Free Republic

When is the Correct Time to Burn Fallen Trees? Has the forest benefitted from government interference with Mother Nature? When the government does not allow the forest to burn off naturally the result is uncontrollable fires in the future. I think they may be a correlation between all misguided government endeavors and the outcomes. The government interferes with the natural order of the economy and the economy remains broken. The government interferes with the world’s absolutely finest most advanced health care delivery system and chaos results. The government attempts to correct poverty results in more poverty. The government borrows money...

Massive storms dumped “biblical rainfall amounts” across nearly 2,000 square miles of Colorado last month, according to the National Weather Service. The raging floods that followed killed at least eight people, damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 homes, and wrecked more than 200 miles of state highways and 50 state bridges. The Denver Post ran a front page aerial photo headlined, “Front Range Flooding: Oil spilling into mix,” showing a trashed stream bed with brown stains near a “damaged tank” that “leaks crude.” Opportunistic flocks of Big Green eco-vultures already embroiled in five local anti-fracking ballot measures pounced on the tragedy...

Colorado - The Gilmore case attracted national attention because he supported demonstrations at an Occupy Wall Street encampment a block away from where the fire was started. Occupy activists were protesting against economic inequality and government policies favoring the wealthy. The early-morning fire caused an estimated $10 million damage to a four-story apartment complex under construction and the occupied Penny Flats condominium and retail building next door.

Rubin rose before Chief U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Portland, where she pleaded guilty to a dozen crimes – in Colorado, Oregon and California – as part of the underground Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. ... Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen F. Peifer recounted Rubin's crimes as part of the largest group of eco-saboteurs ever taken down by the FBI. They called themselves The Family and committed an estimated $40 million in damage from 1996 to 2001. ... the terms of the highly structured plea agreement sets limits on the number of years Rubin will spend in prison....

As the 2013 season of devastating wildfires continues to rage across the American West, the question of arson as a form of major terrorism is again being raised. Already this year, 35,440 reported fires have burned a total of 3.9 million acres, with a quarter-million acres scorched the iconic Yosemite National Park. Large blazes continue to burn in several states, with six alive in Idaho, five each in California and Montana, and one each in Alaska, Louisiana, Oregon, Texas and Washington. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, says at this time last year, 45,278 fires had burned 7.9...

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -- A southeastern Idaho ranch lost 176 sheep as the animals ran in fear from two wolves that chased through a herd of about 2,400 animals south of Victor....

The Obama administration is poised to rescind a little-known emissions exemption for power plants as it seeks to address climate change. Green groups are pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to finalize a rule that would force utilities to limit emissions when power plants are shutting down, starting up or malfunctioning. Those emissions had previously been exempted from regulations because they were not considered a part of “normal operations,” but the EPA says that policy is now “outdated.” The environmental group Sierra Club held rallies last week near two facilities that would be affected by the end of the exemption and...

Maine man badly injured in Torngat Mountains National Park. A U.S. hiker vividly recalls the night one of his fellow campers was pulled from his tent and attacked by a polar bear in Torngat Mountains National Park in northern Labrador. Matt Dyer, a lawyer from Maine, was badly injured during the attack at around 1:30 a.m. AT on July 24. Richard Eisenberg was with Dyer and six other hikers as part of a Sierra Club hiking trip to the remote park. He said the group woke up to the sounds of Dyer screaming as he was dragged from his tent....

Rising ocean waters. Bigger and more frequent forest fires. More brutally hot summer days. These aren't the usual predictions about global warming based on computer forecasts. They're changes already happening in California, according to a detailed new report issued Thursday by the California Environmental Protection Agency. Climate change is "an immediate and growing threat" affecting the state's water supplies, farm industry, forests, wildlife and public health, the report says. The 258-page document was written by 51 scientists from the University of California, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,...

Nineteen firefighters died fighting a forest fire in Arizona earlier this summer. Curiously, almost no one is talking about why it happened, only that it was a tragedy. Arizona Deputy State Forestry Director Jerry Payne has been the only one to speak out about the cause, and he backtracked immediately afterwards, apologizing for what he said. He claimed that the superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots violated wildlife safety protocols while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30th, 2013, 60 miles north of Phoenix. According to Payne, the superintendent’s violations allegedly included not knowing the location of the fire,...

