Free Republic

An ongoing Department of Commerce investigation into whether China is circumventing tariffs on its solar energy products is slowing the expansion of solar power capacity in the U.S., according to industry and outside experts. “In the blink of an eye, we’re going to lose 100,000 American solar workers and any hope of reaching the president’s clean energy goals,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energies Industry Association (SEIA), said in a statement late last month. On March 25, James Maeder, the deputy assistant secretary of commerce for anti-dumping and countervailing duty operations, announced an investigation into whether...

Republican politicians routinely claim that cities run by Democrats have been experiencing crime waves caused by failed governance, but a new study shows murder rates are actually higher in states and cities controlled by Republicans. “We’re seeing murders in our cities, all Democrat-run,” former President Donald Trump asserted at a March 26 rally in Georgia. “People are afraid to go out.” In February, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., blamed Democrats for a 2018 law that reduced some federal prison sentences — even though it was signed by Trump after passing a GOP-controlled Congress. “It’s your party who voted in lockstep for...

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Republican politicians, conservative pundits and fossil fuel industry leaders have accused President Biden of weakening the U.S.’s economic power against Russia by reducing oil and gas production. Last week, for example, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said, “Joe Biden has given up the best defense we had against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s evil vision for the world — energy independence.” But a data dashboard unveiled Wednesday by the Center for Western Priorities shows that the opposite is true. The federal government has been issuing oil and gas drilling permits more willingly than it...

When Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced on Fox News on Sunday that he won’t vote for the current version of Build Back Better, experts predicted he may have single-handedly killed the world’s best hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

With a younger generation increasingly focused on the problem of rising global temperatures, prominent environmental activist and author Bill McKibben is launching a new grassroots movement to mobilize older Americans to combat climate change and to work on related social justice issues. McKibben, 60, has partnered with co-founders Akaya Windwood, a 65-year-old nonprofit consultant, and Vanessa Arcara, a millennial who worked at 350.org, to mobilize older Americans. Their new group, known as Third Act, is having a soft launch this week and a full-fledged rollout early next year. “Third Act is for people like me — that is to say...

Colin Moulder-McComb might seem an unlikely climate change refugee. The middle-aged video game developer is a middle-class Midwesterner, not an impoverished resident of a small island nation threatened by sea-level rise. But the resident of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., an affluent, inner-ring suburb of Detroit where he lives with his wife and two kids, says global warming is destroying his family’s quality of life. In 2016, heavy rains caused their basement to fill with 36 inches of water. “We thought it was a one-and-done, so we refurnished the basement,” he recalled. After all, they had been living in southeast Michigan...

It’s easy to point out which tactics won’t work to get American conservatives engaged in the fight against climate change. Recently I’ve critiqued arguments that climate hawks should extend a welcoming hand to right-wingers and that Pope Francis’s climate change encyclical will move any Republicans to embrace the issue. But merely knocking down others’ arguments is insufficient when they are trying to solve a real problem. And this problem is quite real: In order to pass comprehensive climate change legislation federally — and to get the right policies also working in tandem at the state and local levels — some...

On Tuesday night, Republicans won big: They picked up governorships in blue states like Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois, and they held House seats in competitive districts with embarrassing incumbents like Michael Grimm of New York, who physically threatened a reporter and is under indictment for tax evasion. But their biggest win by far was taking control of the U.S. Senate. As of this writing, Republicans had already secured 52 Senate seats, thanks to knocking off Democratic incumbents or replacing retiring Democrats in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Another GOP pick up is probable in...