Free Republic

Venezuelans are criticizing electricity rationing that government officials began carrying out this week after the country’s electrical system continued to overload because of an ongoing heat wave. Ministries and other public institutions will now work until 1:00 p.m., reducing their workday from 8 to 6 hours. Private companies have also been required to cut their electricity intake by 10 percent. The overall goal is to achieve a 20-percent reduction of country’s power consumption in order to prevent overloading the system. "We are in the presence of a significant increase in the temperature," said Jesse Chacón, the country's Energy Minister, according...

“You know, I believe people knew this was likely in the 1970s, but enviros stopped the necessary water projects,” Glenn Reynolds wrote as an aside in September while linking to an article titled “American Southwest has 80% chance of decade-long drought this century.” Today at City Journal, Victor Davis Hanson flashes back to when California enviro-leftists began the countdown on the state’s existence: Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent...

KEENE, New Hampshire – At a country club here in the southern part of this crucial, early voting state, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie broke from some of his potential 2016 Republican presidential rivals, saying he believes in climate change and that humans have something to do with it. “I think global warming is real. I don’t think that’s deniable. And I do think human activity contributes to it,” said Christie. He added, however, that there needs to be more discussion about the degree to which humans play a role.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business advisor on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control. Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, said the real agenda was “concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook”. In a column for The Australian newspaper to coincide with a visit by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, he added that the world had been “subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years”. “It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 percent of the climate...

Environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, a vocal opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline – and any Democrats who support it – hosted a $2,700-per-person fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at his San Francisco home, riling some green activists, Politico reports. Though Clinton has avoided public comment while the Obama administration weighs the fate of the pipeline, as secretary of state, she presided over studies that said the pipeline would pose few environmental risks – and even said in 2010 the administration was "inclined" to support it. "I am not surprised that he would want to get on-board the Clinton train, but I'm...

California Gov. Jerry Brown had some sharp words for environmentalist critics of his proposed Sacramento River water tunnels. On Wednesday, Brown told critics of his $15 billion plan to “shut up, because you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” according to the AP. Brown’s office told Sacramento Bee blog Capitol Alert that the governor’s remarks were made in “jest.” But the sharp rebuke highlights the tension surrounding the pricey project, which would send water from the northern part of the state south by using a pair of underground water tunnels to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River...

Al Gore pressed Iowans on Tuesday to make climate change a major issue in the next presidential election. Since Iowa holds the first presidential primaries in the country, candidates have campaigned heavily in recent years to win the hearts and minds of the residents of the Hawkeye State.(TWEET-AT-LINK)“More and more Iowans care about the climate crisis. Iowa is a leader in renewable energy. And Iowans can exert influence in their conversations with candidates,” Gore said at Climate Reality Project′s leadership training event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The three-day event from May 5-7 is designed to bring together a global network...

Powerful winds are blowing through St. Peter’s Square, setting up the perfect storm. Indeed, the climate is drastically changing in Vatican City as the world awaits Pope Francis’ environment encyclical. Behind the scenes of St. Peter’s, forces are at play to create a very problematic document influenced, and partly written, by rabid opponents of Catholic moral teaching.. As the keynote speaker at the final Pontifical environmental conference, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said climate change is the “defining issue of our times” and that it is “important faith groups are in harmony with this issue.” Moon said he was...

Pointing approvingly to an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal by House Science Chairman Lamar Smith (R.-Texas), Senate Environment Chairman Jim Inhofe (R.-Okla.) said on the Senate floor yesterday that global warming alarmists are advancing a new religious sect. “Global warming alarmism has evolved into a religion where one is either an alarmist or a skeptic,” Inhofe said. “The modern-day religion of climate change has been very artful in establishing and controlling carefully scripted talking points intended to scare the American people under the guise of environmental protectionism,” said Inhofe. …

Significant amounts of natural gas on federal lands are being wasted, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year and adding to harmful greenhouse gas emissions, a congressional investigation has found. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office also said the Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct production inspections for hundreds of high-priority oil and gas wells—roughly 1 out of 5—to ensure full payment of royalties to the U.S. The report, obtained by The Associated Press before its public release, is the latest to highlight substantial gaps in oversight. An AP review of government records last May found the agency,...

