Free Republic

A petition to close down a coal plant from the green group listed some supporters who say they hadn’t signed on. ... three western North Carolina businesses accused the green group of listing them without permission as co-signatories on a “businesses beyond coal” campaign letter. The Sierra Club listed 80 businesses as co-signatories last October in a letter it widely publicized, calling for Duke Energy to retire its coal plant in Asheville. ... National Review reached out to the remaining 61 businesses listed in the Sierra Club letter. Though it was unable to reach all of the owners, it found...

I stopped dead in my tracks from the mailbox to the house as I flipped through mail I had retrieved. There it lay, on a birthday card from my sister.What in the world? She had stuck a little return address sticker in the left-hand corner of the envelope, with one of the worst four-letter words in the world on it: PETA. I flipped the envelope over. It got worse. Another PETA puppy sticker seared me right between the eyes.I called my sis and asked what the Sam blazes did she mean, signing up for PETA? Her answer? “Oh, I got...

An activist who was using his position on Colorado’s oil and gas task force to push for a New York-style ban on oil and natural gas development has given up on the fringe proposal for lack of support, according to documents released by state officials overnight. The proposal’s demise is yet another defeat for national anti-fracking groups in Colorado, such as Food and Water Watch and the Sierra Club, which are desperately trying to reboot their failed campaign for an effective statewide oil and gas development ban. It’s also a reminder of how outside of New York, the “ban fracking”...

Last week the Senate, with votes from Democrats and Republicans, passed long-stalled Keystone XL pipeline legislation. President Obama is planning on vetoing the legislation despite broad support from lawmakers and the American people. In the meantime, the Saudis are doing everything they can to undermine U.S. domestic oil production and far-left eco-fascist groups like the Sierra Club are loving it. Washington Free Beacon's Lachlan Markay has the details: Saudi Arabia’s efforts to “drown” American energy producers make the oil-rich theocracy a crucial ally of the environmentalist movement, according to a leading green group. The House of Saud, the kingdom’s royal family,...

Executives at a Bermudan firm funneling money to U.S. environmentalists run investment funds with Russian tycoons. A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president...

After the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it didnt take long for environmentalists to cry gloom and doom and for the media to hype those claims. From caribou dying to earthquakes to all hell breaking loose, there was no shortage of catastrophic predictions though the Alaska pipeline now boasts great success roughly 30 years later.      Construction on the pipeline began in 1975, and oil first moved through it on June 20, 1977. Former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton summed up its success in 2003 that Today the pipeline produces 17 percent of our domestic petroleum. It...

On Christmas Eve in 1914, famed naturalist John Muir lay in a Los Angeles hospital bed, taking his last few breaths. A prolific nature writer and passionate preservationist, the 74-year-old spent his final moments racked with pneumonia, hundreds of miles from the 17-room Martinez Edwardian mansion he called home. A century later, Muir’s former residence — now the John Muir National Historic Site — is where national park staffers and about 30 Muir enthusiasts gathered on a gray Christmas Eve morning to mark the passing of the man who co-founded the Sierra Club and preserved Yosemite and other natural park...

Environmentalists say they’ve moved past their 19th century patron saint John Muir because he represents the monied, white privilege that continues to haunt the environmental movement to this day, the Los Angeles Times reports. In an effort to connect more with Latinos and African Americans, some environmentalists are considering ditching Muir as their intellectual godfather. Environmentalists say that while they respect his ideas, they represent rich, Anglo-Saxon values that likely alienate minority communities. “Muir’s legacy has to go,” Jon Christensen, a historian at the University of California in Los Angeles’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability, told the Times. “It’s just...

<p>SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled the design of California's new quarter Monday, which shows conservationist John Muir, a California condor and Yosemite National Park's Half Dome mountain on the coin's tails side.</p> <p>The quarter commemorates California's Sept. 9, 1850, entry into the United States, and is the 31st 25-cent coin to be unveiled as part of a 10-year, 50-state quarters program conducted by the U.S. Mint. States reveal their quarters in honor of the order in which they ratified the U.S. Constitution and joined the union.</p>

