Free Republic

t’s easy to believe that the world is falling apart while watching the news. Before panicking, it may be worth stepping back to get some perspective. Media-driven fear demoralizes us — particularly when we’re young — and engenders terrible political decisions by crippling our ability to do better.... It is understandable and even necessary that the media spotlights today’s conflicts. But this can make us believe that we’re living through unprecedented violence ... The world has, in fact, become much more peaceful... This is of course little consolation to those living in conflict zones. But the emotional tone has dramatically...

I've reported how Facebook censors me. Now I've learned that they also censor environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, statistician Bjorn Lomborg and former New York Times columnist John Tierney. Facebook's "fact-checkers" claim we spread "misinformation." In my new video, Tierney argues that the "people guilty of spreading misinformation are Facebook and its fact-checkers." He's right. Facebook doesn't do its censoring alone. It partners with groups approved by something called the Poynter Institute, a group that claims "a commitment to nonpartisanship." But Poynter isn't nonpartisan. It promotes progressive jargon like "decolonize the media," and it praises left-leaning journalists. Once they even proposed blacklisting...

The liberal media has to find a new way to keep its COVID-19 scare strategy going: Have “health journals” sound the alarm on the “climate crisis.” The Guardian is leading the charge. It screeched in its story’s headline: “More than 200 health journals call for urgent action on climate crisis.” The journals are reportedly “publishing an editorial calling on leaders to take emergency action on climate change and to protect health.” The editorial demanded action to keep global temperature increases below “1.5C” and “halt the destruction of nature.” Too bad for The Guardian that Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg...

Run for cover! The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is warning that we only have a few years to save the planet — a nugget of fear porn the United Nations and the media have been peddling for decades. Liberal outlet The Guardian ran a climate propaganda story headlined “Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible – IPCC’s starkest warning yet.” The outlet took a nosedive into absurdity by blaming humanity for “climate crimes”: “IPCC’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell.” The outlet took the IPCC report and screeched that unless “rapid and drastic reductions in greenhouse...

Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg joined Fox Business to discuss his recent op-ed lambasting President Joe Biden’s eco-extremist agenda. Lomborg’s op-ed called Biden’s agenda “unrealistic” and “implausible.” Lomborg swatted down the assertion that climate policies make us “richer.” Biden’s “own [climate] summit showed the need for arm-twisting even just to make a few of the participants promise expensive new policies,” Lomborg wrote. Lomborg told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on April 23 that Biden was “promising twice as much reduction as what [former President Barack] Obama did.” He continued: “That’s not only going to be incredibly hard to do...

Hoover Institution visiting fellow Bjorn Lomborg joined Fox Business to slap down the left’s climate change fanaticism. Lomborg told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow that there’s “a lot of hype going on with climate change.” He suggested that there has been a lack of a sense of proportion when it comes to the focus on climate change. Specifically, Lomborg stated that “the U.N. Climate Panel tells us that in the 2070s — so, more than 50 years from now — the net impact of global warming will be equivalent to each one of us losing [only] somewhere between 0.2 and...

First there was Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, then came Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm, and now Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never. All three authors sound the common theme that the hyper-green environmental activists who have captured, politicized, and monetized the concern for the environment have, as Lomborg explains, created a false climate alarm which has “costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.” To varying degrees, all three authors come from a strong environmental activist background, which observation makes their public revelations even more noteworthy. Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore,...

A renowned global economist has told 60 Minutes that total society lockdown is not a sustainable long term solution to stopping the spread of coronavirus. Danish political scientist Dr Bjorn Lomborg describes a delicate and difficult balance that needs to be achieved in order to stop the spread of the virus without causing total economic meltdown. But can we stop the spread of coronavirus without destroying global economies?

Empty Gestures On Climate Change Switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, wash your clothes in cold water, eat less meat, recycle more, and buy an electric car: we are being bombarded with instructions from climate campaigners, environmentalists, and the media about the everyday steps we all must take to tackle climate change. Unfortunately, these appeals trivialize the challenge of global warming, and divert our attention from the huge technological and policy changes that are needed to combat it. For example, the British nature-documentary presenter and environmental campaigner David Attenborough was once asked what he as an individual would do to fight...

Over 2 billion people are facing a water crisis, and water-related hygiene and sanitation problems. Clean water is the base for economic development of any society. Water treatment produces clean water. Water treatment includes sedimentation, filtration, aeration, solar treatment, chlorination, and sterilization by boiling. A wide range of treatment processes have evolved to suit the different local conditions. Water treatment must produce ‘clean water’, which is having all contaminants safely below the maximum permissible limits (MPL). With oft revised MPL, new materials are explored to address the presence of contaminants such as microbes, heavy metal ions, oils, pesticides, disinfection byproduct...

