Free Republic

If this decision stands, every farmer in Minnesota who wants to add more cows (or other animals, presumably) to his farm will have to pay lawyers to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement that calculates the effect of the additional farm animals on the Earth’s average temperature. I can save them some money: the impact is zero, to however many decimal points you want to work it out to. Is this a big deal? It certainly is. Daley Farms has been trying since July 2017 to expand its operation. God only knows how much money it has spent already. With the...

It used to be that American politicians abided by a code of conduct when visiting other countries that included leaving politics at the water’s edge. That meant politicians didn’t go overseas and bash the president or America to foreign audiences. That was then … this is now. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traveled to Copenhagen last weekend. The freshman congresswoman from New York was invited to speak during the C40 World Mayors Summit. The summit brought together mayors from around the world to discuss climate change. Apparently AOC is an internationally recognized expert on the subject now. Since she was in town anyway,...

Going solar isn’t necessarily any protection from California’s new “planned” power outages, and local residents and businesses are enduring a lot more than just a few inconveniences. Bloomberg’s Chris Martin has a story on California’s troubles with one of my favorite headlines ever: “Californians Learning That Solar Panels Don't Work in Blackouts.” Apparently, many of California’s would-be Earth-savers had no idea that just putting solar panels on their roofs doesn’t mean they’ll have power when PG&E switches it off. As Martin explains:

CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter brought on "Legendary Journalist" Sam Donaldson to unload the usual liberal mantras on Sunday. That's how CNN tagged Sam -- "Legendary Journalist" -- not only on screen, but even in the CNN transcript. Donaldson raised eyebrows much smaller than his by claiming that Trump fans are "fixated" on narrowing the country: "They want to return this country to the white Christian country that they believe it should be again. They don't want the diversity." DONALDSON: I'm telling you something, if public opinion is strongly for the impeachment and the conviction of President Trump, he...

Economist Paul Krugman, the longtime defender of global free trade and a member of the failed “Never Trump” movement, now admits that globalization has failed American workers. In a column for Bloomberg titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” Krugman admits that the economic consensus for free trade that has prevailed for decades has failed to recognize how globalization has skyrocketed inequality for America’s working and middle class workers. Krugman, though, writes that he and his fellow free trade economists “had no way to know” that globalization of the American economy or a surge in trade deficits “were...

... California residents have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable new reality: Large swaths of the state—by itself the fifth-largest economy in the world, and home to the globe’s most technologically advanced companies—may be subject to the sort of abrupt blackouts normally associated with underdeveloped countries. The state’s three big investor-owned utilities now have regulatory permission to cut off power to parts of their service territories during strong winds to reduce the risk of their electric lines causing wildfires, after at least 21 blazes linked to utility equipment killed more than 100 people and burned tens of thousands of homes in...

Mayors from 50 world cities flew to Denmark last week to discuss ways to address the “global climate emergency,” pledging to “do something about it” before they headed homewards again on Sunday. Telling adults to eat less than 300 grams of red meat – about the equivalent of two fillet steaks – a week was one initiative they could agree on.

Will a hyperloop work in Pennsylvania? That’s the question officials from legislative and executive branches, statewide agencies, organizations and departments, as well as a handful of private business leaders are trying to answer. Fifty people, invited to a workshop at Dixon University in Harrisburg on Wednesday, met to talk about the possibility of building a hyperloop system in the commonwealth. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has until April 2020 to complete a $2 million state-legislative commissioned study on its viability. Media wasn’t permitted to attend the invitation-only meeting. According to the turnpike’s research, a hyperloop combines a magnetic levitation train and...

Natural gas developers in Pennsylvania are hoping a recent water quality report by the Susquehanna River Basin Commission could squelch plans for a fracking ban that’s currently being considered by the neighboring Delaware River Basin Commission. The SRBC’s Remote Water Quality Monitoring Network report, which was released last month, revealed that water quality scores at 14 of the 16 stations in the basin were in the “good” or “excellent” categories According to a fact sheet from the Susquehanna commission, the monitoring stations are located in areas where active drilling takes place, as well as areas free of development, in order...

There are a number of things that climate activists don’t want the rest of us to do, like eating meat and flying on airplanes. They seem to have decided that discouraging flying is a better bet than compulsory vegetarianism, so several European countries are moving in that direction. In Sweden, the government “is considering making it mandatory for travel companies to declare the climate impact of their long-haul trips.” The companies should inform customers of the climate impact of long-haul trips when advertising or selling tickets, the government said on Friday.

