Free Republic

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wasted no crisis knowing what and whom to blame following the devastating tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma. Republicans caused it to happen through anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming. “When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas.” So what about all that hot air? Is it possibly coming from none other than the senator himself? Well-respected meteorologist Joe Bastardi believes...

With his estimated wealth exceeding $200 million, Albert Arnold Gore has come a long way from the time he began a career in government politics. But it hasn’t all been a green path. He can thank some earlier events for paving over muddy ground, a time when his father, Al Gore Sr. met Occidental Petroleum’s CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc was discovered on some of Gore’s land,

When Webster Groves High School purchased solar panels to put on the roof of the school, no one told them they could catch on fire! The fire department was called on Saturday to put out the flames ... Plumes of black smoke could be seen coming from the roof at Webster Groves High School Saturday. Firefighters say solar panels caught fire around 2:00pm. Nearby residents noticed the smoke and called the fire department. The panels are above the new science wing.

Barely a day after the Washington State Senate voted to fund a study that would explore ways to enforce tougher greenhouse gas emission standards, a respected academic spent nearly two hours presenting scientific evidence suggesting the assumptions on which that legislation was based were wrong. Dr. Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University, on Tuesday told the Senate’s Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee he was relying on an old maxim in science: “In God we trust; everyone else bring data.” “Well, I’m bringing data,” he said. “You’ll hear very few opinions from me. When I’m finished,...

Big Brother: The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas. In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters....

In his 2013 State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama called on Congress to pursue a solution to climate change, or else he would do it on his own. The same week, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D–CA) and committee member Bernie Sanders (I–VT) introduced the first major bill that would institute a carbon tax, the Climate Protection Act of 2013 (Boxer–Sanders). One glaring problem with the bill is that it would not preempt regulation of greenhouse gases by federal agencies. Even worse, the bill effectively turns the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator into a...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Last week on this program a young man of 13 years old called. A young boy called from Wilmington, Indiana. He was a very, very bright, articulate guy who called here to tell me that he finally had proven to himself that global warming was a hoax. He'd gone to his local library. He'd researched it and he had found it, and he told me why he thought the left and liberals don't recognize it as a hoax is because they don't want to. So I offered the young man an iPad. I said, "Somebody like you...

Associate Director of College Communications, Unity College claims in a press release this month: “Every college or university that claims to be holding a ‘green’ commencement needs to have divested from investments in fossil fuels, or admit that they cannot truly make that claim.” “As the first college in the United States to adopt sustainability science as its central focus, Unity College ascended to the leading-edge of higher education, training the next generation of environmental leaders to pursue trans-disciplinary solutions to the earth’s most pressing problems including global climate change.” “With a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees in...

A California billionaire is pledging to spend as much of his fortune as necessary to make climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” Tom Steyer, who made his riches as a hedge fund manager, told The Hill on Tuesday that he wants to make climate change a campaign issue for years to come and Democratic support for environmental protections as widespread as support for gay marriage and immigration reform. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” Steyer said of candidates he judges to be on the...

The Economist has been fairly consistent in its stand that carbon dioxide emissions from man-made sources are the chief cause of global warming. But in an editorial this week, it sounds less certain. Global warming predictions haven’t panned out as predicted in the past decade, but the why is a bit fuzzy, the magazine admits. Greenhouse gas emissions have soared during the past 15 years, the magazine notes, with 100 billion tons of carbon having been added to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. Still, both air and ground temperatures during that time have remained virtually unchanged. In fact, the...

NYT's Krugman: Skeptics 'punished in the afterlife' --- McKibben: 'White America' has failed

This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050. Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of...

The manipulation behind Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link by Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 1, 2013 A NY Times science story (by Justin Gillis, March 1) illustrates some interesting points about science journalism - esp. in the contentious and politically charged issue of climate change. A scientific journal, in this case the renowned Science magazine, wants to gain publicity for its journal among the non-scientific readers of the NY Times. So it sends out a press release about a scientific paper it plans to publish. Of course, it has been 'peer-reviewed' to the satisfaction of...

