Free Republic

The American Renewable Energy Day conference in Aspen didn't cite Gore by name, but one of the opening speakers on Thursday suggested that audience members adopt aggressive tactics when dealing with climate deniers. Jigar Shah, CEO of an organization called the Carbon War Room, told the audience they must “confront the liars” on climate change issues or they are “part of the problem.” Shah urged them to “make a scene in public” by confronting politicians or speakers who suggest that alternative energy isn't a viable option for handling power needs and reducing carbon emissions. ... Lester Brown...founder and president of...

Times of international turmoil are great moments for domestic governments to make important announcements they don’t want to be noticed. Especially if the announcement involves a sudden reversal in policy that could seriously embarrass the government. So Friday afternoon was an ideal time for Ontario’s Liberal government to take a big chunk of its alternative energy program and chuck it overboard. .. After years of touting wind projects as a critical piece of the alternative energy puzzle, the government let slip — very quietly — that offshore wind projects are no longer part of the game plan. Turns out there...

HARTFORD — Gov. Dannel P. Malloy this morning named Yale University professor and environmental expert Daniel C. Esty to lead his recently announced state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Esty, 51, serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Yale's Center for Business and the Environment. In 2007 and 2008, Esty served as Presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign adviser on energy and the environment. Malloy earlier this week revealed his plans to consolidate the state Department of Environmental Protection with the Department of Public Utility Control, for the new Department of Energy and Environmental...

I recieved a Propane delivery today at $4.04 a gallon. Luckily I am a Paraniod FReeper so the hit was $222 for 55 gallons Before I took precautions I used about 800 gallons a year, Heating and Cooking, this price is insane. Anyother horror stories out there.

SMO — City Manager Rod Gould has denied two applications for new flight schools at Santa Monica Airport, citing the "particularly intense environmental impacts" the schools would have had. The move went against a recommendation from Airport Director Bob Trimborn but was in keeping with guidance from the Airport Commission, which last month voted 3-1, with one abstention, to urge denial of the applications. The schools, the Flight Academy and Angel City Flyers, had sought to operate a maximum of three airplanes for flight instruction. The Flight Academy, which is based in Washington state, had applied to operate one plane,...

San Francisco's last fossil fuel power plant will start the new year by shutting down. The Potrero Hill plant, one of the dirtiest in California, will cease operations on Jan. 1, state officials are expected to announce today. The plant, operated by Houston-based GenOn Energy Inc., formerly Mirant Corp., could be fired up in the event of a dramatic power emergency before being decommissioned permanently on Feb. 28, officials said."Cross your fingers," said Yakout Mansour, president of the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the state power grid. "It would have to be something very significant for us to need...

Oops.Brought to you by the same kind of people who regulate free markets to the point where you can get detained for selling light bulbs heat balls, comes the cry for a “free market solution” on carbon emissions. These people wouldn’t know a free market if it was the only bridge across a swamp full of crocodiles. Is that a stable path; a simple choice; a tested way through the quicksand?  No No! There’s a log (it looks like a log)… “it’s natural”. (It’s two hundred million years of natural selection.) Playing with fake markets is begging to be bitten,...

We hear a lot about “vested interests” in America these days. Here in California – it is the cry of Global Warming alarmists who are opposed to proposition 23 that is to be voted on in the November election. Prop 23 will suspend a “Global Warming solutions” act that will push up energy prices and drive even more jobs out of the state during one the biggest recessions in living memory. Understandably there is a lot of opposition to the Global Warming Act and Prop 23 is proving surprisingly popular in a state that practically invented the Green movement. Two...

Los Angeles - A new LAUSD school dedicated to environmental studies is set to open in Los Angeles on Monday, despite concerns about environmental safety. The Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences is a state of the art school that took five years and 75 million dollars to make. The elementary school was named in honor of biologist Rachel Carson and former vice president turned environmentalist Al Gore, but public health advocates say Carson-Gore is an environmental mistake. Jane Williams, California Communities Against Toxics (CCAT): "This school site is horribly contaminated ... there is an operating oil well on one side...

