Free Republic

Joe Biden and other Green New Deal advocates continue to push for electric vehicles but without the necessary domestic supply of batteries. For now, the United States is dependent on the Chinese Communist Party for the necessary critical minerals and other elements needed to build them. The two most essential and expensive components of lithium-ion batteries, cathodes and anodes, are almost exclusively produced in China. According to Axios, the U.S. is behind Europe and China in its battery capabilities: Demand for batteries will skyrocket over the coming decades. If the U.S. wants to control its own energy destiny, it’ll need...

A blaze at a massive Tesla battery site in Australia that started three days ago was brought under control on Monday, firefighters said. Emergency services were first called to the Victoria Big Battery project — built by French renewable energy firm Neoen using Tesla batteries — on Friday morning. A 13-tonne lithium battery inside a shipping container had caught fire at the site near Geelong, about an hour’s drive from Australia’s second city Melbourne, the Country Fire Service (CFA) said. “There was one battery pack on fire to start with, but it did spread to a second pack that was...

As the commercial airline industry grounds itself and travel restrictions bite in the face of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, the private jet alternative is thriving thanks to the insatiable demands of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to AFP, the demand from the super rich has never been stronger. Richard Zaher, CEO of a U.S.-based private jet charter company, told the news service emails and phone calls just keep coming. “Inquiries have gone through the roof,” he told AFP, noting his company Paramount Business Jets had seen a 400 percent increase in queries, with bookings up roughly 20-25 percent. “It...

The mainstream media has been bombarding Western countries with news about the need to phase out plastic from our daily lives in order to protect the environment, focusing on the World’s oceans. But how much of that plastic is actually the West’s fault? It’s easy to see awareness campaigns about trapped animals in all sorts of trash and wanting to do something in order to prevent it from happening again. Lately, the mainstream media has been on a crusade against the horrors of plastic in developed nations, targeting disposable items such as plastic bags and plastic straws. Are they preaching...

You know you’re a misguided environmentalist if you support banning plastic straws – the latest enviro-craze sweeping the nation – while still consuming trendy Frappuccino-like drinks contained in big ol’ plastic cups. Cups that also have plastic lids. Has it ever occurred to enviro “elites,” who never hesitate to ban any product they dislike, that the plastic cups they routinely use will end up in the same landfill or ocean as those plastic straws? Perhaps the extremist crowd in Santa Barbara, a city that has criminalized the use of plastic straws and will jail and fine offenders, hasn’t noticed the...

Environmentalists have switched their assault on the world economy to a new frontier, previously unaffected by their agenda – peaks, Mount Everest to be more specific, located between China and Nepal in the Himalayas. The 29,029 feet mountain is in danger. What is the crisis? According to the National Geographic team, the mountain is “overcrowded with inexperienced climbers and polluted with waste.” The nature of the pollution includes human corpses, human excrement, garbage leaking from glaciers, abandoned equipment, and overcrowding. How crowded could it be? Mark Jenkins described at 26,000 feet the dangerous inconvenience of more than 100 climbers moving...

The first lady, her mother, her two kids, plus numerous White House aides and security personnel are going to tour China this month, but White House officials are refusing to say how much the taxpayers will pay for the trip. However, they did say it would be a thrill for everyone on the trip, including for Michelle Obama’s top aide, Tina Tchen. “It is a real honor and privilege, and I think we are all, here in the first lady’s office, quite excited about the upcoming trip,” said Tchen, just after she declared that “my parents emigrated from China in...

Virgin CEO Richard Branson may be championing green business investments, but his airline empire has emitted more than 7.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the years. Branson recently took to his blog to decry global warming denialism, saying that those who are skeptical of mankind’s effect on the planet should “get out of our way.” But Branson’s own airline companies have emitted millions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

There are many things about liberals that are infuriating, but one of the most aggravating is their unabashed hypocrisy. From the President of the United States to Earth Day revelers in a San Francisco park, what sets liberals apart from sane people is that they rarely do what they demand from everyone else. It's almost as if the left's ideology embraced a tenet that if you preach about it, and if you look and talk the part, you're instantly exempt from actually doing what it is you promote. In other words, liberals are like grown up Boy Scouts who...

A Pipestone wind-turbine blade manufacturing plant has been hit with a $490,000 civil penalty for a series of air quality, hazardous waste and stormwater violations. In a court settlement with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency last month, Suzlon Rotor Corp. agreed to settle the violations by paying the penalty and by completing corrective actions at its southwestern Minnesota plant. The consent decree was entered July 7 in Pipestone County District Court. The problems stem from a 2009 MPCA inspection, which found that sandblasting operations there far exceeded emissions standards for airborne particles. In addition, the agency determined the company failed...

In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted them sweeping exemptions from the most basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. Related Stories: ■NEPA Exemptions: The Dirty Dozen List ■Wisconsin Firm Receives Energy Grant Despite Chronic Pollution Problems The administration has awarded more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing those projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Coal-burning utilities like Westar Energy...

Sacramento, CA (AP) -- California refineries and utilities are facing a new levy intended to pay for the state's landmark program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If approved, the fee would raise $51.2 million annually for the next three years and would be the country's first statewide carbon fee on industry. The total would drop to $36.2 million by the fifth year. The fee will be considered Thursday by the California Air Resources Board.

CANNES, France (Reuters) - Hollywood star and long-time environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has a message for the world: go green now, before it's too late. As DiCaprio tells it in film documentary "The 11th Hour", launched on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, people are living in the last minutes of the final hour before it may be too late to do anything about global warming. "Global warming is a reality. It is happening," DiCaprio told reporters gathered for the movie's debut. Last year "An Inconvenient Truth" explored the same environmental issue by telling of former U.S. Vice President Al...

LOS ANGELES -- Special effects explosions, idling vehicles, teams of workers building monumental sets -- all of it contributes to Hollywood's newly discovered role as an air polluter, a university study has found. The film and television industry and associated activities make a larger contribution to air pollution in the five-county Los Angeles region than almost all five other sectors researched, according to a two-year study released Tuesday by the University of California, Los Angeles. Although Hollywood seems environmentally conscious thanks to celebrities who lend their names to various causes, the industry created more pollution than individually produced by aerospace...

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - The world's top polluting nations were told on Wednesday to prepare for decades of weather turmoil, even if they act now to curb emissions and pursue green energy sources. Environment and energy ministers meeting in the Mexican city of Monterrey vowed to work faster to control global warming as scientists told them each year wasted in curbing greenhouse gas emissions would cost them dearly. The informal talks did not set emissions-cutting targets, but delegates agreed on the need to expand the global carbon trading market to provide investment for green initiatives. British Environment Secretary David Miliband...

SOMERSET, Mass. (AP) - Ten power plants in the Northeast last year produced a third of the region's carbon dioxide emissions, considered a major contributor to global warming, according to a report released Tuesday by a coalition of environmental groups. Brayton Point Station, a predominantly coal-fired plant in Somerset, was the top carbon dioxide emitter, the report said. The report said Brayton Point released 5.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air in 2004, representing nearly 5 percent of the total released in the nine-state region. Two other Massachusetts power plants also were included on the list, along...

Refugee warning to global polluters Up to 20 million likely to flee environmental damage, report predicts Paul Brown, environment correspondent Tuesday September 30, 2003 The Guardian (UK) Countries such as Britain which are destroying the environment of poorer nations by contributing to global warming and using tropical hardwoods should be prepared to take a fair share of the refugees they have created, says a thinktank report today. The New Economics Foundation says the idea of being responsible for environmental refugees is an extension of the "polluter pays" principle. "People whose environment is being damaged and destroyed, and who are losing...