<p>LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Gov. Rick Snyder and lawmakers will be forced to consider yet another alternative to address Michigan's deteriorating roads after voters' resounding rejection of a ballot measure that would have increased taxes to pump $1.2 billion a year more into transportation infrastructure.</p>

Journalists help promote Hollywood celebrities while condemning average Americans for causing climate change. The same media go out of their way to ignore or excuse the hypocrisy of celebrity “environmentalists” who fly their private jets around the world, rent mega-yachts and live in massive mansions. Avatar Director James Cameron warned of a future “world that’s in shambles” because of climate change, and said he believes “in ecoterrorism” yet, he owns an impressive private collection of motorcycles, cars, dirt bikes, a yacht, a helicopter, a Humvee fire truck and a $32-million submarine. ABC and CBS even praised Cameron for his submarine...

Freeman Dyson, an award-winning British scientist and retired professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, said that the science on climate change isn’t “at all clear,” and in fact, humans are actually helping the planet. […] “Well, what I would like to emphasize is that human actions have very large effects on the ecology which have nothing to do with climate. Carbon dioxide is what we’re producing in big quantities and putting into the atmosphere,” Dyson said. “It happens to be a very good fertilizer for all kinds of vegetation, good for wildlife, good for agricultural production. “So...

Changes in the Arctic Ocean are so profound that the region is entering what amounts to "a new era", according to Norwegian scientists. A switch from a permanent cover of thick ice will have far-reaching implications, they say. The Norwegian Polar Institute has been mounting an expedition to the Arctic Ocean during the year's coldest months. The director of the institute, Jan-Gunnar Wanker, said that measuring what happens in the winter was vital to improving scenarios for future climate change. "A new era has entered, we are going from old ice to young ice, thinner ice and the climate models...

To Alinsky, the world and its history were all about revolution. Saul Alinsky radicals who are all about revolutionary change ("we are the ones we've been waiting for" kind of change) have now seized control of an issue that can more quickly bring about that change – "climate disruption," as expressed in community-organizer lingo. If Alinsky were alive today, he would likely fit right in with the current activist climate scientists. Alinsky would probably see that the challenge is to convince enough of the "Have-Nots" that their privation stems not just from racism, sexism, classism, and all the other social...

BOSTON (AP) — Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Sunday for reversing his position on climate change despite the predictable political fallout that helped cost the South Carolina Republican his seat in Congress. Kennedy's grandson, Jack Schlossberg, presented the award to Inglis on Sunday at the JFK Library in Boston."My grandfather's legacy is kept alive by Bob's courageous decision to sacrifice his political career to demand action on the issue that will shape life on Earth for generations to come," said Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg.

The Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) announces today that the predicted new cold climate will soon begin to end the historic era of growth in US and global agricultural output that began after the end of World War II. Specifically, as a result of recent events on the Sun and changes in the Earth's climate, the SSRC again warns that record crop yields and volume in the US and Canadian corn, wheat, and soybean belts are about to end. The SSRC expects the first substantial damage could be observed at any time but certainly within the next ten years....

Not too long ago, the students – and more than a few of the faculty – at Swarthmore College decided that the time had come to take a stand against Big Oil, carbon or… something. Along those lines, they demanded that their school divest their endowment fund from any investments in fossil fuels. In order to make their point, they organized a sit in which lasted for the better part of a month. In the end, they declared victory when the faculty voted to support the students in this decision.

New England fishermen of important food species like cod and haddock say the looming cost of paying for at-sea monitors could put them out of business this year. Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service said the money it had been using to pay for the monitors — trained workers who collect data on fishing trips — will be needed for other obligations. That means groundfishermen who catch fish like cod, haddock and pollock in New England waters will likely have to start paying the cost around August. The new expense is coming at a...

The putative climate “debate” that has been raging for the last thirty years or so has now reached the point of duncical irrationality. (I put “debate” in scare quotes since what we are observing is not so much a debate as an ideological crusade that brooks no resistance; in effect, a political jihad against those who oppose the Warmist orthodoxy.) The upcoming Paris COP (climate treaty conference) slated for December of this year, which Obama is expected to ratify, renders the situation increasingly urgent. The world’s leading politicians, abetted by the dubious claims of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...