Environmental activists make money telling us all how terrible things are; climate scientists appreciate the help promoting their data, we do have a bit of a train wreck coming at us emissions-wise, but climate scientists also know there is a risk of backlash if there are too many hyperbolic claims, and that 'green fatigue' will set in if every change in temperature and every storm is attributed to global warming. That's why even the IPCC, no wallflower when it comes to using media talking points, wishes media would not attribute local weather to climate change(PDF). And then there is the...

Standard climatological and economic techniques, combined in an investment appraisal of the proposed Sanders/Boxer carbon dioxide tax (U.S. Senate, 2013), show that even at a zero inter-temporal discount rate the cost of the Bill’s proposed CO2 mitigation if applied worldwide over ten years is 15 times greater than the benefit in the cost of warming-related damage avoided by the intended cut in CO2 emissions, which is here assumed to be – but is in reality unlikely to be – achievable at the stated cost. Fraction of global CO2 emissions abated: By 2023, on business as usual, U.S. CO2 emissions will...

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address President Obama made some observations on climate change so brimming with falsehoods I'm surprised his nose didn't fall off. It really doesn't matter where he himself was deliberately lying or whether he was merely lending the gravitas of his office to the deliberate lies of others. The point is that the President of the USA has access to any number of fact checkers and advisers and if he stands up and addresses the nation with a farrago of complete untruths then the buck stops with him. This dissembling and mendacity...

A large global warming protest with a very Canadian connection is scheduled for Sunday February 17th at the White House. The protest, organized by the Sierra Club and 350.org, is being dubbed as the biggest climate rally in U.S. history and is meant to encourage President Obama to veto the construction of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. In a telephone interview with Yahoo! Canada News, 350.org's Daniel Kessler said that he is expecting tens of thousands of people including "several groups" from Canada. Obama is expected to...

A recent article in the Washington Post exposes once again what climate change skeptics already know: the green movement is designed to lower living standards, not just make living more carbon efficient. “One of President Obama’s goals in his State of the Union address was to make American homes twice as energy-efficient by 2030,” writes Brad Plumer for the Washington Post today. “But would that actually curtail overall energy use and reduce U.S. carbon emissions? That’s a trickier question.” “A second way to look at this is that as Americans get richer, we’re inevitably going to want bigger homes and...

SUNNYVALE -- A prominent Silicon Valley clean-energy startup has been ordered to pay back wages and penalties for bringing in workers from Mexico and paying them about $2.66 an hour in pesos, the U.S. Department of Labor announced Tuesday. Sunnyvale-based Bloom Energy, which makes fuel cells and sells energy to clients including AT&T, Adobe, Coca-Cola, eBay, Google and Wal-Mart, was ordered by a judge to pay $31,922 in back wages and an equal amount in damages to 14 welders who were brought in to work alongside domestic workers refurbishing power generators. It followed a federal investigation that inspected records from...

President Obama has put salvation from dreaded climate catastrophes on his action agenda hot list. During his inaugural address he said: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” He went on to shame anyone who disagrees with this assessment, saying, “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and powerful storms.”

A 2012 performance review of the The Colorado Energy Office (CEO) revealed several disturbing findings by the State Auditor last month, which included a non-existent accounting system for CEO’s 34 programs, a runaway budget, and staff who had no knowledge of program goals or standards. The forty-eight page report was was dated December 18, 2012 and included background information on the CEO, key facts and findings, the State Auditor concerns, and recommendations for the CEO moving forward. The CEO was established via executive order in 1977 as the Office of Energy Conservation. Last year, House Bill 12-1315 changed CEO’s overall...

Hybrid car pioneer and “father of the Prius” Takeshi Uchiyamada says the billions poured into developing battery electric vehicles have ultimately been in vain. "Because of its shortcomings--driving range, cost and recharging time--the electric vehicle is not a viable replacement for most conventional cars," said Uchiyamada. "We need something entirely new." Uchiyamada’s comments come as the U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday that the government is backing off President Barack Obama’s promise to put one million electric cars on American roads by 2015. As Breitbart News reported last September, there are just 30,000 electric cars on American roads.