Concerned that rising waves will flood runways and buildings in the coming years, officials at San Francisco International Airport are moving ahead with a $587 million plan to build a major new sea wall around the entire airport. The plan, the latest example of the growing cost of climate change in California, involves driving steel pilings - sheets with interlocking edges - into the mud and also constructing concrete walls in some places around all of the airport’s 10-mile perimeter. “This is something we’ve been looking at for many years,” said Doug Yakel, a spokesman for the airport. “What’s changed...

Iran announced on Sunday that it has discovered a new natural gas reserve with the capacity to produce nearly 400 million barrels of gas condensate, which could generate a total of $40 billion. The natural gas field, named Eram, is located near the Persian Gulf in the southwestern province of Fars and holds about 19 trillion cubic feet of gas, National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Deputy Managing Director Reza Dehghan said at a press conference. "We have the potential to identify more undiscovered oil and gas reserves (in the country) by using geophysical exploration techniques and discovery drilling and will...

The controversial television host, who revealed earlier today that he’ll be debating whether or not he should be fired from his position on tomorrow’s show, has asked his 6.8million Twitter fanbase to show their support by adding their signatures to a Change.org appeal. ‘BREAKING: There is now a rival petition to save me on @GMB,’ Piers wrote. ‘Thank you Margaret Lowry! Please sign it if you wish to repel the snivelling snowflakes & keep me in my job.’ In another post, he added: ‘Spread the word, my people… Sign, RT, and save me as your voice against the shriekingly illiberal...

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, buoyed by its popular conservative platform and generous social spending, was widely expected to win Sunday’s election, which is regarded as one of the country’s most momentous since the fall of communism 30 years ago. More than 30 million voters were choosing lawmakers in the 460-seat lower house of parliament, the Sejm, and in the 100-seat Senate. Law and Justice is the first party since the fall of communism to break with the austerity of previous governments, whose free-market policies took a moribund communist economy and transformed it into one of Europe's most dynamic.

The Queen and Prince Charles could make more than £100million a year from the huge expansion of offshore windfarms – thanks to a change in the way that the monarchy is funded. The green energy earnings of the Royal Family are being significantly boosted by an auction, which formally began last week, for the biggest offshore windpower development in the world. If they were still being paid by the long-established Civil List, the Royals would not have benefited. ... Prince Charles is a vociferous campaigner for renewable energy sources but is opposed to turbines being erected on land – particularly...

As poor as CNN’s ratings are in the United States, a rational person would conclude that, at some point, the executives who run the place would figure out what they’re doing wrong and fix it so that they could attract more viewers. But CNN isn’t run by rational people. In fact, we believe everyone who works there is certifiably out of their minds. They’d have to be in order to come up with some of the dumbest, tone-deaf, inappropriate, uninteresting, and pointless BS they put on the air. Like holding a “town hall” meeting with a gay man, hosted by...

When Democrats say America must “do something” about global warming, they never fully explain what that “something” is. Instead, they talk in nebulous terms about “cutting back” on the use of fossil fuels. There’s a reason they obfuscate. If voters find out what they have in mind, they’ll be routed in 2020, and they know it. Having embraced the extreme “do something” plan known as the Green New Deal, Democrats have an nasty surprise in store for voters who haven’t looked beneath the lipstick and mascara that’s being troweled on in pancake-thick layers to conceal the linchpin of their plan...

Among hundreds of groups the company has listed on its website as beneficiaries of its political giving are more than a dozen organisations that have campaigned against climate legislation, questioned the need for action, or actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections. The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that was instrumental in convincing the Trump administration to abandon the Paris agreement and has criticised the White House for not dismantling more environmental rules. Google said it was disappointed by the US decision to abandon the global climate deal, but has continued to support...

Billionaire Tom Steyer and his wife Kathryn Taylor own an 1,800-acre ranch in California called TomKat Ranch. Like everything Steyer spends his money on, the ranch is intended to change the world. In this case he wants to demonstrate that “regenerative agriculture” can be just as profitable as the factory farming that Steyer believes is destroying the planet. But according to Politico Magazine, Steyer’s experimental ranch isn’t producing all of the desired results thus far:

Now the Governor has come up with a unique plan to end the stalemate. Using an obscure state law regulating utility companies through the power of the Public Service Commission, Andrew Cuomo (who helped kill the pipeline project) is simply ordering the utility to hook up the gas lines anyway. But there isn’t enough natural gas in the existing pipeline to keep adding more service points. If they continue to hook up new customers, you’re going to see the backpressure in the lines start dropping during peak demand hours. If you look at the configuration of a typical gas furnace...