Free Republic

As Los Angeles’s deadly wildfires continue to burn, a group of survivors is taking aim at the industry most responsible for fueling climate disasters: fossil fuels. Residents impacted by the blazes lamented during a Thursday conference call losing their homes and communities and called for litigation and policies that could force big oil to pay for the damages. In the coming days, lawmakers will introduce legislation with that aim in mind....... There is mounting evidence that big oil knew for decades that their products fuel the climate crisis, yet continued to peddle them to the public anyway and sow doubt...

Oil and gas companies will be forced to face a suit seeking damages over Honolulu's claims they downplay their products' contribution climate change. The Supreme Court turned down an appeal from fossil fuel giants on Monday, rejecting an attempt to skirt a climate change lawsuit seeking to hold companies liable over claims of deceptive marketing about the effect of greenhouse gases. Companies such as Sunoco, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and BP said they are facing dozens of lawsuits, leaving a vital industry at risk of owing billions of dollars over accusations it causes climate change. The justices denied the oil and...

In 1989, Shell published an internal report analyzing two possible futures, one in which fossil fuels were brought under control and one in which they weren't. In the former, which they called the "sustainable world" scenario, greenhouse gas emissions began declining rapidly around the year 2000 and global warming was kept in check. In the other, where fossil fuel production continued apace, Shell researchers predicted a world of climate chaos—one with massive increases in "violent weather," particularly "more storms" and "more deluges." These disasters, Shell concluded, would create crises of such severity that "[c]ivilization could prove a fragile thing."....... If...

The Biden administration plans to seek bids this fall to buy 60 million barrels of crude oil as the first step in a years-long process aimed at replenishing America's emergency oil reserve, an Energy Department official told CNN. This would mark the first time since the early 2000s that the Energy Department has acquired large quantities of oil for the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the largest emergency supply of oil on the planet. The Energy Department plans to announce the launch of the long-term buyback plan on Thursday to show officials are serious about eventually refilling the SPR, which...

Corn-based ethanol may be more emission-intensive than previously thought and is likely contributing to more emissions than gasoline, a new study finds. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the environmental benefits of the U.S. renewable fuel standard (RFS) remain unclear. Under the Renewable Fuel Standard, oil refiners are required to blend growing amounts of renewable fuels into gasoline and diesel. The RFS raised corn prices, which in turn expanded the land used for corn crops. This increases emissions from the conversion of land to corn crops, and raises fertilizer and water usage, says...

Senate Democrats are set to unveil legislation that would tax energy companies responsible for major greenhouse gas emissions to pay for the costs of climate disasters. The Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, sponsored by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), would require between 25 to 30 of the U.S. corporations responsible for the most greenhouse gas pollution to pay $300 billion into a fund over 10 years. The legislation would require companies to pay into the fund if they were responsible for at least .05 percent of global carbon dioxide and methane emissions between 2000 and 2019 based on data from...

The price of oil surged to $75 a barrel the other day under President Joe Biden's green energy policies. The price was as low as $35 a barrel under former President Donald Trump because he believed in American energy dominance ("Drill, baby, drill"). So, more oil meant lower prices at the pump. It was effectively a massive, multibillion-dollar tax cut for lower- and middle-income earners of tens of billions of dollars a year. But now, with the exploding demand for energy as the world economy reopens, the self-defeating Biden policy is to curtail oil drilling here at home, which is...

Police were called to the Enbridge Inc. Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota earlier this week after protestors shackled themselves to the equipment being used to modernize and expand the infrastructure, in service since 1968, shipping crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to Midwest U.S. refiners. The protesters, mostly white according to photographs accompanying a Reuters report, said they stand with indigenous people who believe the pipelines are a threat to waterways despite no evidence to back up the claims. In fact, Enbridge puts out an annual safety report detailing spills. In 2020 statistics included seven spills, all on Enbridge property. The...

There's nothing like a smarmy hypocrite getting exposed, and North Face, the virtue-signaling outdoor clothier, just got called out as an emperor with no clothes on, following its declaration of war on Big Oil. Here's the must-see smackdown video, done by a think tank and featuring a Big Oil employee, exposing the company in all its naked glory. North Face had declared war on Big Oil by sanctimoniously refusing to make custom jackets with their label on them for the employees of an oil firm that tried to give them some business. The oil and gas extractors wanted to give...

