference in Poland right now. And an Associated Press report from Poland says, "Scientists studying the changing nature of the Earth's climate say they have completed one crucial task -- proving beyond a doubt that global warming is real. Now they have to figure out just what to do about it." Aren't you thrilled? The UN has figured it out! The debate is over! And right now more than 10,000 UN delegates and...

Shadow World:  Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical Islam By Robert Chandler Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008 622 pp., $29.95 The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is viewed by the West as the end of the Cold War and the death knell for Communism. In reality, Communists continued to push for the same ultimate goal -- creating a socialist world order -- but their violent Marxist-Leninist revolutionary tactics were supplanted by an insidious cultural Marxism. Today, that push has evolved into a Moscow-led,  global strategic quadrangle consisting of Russia, China, Iran and a collection of Latin...

"With grim economic news coming from many directions, it's easy to get discouraged about our ability to repair the damage of years of failed economic policies. And yet, there are pragmatic solutions to our biggest challenges, including ways to restore health care and retirement security, to create family-supporting jobs, and to reestablish a leadership role in the global economy. Collaborating with some of the nation's top progressive thinkers, EPI researchers have been exploring and refining solutions for the better part of two years. Now, just in time for national debates on economic direction, EPI has compiled the best of these...

Class action lawsuit against world leaders for allowing global warming being mulled at the International Criminal Court in the Hague __ A climate activist in Boston is currently mulling creating a lawsuit in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, the Netherlands, asking for US$1 billion dollars in damages on behalf of future generations of human beings on Earth. Asking to remain anonymous for now, the green activisti says he is mulling the lawsuit with the help of a team of pro bono international lawyers to sue -- according to the proposed lawsuit's language -- "all world leaders for...

Embracing Earth Charter key to environmental salvation Author and U of A professor Colin Soskolne says humans need to smarten up. March 7, 2008 - Edmonton -- Human beings, laments Colin Soskolne, are a "seriously dumb species." Just what kind of defect drives us to destroy the very ecosystems that provide us with sustenance? Why do we turn away from mounting, irrefutable evidence that we are sabotaging our very existence?Such questions are asked in a new collection of essays, called Sustaining Life on Earth: Environmental and Human Health through Global Governance, edited by Soskolne, on the environment and human health."Our...

This act which just passed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday would commit the next president of the United States -- oh, my gosh, that may be Obama, what a coincidence. It would commit him to working towards the worldwide poverty goals set by the United Nations millennium declaration. These goals may cost America an estimated $845 billion, while making us subservient to a whole array of U.N. treaties and resolutions like the Kyoto Protocol. CLIFF KINCAID, ACCURACY IN MEDIA: That`s right. I found out about it a couple of days ago when it was really secretly put on...

A nice-sounding bill called the "Global Poverty Act," sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations. Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he is trying to rush Obama's...

Mark Malloch Brown hadn't even ordered his ermine before he became the most contentious appointment to Gordon Brown's Government of all the talents. While the aid agencies and liberals were still toasting the arrival of "Saint Mark" to Whitehall, the neo-cons on both sides of the Atlantic were throwing darts at photographs of their devil. The former deputy secretary general to the UN divides opinion between those who see him as the great hope for Africa and a principled opponent of the war in Iraq, and those who believe that he is an anti-American egotist who defended Kofi Annan over...

Gordon Brown returned to Downing Street from Buckingham Palace as Britain's new Prime Minister and declared: "I will try my utmost." tanding outside No 10 with his wife Sarah, he promised to be "strong and steadfast" and to govern beyond narrow political interests. Mr Brown told reporters: "This will be a new Government with new priorities. "At all times I will be strong in purpose, steadfast in will, resolute in action in the service of what matters to the British people." The 56-year-old said he would try to meet "the concerns and aspirations of our whole country". Mr Brown promised...

ALMOST three quarters of people believe global warming is a 'natural occurrence' and not a result of carbon emissions, a survey claimed today.

What should conservatives do about global warming? Jim Manzi suggests in his June 25 National Review cover story (“Game Plan”) that conservatives embrace junk science and “manage” global climate change so that they can “peel off” 1 percent of the votes from the “opposing coalition” in some future presidential election. Manzi’s is a recipe for social, political and economic disaster – not just for conservatives, but for everyone, with the possible exception of the misanthropic, back-to-nature socialists among us. "It is no longer possible, scientifically or politically, to deny that human activities have very likely increased global temperatures…,” intones Manzi,...

By Tom DeWeese June 13, 2007 American Policy Center Global warming alarmists are a clever bunch. They have very carefully changed the issue from "global warming" to "climate change." Now any change in weather, be it mild winters or cool summers can be attributed to "climate change." Whatever the weather, the news is very bad. One claim threatens massive storms thrashing our communities. Such a threat was an easy sell in 2005 as Katrina was blamed for nearly destroying New Orleans in a hurricane season that seemed without end. Surely it could not be denied that climate change Armageddon was...

MR. GRIFFIN: I have no doubt that global -- that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does...

This video has strong language. Be advised. It captures an Al Gore supporter taking a sign from the FreedomWorks Panda and tearing it up. He then littered the sidewalk and told the film maker, “F!@# yourself.” The Panda's sign read, "Stop Pandering to Radical Environmentalists." Here is the video.

A capacity crowd of 1,500 people jammed into Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University last night for Al Gore's speech and book-signing. But the numbers don't matter: Even if Gore were speaking before a sellout crowd at Verizon Center, he would still be the smartest guy in the room. He reminded his listeners of this repeatedly last night. Click here for the rest

EU, Asia Set 2009 Climate Pact DeadlineHAMBURG, Germany (Map, News) - European and Asian foreign ministers agreed to set a 2009 deadline to complete negotiations on a new international climate change pact to limit greenhouse gases, diplomats said Tuesday. Under the agreement, which came during two-day talks here, Asian nations - including China and India - will not have to adhere to binding targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, ministers outlined the responsibilities of richer and poorer nations in combatting climate change, the diplomats said on condition of anonymity.

Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents Peter Staudenmaier "We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into...

Oddly, Bella Pelosi's consiglieres in the Drive-By Media forgot to mention that it was a COLD day in Ilulissat, Greenland when Her Majesty stayed overnight there on Saturday, "observing the global warming". Actually, it was a pretty cold day for May 26 in that part of Greenland ANY year. But I guess it will be a cold day when the MSM actually shares with the peasantry any facts that might throw a monkeywrench in the agenda... May 26 Temperatures for Ilulissat, Greenland high low year 36 30 2007 42 37 2006 35 31 2005 59 41 2004 39 28 2003...

Whether or not blind faith in man-made, catastrophic global warming has become a new religion, many of its adherents, ironically, embrace it with the same type of unquestioning zeal they sloppily attribute to and summarily condemn in Christians. Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after leading a congressional delegation to Greenland, declared that she and her fellow travelers saw "firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality, there is just no denying it." Pelosi is also sure the "global warming" is caused by human beings. She said, "It wasn't caused by the people of Greenland; it was caused by...