As he begins his second term, President Obama is barreling toward what one Bay Area activist predicts could be "all out warfare" with environmentalists who want him to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, the transcontinental conduit for tar sands fuel from Canada that many scientists say could expedite climate change. Obama's political dilemma lies in the pipeline's potential upside: The State Department projects that it could deliver 6,000 temporary jobs to the U.S., where 12.2 million people are unemployed. Bay Area liberals leading the Keystone opposition say Obama has only one choice. "If he doesn't reject it," said Piedmont attorney...

Having heard it straight from President Obama last Monday, the “devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” looming in our immediate future are all imminent catastrophes fueled by rapid climate change about which we simply must do something right away — but this is exactly the type of alarmist rhetoric that ensures we pursue the types of ineffective, top-down, big-government, expensive, and internationalist solutions that will actually have very little net effectiveness in sincerely addressing the issue.One of environmentalists’ favorite past-times includes whipping up a certain amount of global-warming frenzy as an excuse to implement...

Friday, October 5, 2012 US Temperatures Have Been Falsely Adjusted According to the Level of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Steven Goddard in recent months has been presenting evidence on his real-science site of fraudulent manipulation, by NASA and other renowned federal scientific institutions, of the temperature data used by climate scientists to promulgate global warming hysteria. Goddard has presented the following graph, showing that adjustments made to the US temperature records have systematically lowered past temperatures and raised more recent ones, to give a false indication of warming over the past century and more: The indicated adjustments looked familiar...

US-based Hemlock Semiconductor said Monday it planned to shed 400 of the staff at its Michigan and Tennessee production plants due to an oversupply in the polysilicon industry and an expected drop in orders from China. Hemlock, a joint venture of US silicon-based materials maker Dow Corning, Japanese Shin-Etsu Chemical Co Ltd (TSE:4063) and Mitsubishi Materials Corp (TYO:5711), makes polycrystalline silicon for the production of semiconductors and solar cells. The company is suffering from the expanding trade dispute between the US and China in which the Asian country launched anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probes into polysilicon imported from the US, the...

“Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes ... The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. ... Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil. At...

A new video game featuring a black alien female superhero delivered to Earth to fight global warming is about to hit the market thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Obama administration. The National Endowment for the Arts is funding the Spelman College of Atlanta, Ga.'s multi-episode game called "HERadventure." In the grant announcement made last year, the NEA said the story "focuses on a young female superhero sent to Earth to save her own planet from devastation because of climate changes caused by social issues impacting women and girls." The game is set to debut on March 8 on...

The claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase air temperatures by "trapping" infrared radiation (IR) ignores the fact that in 1909 physicist R.W. Wood disproved the popular 19th Century thesis that greenhouses stayed warm by trapping IR. Unfortunately, many people who claim to be scientists are unaware of Wood's experiment which was originally published in the Philosophical magazine , 1909, vol 17, p319-320. Philosophical Magazine might not sound like the name of a science publication, but a century ago leading scientists published their discoveries in it. During the early 19th Century many physicists supported the theory postulated by Benjamin Franklin...

Georgia Power asked state regulators for permission to shut down 15 power plants yesterday, claiming new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) make the plants too expensive to run. The 15 coal-, oil- and natural gas-fired power plants currently produce 2,061 megawatts (MW) for Georgia energy consumers. Georgia Power plans to close 11 of the plants on the exact day the EPA’s new mercury regulations are set to take effect, April 16, 2015. Georgia Power will seek waivers from the EPA to keep four of the other plants open for a single year, and then shut those down too...

Alaskan liberty goes up in smoke under new air regulationsNot-so-unintended consequences of overregulation are in the air. Newly adopted rules limiting airborne soot imposed by bureaucrats in Washington threaten to freeze the choices — and toes — of individuals living more than 4,000 miles away in subarctic Alaska. Thanks to authoritarian overreach, the freedom of America’s “last frontier” may not last much longer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) waited until after President Obama’s re-election to announce drastic new restrictions on soot produced by industry smokestacks, diesel trucks and even ordinary sources like wood-burning stoves. The new standard for the great...

From the journal Earth System Dynamics billed as “An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union” comes this paper which suggests that the posited AGW forcing effects simply isn’t statistically significant in the observations, but other natural forcings are. “…We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we...