Last weekend President Trump vowed to travel to Alaska and campaign against Lisa Murkowski in her reelection bid. On Thursday Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) went to Mar-a-lago to beg President Trump to support dead weight Lisa Murkowski. Trump reportedly would not budge on opposing the worthless Murkowski.

Several groups that often are at odds over environmental rules are on the same side when it comes to easing methane regulations at oil and gas sites. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection joined major oil and gas companies, environmental groups and lawmakers from both parties last week in urging the Trump administration not to go through with its proposal to eliminate methane control requirements from well sites and pipelines across the country. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back rules adopted in 2016 that require companies to identify and stop methane leaks from new and modified...

''It’s not at all surprising that in 1977 Exxon management might reject a warning from one of its scientists that rising carbon dioxide emissions were going to pose a problem. It certainly wasn’t widely accepted at that time, and we have the benefit now of 40 years of hindsight. That’s why whenever someone says “Exxon knew”, I respond “Did they though?”

Ah, what are the future Extinction Rebellion members in New Mexico supposed to do? Teens who consider themselves to be climate activists are now on the horns of a dilemma. After Democrats managed to flip the state blue in the last elections, their new liberal governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, began pushing through all sorts of proposals. In addition to gun control and marijuana decriminalization, Grisham decided that all of the students in the state should get a free education at both two and four-year state colleges. What’s not to like, right?Well, according to some teen activists, there’s still a...

Dawn Marie Addiego has served in the state Senate since 2010. (Courtesy) Republicans' power in New Jersey just shrunk again. In a rare and unexpected move, longtime Republican state Sen. Dawn Marie Addiego announced Monday she is switching parties and becoming a Democrat. “As gridlock in Washington dominates the news, it has become increasingly clear that in order to effect change you have to be part of the discussion and not on the outside looking in,” Addiego, who has represented South Jersey’s 8th District since 2010, said in a statement. “The people of the 8th District did not elect me...

We knew (or at least feared) that this was coming, but Friday saw the finalization of the new biofuels – specifically ethanol – blending requirements for 2019 and 2020. And true to the promises that President Trump made to Iowa politicians, we did not see any significant reductions in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandates. In fact, they went up, much the same as under Obama’s EPA. (EPA website)

Big Oil has poured a lot of money to defeat energy-restricting ballot initiatives in various states in the midterm elections, and it succeeded in two key votes. Voters in Colorado were asked to vote on a ballot proposition to increase the setback distance for drilling oil and gas wells by five times to 2,500 feet, which would have put a lot of land off limits for new developments. Voters in Washington State voted on a proposal to instate a U.S. first state-wide carbon tax. Both initiatives failed, and both ‘no’ camps were supported by Big Oil. In Colorado, Proposition 112...

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies. Of course, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.Somehow, improved technology and geological acumen kept finding more oil. Then the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution postponed the...

An elaborate hoax based on forged documents escalates the phenomenon of “fake news” and reveals an audience on the left that seems willing to believe virtually any claim that could damage Trump. In the third week of January, an Israeli named Yoni Ariel flew from Tel Aviv to Rome carrying $9,000 in cash on a secret mission to bring down Donald Trump. There, he met with an Italian businessman. Seated at a table toward the rear of a café, away from the street where they might attract unwanted attention, Ariel recalled, he handed over the cash. In exchange he was...

You can understand their frustration, as the steady stream of radical environmentalist successes during the Obama years has been replaced with endless setbacks. Oil, gas and coal leasing, permits and production have risen significantly. Big Green just lost its first Big Cities v. Big Oil climate change shakedown lawsuit. President Trump pulled the USA out of the economy-wrecking, all-pain-no-gain Paris Climate Treaty and will soon nominate another Supreme Court justice. So, all these rabidly anti-fossil-fuel actions in Oakland and New York and across the USA will have no effect on global emissions or even theoretically on Earth’s climate. It’s all...

People over 50 remember the OPEC oil embargoes and Americans waiting in line to buy gasoline. We were the most powerful nation the world. We had won World War II, rebuilt Europe and Japan. Yet, here we were begging some faceless Middle Eastern Sheiks for a few gallons so we could get to work. It was both frustrating and humiliating. The answers we got from our political leadership were pathetic. Yes, they authorized farmers to start making ethanol and gave tax credits to the big refineries to get them to blend it. Congress created a Department of Energy to look...