Sestak screws up. OK, that's one of those phrases that you could copy to a clipboard from which to paste into a story for convenience sake but yesterday Pennsylvania's 7th District Congressman and Democrat nominee for U.S senate has admitted to doing so, which makes it a bit more newsworthy than normal. Joe Sestak has announced that he erred in seeking to send $350,000 in taxpayer money to the Thomas Paine Foundation, which is an organization owned by Drew Devitt aimed at promoting the cause of atheism, to design a new kind of windmill which would be built by New...

The commission appointed by President Obama to investigate the Gulf oil spill (the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling) does not include a single member with specialized knowledge of petroleum engineering. This is akin to performing a heart transplant with a surgical team that has never set foot in an operating room. Of the seven members appointed to the commission, not one is a petroleum engineer, and all have long-standing ties to the environmental movement. This is certainly the case with Frances Beinecke, Donald Boesch, Terry Garcia, and Frances Ulmer, all of whom have...

AS well-intentioned gestures go, Earth Hour is hard to beat. At 8.30pm on Saturday, March 27, nearly a billion people in more than 120 countries demonstrated their desire to do something about global warming by switching off their lights for an hour. Earth Hour is surely one of the most successful publicity stunts to be dreamed up. First organised in Sydney in 2007 by the local chapter of the WWF, its popularity and the level of participation that generates has exploded in recent years, to the point that there is barely a corner of the earth that the campaign hasn't...

Daily baths and showers polluting the environment Showers and baths are polluting water supplies partly due to growth in shampoos, gels and skin products, new research claims. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent Published: 11:15PM GMT 24 Mar 2010 Researchers have detected substances in water supplies that have come from prescription drugs and toiletries. In the past environmental concerns have focused on sewage as a source chemical pollution as it is thought antibiotics and the active ingredients of pills are flushed down the lavatory. But now the new research by the US Environment Protection Agency suggests that waste from showers and...

WASHINGTON — All Republicans except one are boycotting the start of committee debate on a bill to curb greenhouse gases in a protest that the bill's economic costs have not been fully examined. Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio attended the session to explain the GOP's argument for staying away. He said the tactic "is not a ruse" to block the bill, but concern that is widespread impact on the country has not been made clear. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the panel's chairman, argued the EPA already has provided "a full blown economic analysis" and that Majority Leader Harry...

The environmental movement, bent on regulating America under its green thumb, has such a vast array of lobbying groups, proposed measures, and specialized terminology, that it is difficult for busy Americans who are wary of this movement to stay current with the debate.   To the rescue comes Steve Milloy’s Green Hell. At 294 pages, it is not encyclopedic, but just the right length to bring readers up to date on the methodologies, motives, and fallacies of this movement, and how to combat it. Green Guilt The core environmental “danger” greens currently discuss is global warming, allegedly caused by man-made carbon...

The report alleges that Toyota exploits guest workers, mostly shipped in from China and Vietnam. According to the NLC, these workers are “stripped of their passports and often forced to work — including at subcontract plants supplying Toyota — 16 hours a day, seven days a week, while being paid less than half the legal minimum wage.” Workers are forced to live in company dormitories and deported for complaining about poor treatment, the report finds.

In Oregon, one in four people can’t find full-time jobs Here’s the thing that worries unemployed Woodstock resident George Snipes: What if things are worse, much worse, than we are being told? They are, says Andrew Sum, an economist who heads the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Sum has analyzed employment data for all 50 states, and he says that those charts provide statistical verification of what Snipes feels in his gut: Oregon’s 12.2 percent official unemployment rate is something of a red herring and far from a true indicator of the social hardship taking...

Below Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck explains the Apollo Alliance on his July 28 show. Beck mentions the Obama administration’s “stimulus” blueprint, “The New Apollo Program: Clean Energy, Good Jobs,” which you can read here.

To meet ambitious renewable energy goals, city must find a way to pay for them. Austin's electric utility could soon reverse a long-standing practice of selling wind, solar and other renewable energy only to customers who choose to buy it, four Austin City Council members and a mayoral aide said this week.