Free Republic

While millions of birds and bats are dying needlessly, wind and solar power inconsistent energy production cannot replace coal. The world’s economy needs fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and hydro-power that provide a constant source of electricity

America’s uranium industry has been absolutely devastated by Department of Energy decisions and political maneuvering by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and individuals closely tied to her. ... in 1976, the uranium extraction industry employed 35,000 people. Today .. fewer than 500 people in this country are involved in it .. 20 percent of our electrical power is dependent on those 500 people, that’s every fifth light-bulb. We’re now producing enough uranium to power 4 or 5 of our nuclear reactors, that’s 94 dependent on foreign uranium. ... Since 2011, DOE has sold off roughly $1 billion of publicly-owned uranium...

In this election cycle, we hear a lot about the “establishment.” Most people are not really sure who they are, but they are sure that they do not like them. The anger toward the establishment is not party specific and has propelled two unlikely candidates: Donald Trump on the Republican side and Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democrats. The faithful following these outsiders may be more about “the grassroots trying to teach the establishment a lesson,” as Gary Bauer posited last month, than about affection for either man. In an InfoWars video, reporter Richard Reeves, at the University of Texas...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may soon need to contemplate the possibility that, when he next meets the president of the United States, he will be facing Ted Cruz. With Cruz’s victory this week in Wisconsin, Donald Trump is all but certain to fall short of the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination for president prior to the party’s convention in Cleveland in July. If Trump fails to win a first-ballot victory, he will then almost surely lose many of the delegates involuntarily bound to him. The once seemingly invincible Trump has been faltering, losing all of the...

The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There’s a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy.“Our idea was if we had a national ‘interstate highway for electrons’ we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,” says study co-author Alexander MacDonald. Several years ago, MacDonald was curious about claims...

One of the most destructive environmental subsidies in the United States has found an enthusiastic supporter in Donald Trump. "The EPA should ensure that biofuel ... blend levels match the statutory level set by Congress," he said yesterday in Iowa, adding that he was "there with you 100 percent" on continuing federal support for ethanol. "You're going to get a really fair shake from me." The ethanol lobby has rigorously courted Trump since April, arranging to speak at least weekly, including at least three in-person meetings, in addition to an ethanol-plant tour, the Wall Street Journal reports. Trump's support for...

As diplomatic confabs go, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference does not have much of a potential to do a lot of damage. That is remarkable considering that the War on Terror-torn capital of France is playing host to thousands of politicians, diplomats, businessmen, activists, and troublemakers, all of whom want to gain some sort of advantage out of the concept of climate change. The idea that human-caused global warming is going to cause a catastrophe unless the things people are doing to cause it are stopped is well accepted in the media and in certain government circles

Renewables for thee, but not for me California Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown believes that everyone needs to start using wind, solar and other “renewable” energy sources as soon as possible because, you know, the earth, man. California doesn’t need to be burning all kinds of oil and making bank for rich capitalists who own gigantic ranches with oil underneath them, ‘amiright’? Unless, of course, that ranch owner happens to be Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown! In that case, well, better find that oil! And that’s exactly what Gov. Moonbeam was hoping to do when he dispatched state employees, on the taxpayers’...

There is no renewables revolution in China A new study suggests air pollution is even worse than thought in China where pollution is sky-high everywhere. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the EPA either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half of the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold. Berkeley’s Earth scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day. China emits more CO2 than the US and Canada put together—up 171%...

Apple CEO Tim Cook is joining the CEO Council for Sustainable Urbanization, a group formed by the Paulson Institute and the China Center for International Economic Exchanges in order to divert the environmental impact of China's urban growth. "Apple is committed to running our global operations on 100 percent renewable energy and we're working hard to reduce emissions throughout our global supply chain," Cook said in prepared statement from the Paulson Institute. "We look forward to participating in the CEO Council's effort to advance China's green transformation and hope to do our part in helping China reach its climate goals."

Abengoa, a renewable energy multinational company headquartered in Spain, has been a favorite of the Obama administration in getting federal tax money for clean energy projects. Since 2009, Abengoa and its subsidiaries, according to estimates, have received $2.9 billion in grants and loan guarantees through the Department of Energy to undertake solar projects in California and Arizona—as well as the construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kansas. But in the space of less than a year, Abengoa’s financial health has become critical, leading investors to worry whether the company can survive. The company’s stock price on NASDAQ has swooned—from...

Power: In her latest campaign video on renewable energy, Hillary Clinton mocks Republican candidates for not facing the "reality" of global warming and the need to fight it. But it's her own energy plan that defies reality.

Replacing Fossil Fuels: Energy Evolution Has Happened Before If renewable energy replaces fossil fuels as our main source of energy it won't be the first time a fuel source was rapidly replaced. On the surface, energy seems like a pretty stagnant industry these days. Oil has dominated transportation for most of the last century while natural gas and coal provide a vast majority of the electricity we consume. That's not all that different than the way things were at the turn of the 20th century.But if you look at the overall energy mix over more than two centuries there's a...

The green energy movement in America is dead. May it rest in peace. No, a majority of American energy over the next 20 years is not going to come from windmills and solar panels. One important lesson to be learned from the green energy fad’s rapid and expensive demise is that central planning doesn’t work. What crushed green energy was the boom in shale oil and gas along with the steep decline in the price of fossil fuel that few saw coming just a few years ago.

Neither the science, the cost, nor the recent history of “renewable energy” provides a single good reason to force Americans to pay for this “green” failure. Imagine you wanted to get in your electric car and drive a considerable distance. It wouldn’t take long for your car to run out of power, so you would have to have another car, one using gasoline, to drive behind you to make sure you reached your destination. That’s a description of “renewable energy”, wind and solar, in America today because they both require backup from traditional energy sources such as coal, oil, natural...

There is never a good time for bad public policy. For few policies is this more evident than renewable energy mandates (REM), variously known as renewable portfolio standards, alternative energy standards and renewable energy standards. The first renewable energy mandate was adopted in 1983, but most states did not impose these mandates until the 2000s. Though the details vary from state to state, in general, renewable energy mandates require utilities to provide a certain percentage of the electric power they supply from “renewable” sources, notably wind and solar, with the required percentages rising over time. At the height of the...

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat. It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies. As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg...

The recent Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidation filing of the Toledo, Ohio-based solar-panel manufacturer Xunlight Corp. has attracted barely any national attention. Maybe it’s gotten to the point — after Solyndra, Evergreen, Abound, and Satcon — that the failure of another government-backed alternative energy company is a dog-bites-man story. It’d be newsworthy if any of them actually ever succeeded. But it’s worth pausing for an autopsy and retrospective on Xunlight, because it’s a great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) example of how government at all levels — state and federal — and in both parties —...

The EPA is not protecting anyone’s health. It is forcing them to pay more for what should be the most traditional and affordable sources of electricity in the world One of the lesser known attempts to prove that renewable energy, wind and solar power, can replace traditional energy sources—coal, oil, and natural gas—went belly up in much the same way current wind and solar companies depend on tapping the taxpayer for government subsidies in order to stay in business. Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative begun in 2007 and shut down four years later. Two members of the Institute...

Some people call it "renewable energy" but I prefer to call it "alternative energy" because that's what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.) Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google's research department have reached the same conclusion. Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In...