Free Republic

Boris Johnson has declared that wind power is the future of Britain's energy .. But an investigation has revealed turbine owners are being paid over the odds .. Civil servants set subsidy rate so high it's been branded ‘licence to print money’.. A botched green scheme is paying wind turbine owners seven times the value of the electricity they generate – and it is set to cost UK consumers an estimated £1.4billion. The Daily Mail can reveal the eyewatering fiasco in the week Boris Johnson declared that wind power was the future for the nation’s energy generation. The scheme was...

Wind energy companies will have the option of using decommissioned wind turbine blades as backfill material when reclaiming surface coal mine sites soon, thanks to a new bill signed into law earlier this year. But first, the state needs to set the rules. ... The blades.. are made of fiberglass. Fiberglass is a tricky material that can’t be recycled or easily repurposed. And as utility companies look to replace aging wind turbines, the machines’ blades are being buried in stacks at a handful of landfills around the country, ... old mine sites to suddenly become a landfills, which could affect...

It’s May 16, 2020, which means that there is nothing out of the ordinary about the phrase ‘sun lockdown’ trending on search engines and social media. Most of us are in lockdown, after all, because of the coronavirus pandemic, and so if the sun wants to join us, so be it, right? Wrong, some exaggerated headlines suggest, as they promise famine, freezing temps, and droughts on Earth because the sun has entered a completely predictable and entirely normal solar minimum, according to Astronomer Dr. Tony Phillips in an interview with The Sun.

it’s appropriate to mourn the passing of one notable longtime New Yorker .. Unit 2 reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center. The workhorse, Westchester-based nuclear-power generator, which could have run for several more decades, is scheduled to be unplugged Thursday. Cause of death: political expediency .... the 1,028-megawatt Westinghouse machine delivered about 8,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year from a site on the Hudson River that covers less than a half square mile. Unit 2’s prodigious output left its more politically popular rivals — solar and wind energy — in the shade. Ivanpah, the biggest thermal-solar project in America,...

We have learned the hard way that the scientists who produce mathematical models predicting disaster are not to be granted the presumption of infallibility. Nor are their demands that we impoverish ourselves in order to avert a disaster a matter of "settled science." The coronavirus doom that the Cassandras of prestigious scientific organs predicted is nowhere to be found, and it turns out that models are based on assumptions and can be spectacularly wrong. Americans have sacrificed trillions of dollars and turned our lives upside-down based on predictions of millions of deaths if we didn't follow radically change our way...

In 2011, hikers in the snowy mountains of central Norway came across a 1700-year-old wool tunic, likely belonging to a Roman-era hypothermia victim. As ice in the region has continued to melt, researchers have made hundreds of additional finds. Now, archaeologists have made their biggest discovery yet: a lost Viking trade route that may have been used for hundreds of years to ferry everything from butter to reindeer antlers to far-flung European markets.

In a shocking speech in front of the National Governors Association, Secretary Mike Pompeo revealed that he is in possession of a list of American governors who have been listed as "friendly" by Chinese Communist infiltrators. Pompeo said he received an invitation from a former governor to attend a networking event that promised great "deal-making" opportunities with the Chinese government. This networking event was run by "The Chinese People's Association for Friendship in Foreign Countries," said Pompeo. But what the participants might not have known is that "the group is the public face of the Chinese Communist party's official foreign...

Finally, some good Coronavirus news: the pandemic has caused the collapse of Europe’s carbon trading market. According to Recharge News: The Covid-19 pandemic has turned Europe’s carbon price upside down, with prices dropping by 40% since early March when they were still trading at about €24 ($26) per metric ton, analyst IHS Markit said. The current trading levels of between €16-18 per metric ton are roughly two thirds of the level of the high of 2019 of €29 per metric ton. “This is a perfect storm for Europe’s carbon market, and it may well lead to some challenging questions about...

What happened: The US Navy has dismantled its Task Force on Climate Change, which was designed to use the best available science to prepare naval leadership for global shifts in sea levels, melting ice sheets and ocean temperatures. The task force was shut down in March 2019 without a public announcement and climate change science and information has been scrubbed from the Department’s website. According to a Navy spokesperson the task force was “duplicative” and no longer needed, though the task force’s work has not been fully incorporated into the Navy’s decisionmaking process.Why it matters: The task force was designed to provide...