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Tribal and environmental groups are suing the U.S. State Department for approving a temporary plan by a Canadian pipeline company to increase the flow of crude oil from Alberta into Minnesota. The Sierra Club and other groups filed the federal lawsuit. The suit contends the State Department approved a plan by Enbridge Energy to construct and operate a pipeline that crosses the U.S.-Canada border without first reviewing environmental impacts. Enbridge won Minnesota regulatory approval to complete a $200 million upgrade of its 1,000-mile Alberta Clipper pipeline, boosting its flow by adding pumping stations

The EPA and environmental groups are exceptionally close for a government agency and lobby groups, with a revolving door and pressure from the groups often shaping EPA’s policies, according to a new report from a conservative watchdog group based on emails obtained in a yearslong battle with the agency. The report, which details what the Energy & Environment Legal Institute terms “collusion” between the Environmental Protection Agency and eco-friendly groups, is also a study in the way E&E; used open records laws to force transparency on a secretive agency. Chris Horner, the report’s author, said the emails show EPA officials...

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. ... “This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda [?], and assist in the preservation of open debate,” the grant said. ... “Truthy” claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority. ... The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use...

Backgrounder: The Students for Justice in PalestinePosted By Lee Kaplan On July 17, 2014 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) today exists as a consortium of campus “clubs” throughout the American and Canadian college systems which work to oppose the existence of Israel and to promote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Jewish state. There are at least 80 chapters of these clubs on campuses throughout the US and Canada. The SJP goes under other assorted names on some campuses. Names such as Palestine Solidarity Committee or Students for...

1) What do you make of the extension of the comment period for federal agencies to Keystone XL? President Obama said he would take his time to make a considered decision whether or not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and that appears to be exactly what he's doing. 2) The State Department wrote in a recent report that even if the pipeline isn’t built, the oil will still be exported by other means. So, is protesting the pipeline fruitless? Not at all. 3) For many, the debate on Keystone comes down to jobs. The presence of a pipeline will...

Jared Polis really doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. If you saw the Colorado congressman speaking on the House floor last month wearing a clip-on bowtie with a polo shirt under his blazer, you know what I’m talking about. He’s been this way since he first emerged on the scene. About 10 years ago, when he was just 28, Polis was one of four wealthy Colorado Democrats who pooled their considerable personal resources to create a state-of-the-art political machine that was ruthlessly effective in turning this once-red heartland state a stunning shade of blue. But Polis wouldn’t run with that...

There are many environmental reasons to eat insects. But first you have to get past the ick factor. You have to be careful not to overcook scorpions. The exoskeleton traps steam, and they're messy when they pop. "But get it right," said "Bug Chef" David George Gordon to the swarm of curious faces gathered to watch him work, "and they taste like soft-shell crab." It was Halloween night. I'd trekked across Portland, Oregon, for a bug-cooking demonstration at Paxton Gate, a store that owner Andy Brown describes as "a natural history museum where everything is for sale." Feats of...

Sierra Club San Diego Chapter suspended The Sierra Club’s national board voted Friday to suspend its San Diego chapter for four years, a step that leaders said was needed to curb “ongoing conflicts and divisions” among local activists. “We have one objective, having a healthy, effective, working Sierra Club chapter in San Diego,” Sierra Club President Dave Scott said after the vote, saying the board had received many complaints about strife within the chapter. The organization’s leaders have provided few details about the nature of that conflict, but San Diego members and former officials attributed it to the Sierra Club’s...

....I recently received an email from the Sierra Club praising the President’s State of the Union speech in which he claimed that climate change—by which they mean global warming—is real and that the science is “settled.” No, the science entirely refutes it—except if one means that the climate has always been a state of change. The most recent climate change is seventeen years of cooling that has gifted us with record-breaking cold as far south as Florida.

Among Washington's most important but rarely covered realities is the daily close coordination among Democratic politicians, executive branch bureaucrats and the left side of the non-profit activism community. Emails obtained recently through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute exposed a slice of that coordination in the campaign to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The emails show, according to Fox News correspondent John Roberts, "senior policy officials at the EPA working closely with environmental groups in what appears to be an effort to kill the pipeline."...

'Secret Dealing'? Emails Show Cozy Relationship Between EPA, Environmental Groups By John Roberts Published January 22, 2014 FoxNews.com Newly disclosed emails suggest senior policy officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups are working closely to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, critics say. "These damning emails make it clear that the Obama administration has been actively trying to stop this important project for years," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who has long advocated for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline's construction, said in a statement to Fox News. The emails were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Energy and...