(Skip) Far from the “end of the world,” the impact of warming is what we’d expect from roughly a single economic recession taking place over the next half century. (Skip) If the world isn’t ending, and the impact of global warming by 2030 is much less than 0.2 percent to 2 percent of GDP, then we need to start comparing costs with benefits. This is the bread and butter of William Nordhaus, the only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize. His careful work over many decades shows that a globally ­coordinated, moderate and rising carbon tax could reduce temperatures...

Cape Town is in the unenviable situation of being the first major city in the modern era to face the threat of running out of drinking water. However, the plight of the drought-hit South African city is just one extreme example of a problem that experts have long been warning about - water scarcity. Despite covering about 70% of the Earth's surface, water, especially drinking water, is not as plentiful as one might think. Only 3% of it is fresh. Over one billion people lack access to water and another 2.7 billion find it scarce for at least one month...

**SNIP** The Oscar buzz comes despite pushback from skeptics, led by University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist who accused Mr. Gore of attributing natural phenomena to human-caused climate change. In September, Mr. Spencer published an 84-page e-book, “An Inconvenient Deception,” which blasted the film as “bursting with bad science, bad policy, and some outright falsehoods.” “An Inconvenient Truth” was similarly rebuked by skeptics — Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg challenged it in a book and film called “Cool It”—but the movie earned $24 million at the box office, making it the 11th-highest grossing documentary of...

The election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both houses have terrified environmentalists and climate campaigners, who have declared that the next four years will be a “disaster.” Fear is understandable. We have much to learn about the new administration’s plans. But perhaps surprisingly, what little we know offers some cause for hope. It should not need to be restated in 2016 that climate change is real and mostly man-made. It is hard to know whether Trump will acknowledge this. He has called global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, but stated that this was a joke; he...

Reducing 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ on the EU emissions trading system costs £5; but instead, the UK Government subsidises each car with £4,500. All of the world’s electric cars sold so far have soaked up £9 billion in subsidies, yet will only save 3.3 million tonnes of CO₂. This will reduce world temperatures by 0.00001°C in 2100 – the equivalent of postponing global warming by about 30 minutes at the end of the century. Electric cars will be a good idea, once they can compete – which will probably be by 2032. But it is daft to waste billions of...

The plan we are most likely to adopt to address climate change will cost far too much and do next to nothing. The fight over the science of warming is over, yes. But the debate over the solution to global warming hasn't even begun. I. A False Choice On a family visit to Kenya long before he became president of the United States, Barack Obama declared that he wanted to go on safari. His Kenyan half sister, Auma, chided him for being a neocolonialist."Why should all that land be set aside for tourists," she asked, "when it could be used...

Which is worse, paying for stuff you use . . . or being constantly harassed for using it? There is talk of drought, these days, in several states of our union. And governments, local and state, are becoming draconian. Further, the moralistic crowd is out, telling us to conserve water as if it were a moral imperative on the order of Do No Murder or Thou Shalt Not Steal. This is the world of hyper-regulation of hydro-usage, the penalizing — even criminalizing — of consuming “too much” H2O. To deal with its drought, California now regards it as criminal to...

The world will run out of fresh water long before it runs out of oil, with the potential for major deficits by 2030, the chairman of bottled water giant Nestle said. "We have a major water management crisis," Peter Brabeck-Letmathe told CNBC on the sidelines of the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference on Tuesday. "We are destroying 20 percent more water for human consumption than there is available." Around 1.2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the world's population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500 million people are approaching this situation, according to data from the United Nations....

Bill Gates and friends have developed a simple system to convert human feces into electricity, fresh water and pathogen-free ash – and no stink! In a quest to find a way to end the tragic death of more than 700,000 children annually from drinking bad water, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has sponsored a variety of waste treatment programs in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Janicki Bioenergy develops and manufactures a variety of sizes of this system. It uses the combustible biomass (roughly 20% of the feces) to heat mass quantities to ~2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The super-heated steam from...

YouTube/thegatesnotesBill Gates has taken to his blog to discuss the latest project from the philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: a machine that transforms human waste into clean water and electricity. According to Gates, at least 2 billion people worldwide don't have access to adequate sanitation, with human waste often polluting the water supply and remaining untreated.The "Omniprocessor" aims to help with this problem. Its development is led by Seattle-based engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy.The machine extracts water from sewage that's piped in or delivered to the facility. The dry sewage is then incinerated to generate steam, which powers the entire...