The stunning repudiation of Sen. Richard Lugar's, R-Ind., bid for a seventh term has sent shock waves through Washington's internationalist lobby. A former Rhodes Scholar, Lugar has spent his career promoting a globalist agenda, since he succeeded the late Jesse Helms as the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One day after Indiana Republicans handed Lugar his walking papers, an outfit called the Atlantic Council held a forum to promote the discredited Law of the Sea Treaty. As former Republican U.S. Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Warner beamed their approval, Obama's Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared that...

Three years ago, a researcher collecting tree core samples in Connecticut was startled to see one of the trees begin to hiss and spit. Even more surprising, he found that the leaking gas could be set on fire. It’s been known since around the 1970’s that a relatively rare bacterial infection in trees responsible for the damaging rot known as wet wood can cause trees to emit methane, a greenhouse gas with 20 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. Trees in wetland soils can also act as straws, sipping methane from soggy, oxygen-poor soil. Yale School of Forestry and...

President Donald Trump's top Russia expert on the National Security Counsel is reportedly on leave pending a security investigation. Andrew Peek, the NSC’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, was escorted from the White House grounds on Friday, two people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Peek had been in the NSC role for just two months, after most recently working as a deputy assistant secretary of state with responsibility for Iran and Iraq. Peek had been expected to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland next week with Trump and other top aides. However, he is currently...

Billionaire George Soros said he will commit $1 billion to start a global university to fight authoritarian governments and climate change, calling them twin challenges that threaten the survival of our civilization. The Open Society University Network will offer an international platform for teaching and research, the 89-year-old said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The university will be launched through a partnership of the Soros-backed Central European University and Bard College. “As a long-term strategy our best hope lies in access to quality education, specifically an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating...

A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.

The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change. As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projectionsfrom the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.

Glacier National Park in Montana put up some signs back during the Obama administration warning visitors to take their selfies quickly because the glaciers would be gone by the year 2020. Unfortunately for the prognosticators behind that project, while some of the glaciers have definitely shrunk a bit, they stubbornly remain in the mountains to this day. That’s a bit of an embarrassment, so clearly the signs need to come down or at least be altered. Unfortunately, they can’t manage to get the job done so the humorous signage is still in place for visitors to chuckle at. (Free...

A 45-year-old Iraqi migrant .. setting several fires in the center of Graz – Austria’s second largest city after Vienna – including ones at city hall and a district court has been arrested. ... arson attacks started .. at the district court of Graz-West.. the man was seen spraying .. flammable fluid throughout the court’s lobby before setting it on fire ... set another one in front of Graz’s city hall.. The staff saw it on video surveillance and sounded the alarm. ... three separate fires were set and that the smoke became so thick that he wasn’t able to...

Australia’s rampant and destructive wildfires were started by arson, and fueled by dry conditions and high temperatures, but you’d never know it from the Golden Globes or mainstream media outlets. In November, a teenage volunteer firefighter from New South Wales was charged with setting 7 bushfires in the region, and then returning with his brigade to fight them. Apparently, he has set 17 fires, and the pyromaniac has now been barred from access to any firefighting equipment. ... Police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months. NSW police...

For two days in a row, Antero Reservoir in Park County has had the lowest temperature recorded in the United States at — brrr — 48 degrees below zero. That's not all. On Monday, Crested Butte recorded a temperature of -31 degrees Fahrenheit. Alamosa, Gunnison and Kremmling all recorded lows of -26 degrees. Jim Kalina, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Antero Reservoir — which is about 75 miles west of Colorado Springs — typically gets that cold every year at least a couple times. It sits at nearly 9,000 feet of elevation, after all. The coldest temperature...

Bitter cold air settled into Colorado’s high country after a weekend snowstorm hit the state. By Monday morning most locations above 8,000 were at or below zero. ... The National Weather Service in Boulder says the temperature fell to -48°F at Antero Reservoir in Park County. A trooper with the Colorado State Patrol in Alamosa tweeted a picture of his car thermometer reading -28°F. Other low temperatures include… -26°F (6 miles NW of Kremmling)