It was the kind of meeting that conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about. A month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. Brought together by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America (CWA), and the NAACP, the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration reformers, and a panoply of other...

A former top aide to then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is at the center of a controversy over a suspended federal water-conservation program. Rebecca R. Wodder, a senior advisor to the Interior Secretary on rivers, declined to appear before the House Natural Resources Committee Wednesday afternoon. As the hearing began, a white placard bearing Wodder’s name in black type was placed at the eastern end of a mahogany table and in front of an empty chair. “Unfortunately, the Department will be unable to send a witness to the hearing,” committee spokeswoman Mallory Micetich said an Interior Department official told the committee....

Biotechnology giant Monsanto is scrapping plans to win approval to grow new types of genetically modified crops in the European Union. It says the move is due to the lack of prospects for cultivation in the EU... It comes just days after the EU began talks with the US on a wide-ranging trade deal, with agriculture likely to be one of the toughest issues. The company said it would now concentrate on growing its conventional seeds business in Europe. It will also look to get EU approval to import its genetically modified crop varieties from the US and South America...

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and the attorneys general of 11 other states sued the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday, demanding that the agency turn over documents the states allege will show the agency cooperates with environmental groups as part of a "sue and settle" legal strategy to develop regulations. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City, alleges that binding consent decrees between the EPA and environmental groups that have sued the agency over the years have led to new rules and regulations for states without allowing their attorneys general to defend their interests and those of its...

Having grown up on a farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley, I have seen firsthand how environmental extremists smashed a flourishing agricultural region. Citing the need to protect a three-inch baitfish called the Delta smelt, green activists succeeded in getting farmers’ water supplies drastically cut. As some of the world’s most productive soil degenerated into a drought-stricken landscape, farmers — some of whose families had worked these lands for generations — packed up and left. The local economy sank, with unemployment in the Valley now doubling the national average. President Obama’s recent speech unveiling his “new national climate action plan”...

Policy Missouri Right to Life does not support any organization that in its statements or in practice manifests anti-life positions on abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, or cloning. Missouri Right to Life urges citizens to consider carefully whether to support such organizations. Explanation Anti-life positions are manifested by organizations that are not directly involved in anti-life activities. Examples include, but are by no means limited to, such organizations as the American Bar Association (ABA Policy on Legislative and National Issues: Abortion [adopted August, 1992], available at http://www.abanet.org/policy/Ch-13greenbook2009-10.pdf), the Sierra Club (“[T]he Sierra Club is a pro-choice organization that...

GM foods are banned from restaurants in the Houses of Parliament despite government claims it is ‘probably safer’ than other meals. Government ministers are demanding that ordinary families should abandon their reluctance to eat genetically modified food, however they are banned from MPs’ plates. This week the food and farming secretary, Owen Paterson, launched an extraordinary propaganda campaign to encourage the nation to accept GM crops and farming. He bolstered his campaign with claims that some seven million children in the Far East could have been saved from blindness or death in the last 15 years if only people had...

Is Big Green running things in President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency? Wake up and smell the corruption. A virulent 2009 sue-and-settle lawsuit, WildEarth Guardians v. Jackson (as in Lisa Jackson, former EPA administrator) is an outrageous sweetheart deal rife with collusion and manipulation to create arbitrary regulations, along with the EPA takeover of state regulatory programs and a price tag of more than $2.5 billion -- all aimed against the domestic fossil fuel industry.

To paraphrase William Shakespeare, there’s something rotten in Washington, and the odor is emanating not just from the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. It’s also coming from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies accused of colluding with radical environmental groups to write regulations that are threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study has found that the EPA has given green groups a seat at the table when drafting environmental regulations, but it has excluded the people and industries most likely to be affected. The Sierra Club has participated in “closed-door...

In a news cycle where the lack of transparency is revealed daily, it is refreshing when something previously opaque exposes its true motives. Such is the case for the Sierra Club and its desire to block oil and gas drilling. I’ve written many times on environmental groups’ influence over use of public lands and how they often use claims of some endangered flora or fauna as cover for their efforts to block any beneficial economic development, such as mineral extraction or agricultural activity. They cry about some critter when in fact it is really about control—control of public lands.