Free Republic

This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal Prince of Saudi Arabia.They were evaluating their joint investments in companies that could help the world combat climate change. Among the businesses in their portfolio, four stood out as having a particularly audacious goal: They were working to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for a profit.As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world...

It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author...

Radicalism: A group of academics wants to force rationing in developed countries to turn back what they see as the carbon threat. How does this differ from a socialist group demanding the seizure of private property? Negotiators from 192 nations will be in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun through Dec. 10 trying to hash out a deal they believe will curb global warming. The hot air won't be from the ocean breezes but from the negotiators' own carbon dioxide emissions. There will be plenty of nonsense from politically motivated academics, starting with Kevin Anderson, director of the U.K.'s Tyndall...

With the Obama administration pushing for cap-and-trade legislation, former Clinton and Obama adviser Franklin Raines has positioned the government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae to make millions by selling carbon credits from American homes. Two patents applied for by Raines as one of several "co-inventors" – Nos. 6904336 and 7133750 – create a "method for identifying, quantifying, and aggregating reductions in residential emissions into a tradable commodity." The patents are identically titled "System and Method for Residential Emissions Trading." The idea appears to be for Fannie Mae to create "Collateralized Carbon Obligations," or CCOs, by utilizing a methodology similar to its...

Obama says we are doomed. but he will save us.