The odd-year gubernatorial election of what now feels like a solidly purple Virginia (…dagger) could potentially serve as a bellwether of which way the national attitude is trending after almost a year into President Obama’s second term, and conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli will be facing former DNC chief Terry McAuliffe in what will likely be a pretty rough race.One of the items on which the Obama administration has already started moving “forward” in the more politically safe second-term-secured atmosphere is all of the regulations on which they were rather conspicuously holding back before the election, with the Environmental Protection...

Legislate in haste ... repent at leisure. In their haste to rid Americans of the unconscionable plague of perfectly safe if somewhat inefficient incandescent lighting, politicians in Washington have forced us to adopt more expensive technology in its place. Compact flourescent lighting (CFLs) are already known to be a considerable disposal risk, thanks to the mercury used in them. A new study reported earlier this week by Miami's CBS affiliate warns of an operational risk as well ... ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancers and even acute burns (via Katie Pavlich): Every time you turn on the lights, you...

Wondering why rail traffic has been somewhat surprisingly consistent despite uncertainty? Concerned at government's tenticular reach into each and every aspect of our lives? This somewhat stunning anecdotal report from OilPrice.com might shed some light: A cargo train filled with biofuels crossed the border between the US and Canada 24 times between the 15th of June and the 28th of June 2010; not once did it unload its cargo, yet it still earned millions of dollars... The companies “made several million dollars importing and exporting the fuel to exploit a loophole in a U.S. green energy program.” Each time the...

Secretary of State nominee John Kerry, with 20 years of concern about climate change, is expected to push the issue to center stage as a slow-motion crisis in need of a global solution. When he sought to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts made a point of challenging the Bush administration's backtracking on the issue and rejection of climate science. In contrast, he told the nation, he “believes in science.”

All “registered owners” of vehicles weighing more than 26,000 GVW have received this letter over the past couple weeks. This edict, only applies to diesel powered vehicles used as a function of business. Privately used vehicles are exempt, at this time. Compliance is very expensive, Diesel Particulate Filters, start around $10,000.00 per vehicle. New vehicles are as high as, $140,000.00. This is an enormous expense to California business owners, which obviously will be passed on. California business also has to comply with a carbon credit scam and undoubtedly, the future recension of Prop 13 protection of commercial property. There are...

Just think — if Democrats win the midterm elections in 2014, we could see this kind of success on a national scale!  California has struggled with massive budget deficits for years, but the political class in Sacramento stumbled on the perfect solution to falling revenues and rising costs … soaking the business world to seize more capital for further spending.  The state held its first auction of cap-and-trade credits, and projected that businesses would spend a billion dollars in buying, er, vapor.  Those projections were just a teensy bit optimistic, as Bloomberg’s Steven Greenhut explains: In late November, the California Air...

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has devoted an unprecedented number of bureaucrats to finalizing new anti-coal regulations that are set to be released at the end of November, according to a source inside the EPA. More than 50 EPA staff are now crashing to finish greenhouse gas emission standards that would essentially ban all construction of new coal-fired power plants. Never before have so many EPA resources been devoted to a single regulation. The independent and non-partisan Manhattan Institute estimates that the EPA’s greenhouse gas coal regulation will cost the U.S. economy $700 billion. The rush is a major sign...

Enlarge Image Green crude. Harvesting oil produced by algae at Sapphire Energy's Green Crude Farm in Columbus, New Mexico. A new report says such existing technologies will need to use fewer external inputs to become sustainable. Credit: Sapphire Energy A report out today from the National Research Council (NRC) of the U.S. National Academies says that large-scale production of biofuels from algae is untenable with existing technology, as it would require the use of too much water, energy, and fertilizer. To improve matters, the report's authors suggest that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which supports much of the...

....So far, 36 companies that have received federal support from taxpayers have either gone bankrupt or are laying off workers and are heading for bankruptcy. This list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher. The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:...

