Free Republic

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas. That's a Harvard University study's estimate of the per-gallon price of the president's global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess. So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill? Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak. The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a...

Sunday, Governor Palin posted the following message on her Twitter page: “So..because BP, subcontractors & govt screwed up WE get punished w/energy tax that jacks prices & kills jobs & opportunity? Nope,wrong answer.” Roger Ebert, being the brain of the left, had no idea what she meant. I doubt he ever will but if he does ever connect the dots, he’ll never admit it. Moving right along… Most of us are familiar with the energy legislation that has been a primary goal for the Obama Administration since day one. It was known in the beginning as “Cap and Trade,” or...

SOUTH AFRICA - Excitement is reaching fever pitch as South Africa gears up for the first football (soccer) World Cup to be held on African soil. Beginning on Friday, June 11, 2010, the FIFA World Cup will encompass 30 days of football (soccer) played in 10 stadiums scattered over 9 cities. They are expecting over 300,000 visitors from all parts of the world. This will translate into 2.74 million spectators with a TV audience of some 40 billion watching the 200 hours of football. Half the world will be able to watch the final which expects to see 3.3 billion...

Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus." To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you...

The recently disclosed emails and documents from University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit compromise the integrity of the United Nations' global warming reports. So declares Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, taking a few minutes away from a Thanksgiving retreat with his family. "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in." If any politician might be qualified to offer last rites, it would be Mr. Inhofe. The top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee has spent the past decade in the thick of Washington's climate fight. He's seen the...

In explanation for her "yes" vote on the Max Baucus created health care bill, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe said: "Is this bill all that I would want? Far from it. Is it all that it can be? No. But when history calls, history calls." Senator Snowe is probably right. History is calling. What she has wrong is history's message. History is calling with the warning that tyranny is at our doorstep. The tyranny that threatens us is not the same brand as the violent police states of the 20th century. Tyranny in America will look more like the misguided utopianism...

Liberals have consistently used deception in their attempt to steer this nation to the far left, but as the old proverb states, sooner or later the truth comes to the light. But who would have thought it would have come from their own mouths? Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) on Cap-and-Trade: "Nobody in this country realizes that cap and trade is a tax, and it's a great big one." Howard Dean on why there's no tort reform in health-care reform proposals:

According to most conservatives in South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has officially gone over to the dark side. Under the guise of 'bipartisanship,' Graham has signed on to one of the left's most ambitious plans to impose a socialist agenda in America - government control of the formerly free market through implementation of cap-and trade, the 1,400 plus page Waxman-Markey bill approved earlier this year by the House. The main (scientifically unproven) premise of cap and trade is that the earth is melting and government must step in to save the world. Of course, it will be expensive, but...

As an entrepreneur and resident of Ohio I am used to swimming upstream. Ohio's economy never actually recovered from the 2001 recession. We have been hemorrhaging jobs and population for over a decade. Except for two nuclear power stations and some tiny "green energy" pilot projects, our state is powered by coal fired power plants dotting our lakes and rivers. With our energy intensive manufacturing economy there are few places in the country which will be more affected by Cap and Trade legislation than Ohio. Short of a nuke-wielding dictator threatening to wipe us off the map, it is hard...

Today, the director of the Congressional Budget Office warned the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that proposed climate change legislation would impose "significant costs" on America's GDP and employment. That’s not exactly what proponents had promised. According to CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf, the Waxman-Markey bill passed in the House last June would reduce GDP by between one and three quarters of a percent by 2020, and between 1 and 3.5% by 2050. To the average household that might equate annually to $160 by 2020 and $925 by 2050 – hardly the “cost of a postage stamp” promised by the...

AS Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health-care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry race to meet their latest deadline to introduce a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions. On health care, the House committees and Baucus and Christopher Dodd in the Senate health committee, decided to build a makeshift addition to the health-insurance system that grew out of...

It was a startling admission. Prior to passage of "Cap-and-Trade" legislation by the House of Representatives, Mr. Henry Waxman (D, CA), House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman and co-sponsor of the bill, in responding to a question from Mr. Joe Barton (R, TX) at a May 22 hearing, admitted the following: "I certainly don't claim that I know everything that's in this bill. I know we left it to ....we relied very heavily on the scientists on the IPCC and others and the consensus they have that there is a problem with global warming, it's having an impact, and that...

THE global-warming bill moving through Congress would cost the nation nearly $10 trillion -- while doing virtually nothing to stop warming. The Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill passed the House in late June; the Senate's due to take it up late this month. Its biggest problem (among many) is that it relies on the myth that we understand exactly what causes warming and what to do about it -- that the only issue is finding the political will. Yet a major new study published in the American Geophysical Union's official publication, the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that most warming...

Freepers - Don't forget about the Cap & Trade legislation that passed the House and will go to the Senate. I'm worried that all this Obamacare mania will cloud over the biggest tax increase in world history! Keep the pressure up on your Senators...tell them kindly you will vote them out of office if they vote for it. Thanks

1 Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise. 2 Carbon dioxide is a trace gas and by itself will produce little warming. Also, as CO2 increases, the incremental warming is less, as the effect is logarithmic so the more CO2, the less warming it produces. 3 CO2 has been totally uncorrelated with temperature over the last decade, and significantly negative since 2002. 4 CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food. 5 Reconstruction of...

In case you were off on a different planet and hadn’t heard the news, Michael Jackson died. It was a tragedy. Not that this piece of human rubbish had died, but that the media, including Fox News, carried on as if it was a major loss to mankind. This was, one, a man who had tried to turn himself, through weird chemicals and plastic surgery, into a white version of a black man and a male version of Diana Ross. Then, for good measure, he was a pedophile and a loon. But I guess if a person can moon walk,...

The revolution will not be televised: it's been blinking along on a giant bakery sign in St. Louis, Mo., instead. Fed up with his congressman's vote on a sweeping climate-change bill that passed the House of Representatives on Saturday, the proprietor of McArthur's Bakery took to his street sign and posted a clear message to all passersby: "Russ Carnahan voted to ... close us and other ... small business." David McArthur, vice president of the 52-year-old family operation, a Gateway City institution, is one of a growing number of business owners and taxpayers nationwide who are mobilizing against the so-called...

Why did a bare majority (219-212) of the members of the U.S. Congress vote for the largest tax increase in American history this past Friday, under the claim it was a vote to save the climate? Before you answer the question, consider the following facts. The proponents claim this tax bill will reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which are purported to cause global warming. First, despite the claims of President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many in the media, there is no consensus in the scientific community about how much climate change, other than the normal cycles, is taking...

THE cap-and-trade bill passed the House of Representatives shrouded in a fog of willful ignorance and calculated irrationality. No one could be sure what he was voting for -- not after the 1,200-page bill had a 300-page amendment added at 3:09 a.m. the day of its passage. The bill is so complex and jerry-built that even its supporters can't know how, or if, it will work. And it's impossible for someone to know whether the motivating crisis, impending planetary doom, will ever materialize. Other than that, it's a model exercise in thoughtful lawmaking. The so-called Waxman-Markey bill's formulation was less...

Cap-and-Trade bill that passed the House yesterday will be a declaration of war on the American economy if it ever is enacted into law. It is ostensibly supposed to help the American economy transition from the old, carbon-based industrial economy to the broad, sunlit (and presumably unpolluted) uplands of a post-industrial one. According to an infomercial masquerading as an AP news story, the “climate bill may spur energy revolution.” Overlooked by the AP and other minions of the left is the fact that that revolution has been underway, largely without the federal government’s help, for more than a generation now....