Energy Policy: As the administration fast-tracks solar projects on public lands, it has locked up more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, preferring to continue outsourcing energy jobs and dollars. The price of gasoline, which was $1.84 a gallon the day President Obama took office, has more than doubled since, willfully aided and abetted by an administration that claims we can't drill our way to energy independence as we ignore vast reserves of North American energy that dwarf OPEC's and we sit on 100 years' supply of petroleum. Few Americans have heard of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska...

Al Gore is about 50 times richer than he was when he left the vice presidency in 2001. According to an Oct. 11 report by The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, Gore accumulated a Romneyesque $100 million partly through investing in alternative-energy firms subsidized by the Obama administration. Two days after that story ran, Mitt Romney proclaimed at a rally in Ohio’s Appalachian coal country: “We have a lot of coal; we are going to use it. We are going to keep those jobs.” Thousands cheered. The juxtaposition speaks volumes about the Democratic Party, and about modern liberalism generally. As the Democrats...

The rocketing costs of gasoline and the escalating price of corn are the result of U.S. government mandates requiring the inclusion of ethanol in the gasoline all Americans must use. The time has long since passed to eliminate ethanol from this primary fuel. A recent report by ActionAid USA, “Fueling the Food Crisis: The Cost to Developing Countries of U.S. Corn Ethanol Expansion” is based on work by researchers at Tufts University. ActionAid USA is an anti-poverty group. The study found that the corn-importing countries of Central America and North Africa are at the highest risk from ethanol expansion—the requirement...

In Thursday night’s Vice Presidential debate, the Administration’s green agenda was, once again, part of the verbal sparring. The exchange ended with Congressman Ryan’s unanswered question: “Where are the 5 million green jobs…?” Moderator Martha Raddatz cut him off mid-question, steering the conversation elsewhere: “I want to move on here to Medicare and entitlements. I think we've gone over this quite enough.” Ryan didn’t finish his question. Vice President Biden wasn’t pressed into an uncomfortable answer that would have wiped the smile off his face. Had Ryan not been interrupted and been allowed to finished the question, he likely would...

President Obama faces a dilemma as Mitt Romney bashes him over high gasoline prices in the final weeks of their close race. Obama must decide whether to address the attacks head-on, or stay the course on a messaging strategy that has recently been addressing prices indirectly. Democratic strategists and other experts argue that three weeks before voters go to the polls, Obama should steer clear of big messaging or policy pivots on gas prices. “Bringing the issue up this close to Election Day would be self-defeating at this point,” said Paul Bledsoe, an independent consultant who was a climate change...

Federal officials on Friday approved a plan that sets aside 445 square miles of public land for thedevelopment of large-scale solar power plants, cementing a new government approach to renewable energy development in the West after years of delays and false starts. At a news conference in Las Vegas, Interior Secretary Ken Salazarcalled the new plan a "roadmap ... that will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands." The plan replaces the department's previous first-come, first-served system of approving solar projects, which let developers choose where they wanted to build utility-scale solar sites and allowed for land...

If you guessed "renewable energy," you'd be wrong ... so wrong. Sure, the green-energy industry may have created some 28,000-odd jobs (a very far cry from the 5 million we were promised, cough cough), but it's important to remember that even those few "successfully" created green jobs are not necessarily productive jobs.The green-energy industry is only as big as it is because it's on the receiving end of a whole heap of different types of subsidies, from tax credits to loan guarantees to direct payments, and subsidies are always and necessarily designed to distort free-market signals. All the money poured...

When Barack Obama arrived in Holland, Michigan to break ground for the new Compact Power plant in July 2010, he promised that the $150 million in subsidies that prompted the construction of the new facility would result in more than 300 jobs and an assembly line producing batteries for the Chevy Volt and the Ford Focus electric vehicles. He told workers that these batteries and jobs would not have been possible without his massive stimulus package, which funded his green-tech subsidy program at the Department of Energy (via Nexis): So for years, you've heard about manufacturing jobs disappearing overseas. You...

Does Obama have radical “green” roots? Bret Baier travels across America, revealing rogue regulators, tracing the truth about the president’s environmental agenda and exposing programs that could devastate our economy! Check out a sneak peek of the special below, and tune in on Sunday at 9p ET to watch the full ‘Fox News Reporting: Behind Obama’s Green Agenda’ on Fox News.