Free Republic

“Climate change” is the last priority for Americans and has dropped as an issue that must be dealt with immediately, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll on Friday. The poll found that “climate change” was last on the list of most important priorities for Americans. Respondents ranked the economy (76 percent), inflation (73 percent), crime (59 percent), Ukraine (58 percent), immigration (48 percent), and then “climate change” (39 percent) in respective order of importance. Fewer Americans also see “climate change” as a pressing issue last year. Today, only 49 percent of respondents said “climate change” is a pressing issue and...

Europe is not going to achieve a competitive energy transition with the current interventionist policies. Europe does not depend on Russian gas due to a coincidence, but because of a chain of mistaken policies: banning nuclear in Germany, prohibiting the development of domestic natural gas resources throughout the European Union, added to a massive and expensive renewable rollout without building a reliable backup. Solar and wind do not reduce dependency on Russian natural gas. They are necessary but volatile and intermittent. They need backup from nuclear, hydro, and natural gas for security of energy supply. Dependency on these backup sources...

“I guarantee you, we are going to end fossil fuel,” said then-candidate Joe Biden, declaring war on domestic energy producers. Now, 14 months into his presidency, the budgets of Americans and small businesses are being squeezed by record-high gas prices and historic levels of inflation. Before Biden's crusade against domestic energy, businesses enjoyed low gas prices thanks to Republican policies that prioritized energy independence. In fact, during the Trump administration, the U.S. became the world’s number one producer of oil and strengthened our lead as one of the top natural gas producers. Our energy exports reached an all-time high, marking...

Democrats in the House of Representatives blocked Republican efforts to move ahead with consideration of the American Energy Independence from Russia Act on Thursday that would have reopened U.S. energy projects to combat the rising cost of fuel caused by the Biden administration's anti-fossil fuel agenda. 218 Democrats voted against considering the proposal offered on the House floor by Rep. Michelle Fischbach (R-MN), defeating the House GOP's plan for the fourth time and stopping the Republicans' plan to to bring relief to Americans who saw gas prices hit their all-time average high in March. The legislation offered by Republicans would...

Team Biden doubled down on calls for America to switch from gasoline cars to electric vehicles, and from coal and natural gas electricity generation to wind, solar, and expensive backup battery power. They claim this massive, costly restructuring of America can replace “dirty, planet-threatening” fossil fuels with “clean, renewable, sustainable” wind, solar and battery energy. It’s a duplicitous con. Wind turbines and solar panels on this scale would defile millions of acres of crop, scenic and habitat land. They would kill millions of birds, bats and other wildlife. They require massive amounts of raw materials (and thus mining) to create...

The race to a low-carbon future via electric vehicles already comes with a hefty price tag. But that price tag may enlarge even more in the coming months if the skyrocketing cost of lithium serves as any indication. What are the details? The cost of lithium carbonate — a key ingredient used in the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries and other low-carbon energy resources such as solar panels — has jumped 95% already in 2022, and is up almost 500% year-over-year. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a leading price reporting agency, battery-grade lithium carbonate (EXW China, ≥99.5% Li2CO3) was averaging...

The "Greens" promise renewables, solar and wind power, will replace fossil fuels. After all, the wind and sun are free, and they don't pollute! Oops. Now countries that embraced renewables are so desperate for power that they eagerly import coal, the worst polluter of all! Do they apologize? No. Greens never apologize. Germany was a leader in renewable energy, so confident in solar and wind power that they closed half their nuclear plants. Oops. That leaves Germans so short of power that Germans are now desperate to buy fossil fuels from Russia. Even worse, pollution-wise, high-pollution coal now tops wind...

When President Biden was sworn into office, crude oil was selling for forty dollars a barrel or less. The price was reasonably stable, and gasoline and diesel were affordable for most drivers. Biden came into office preaching the benefits of clean energy and stopped the new drilling on and leasing of federal lands to promote it. As a result, the United States went from being an exporter of crude oil and natural gas to an importer, with a large source of imported oil being Russia. As the supply tightened, producers raised the price, and the crude that was selling for...

A "Climate Justice" rally hosted in Albany by the left-wing organization NY Renews on Tuesday was billed as "a day to remember" by organizers who hoped to "flood the streets of Albany to demand $15 billion for climate, jobs, and justice." But what may be remembered, rather than what appeared to be far less than a "flood" of climate alarmists, is one sign that was present at the gathering. Yes, that is "climate change" depicted as a plane headed for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which stood in lower Manhattan until they were destroyed by Muslim extremist...

The retreat of the United States and her allies before the Chinese-backed Taliban in Afghanistan and the failure of the West’s feeble attempts at diplomacy in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine share a sinister aetiology that has attracted remarkably little attention. A relentless, targeted campaign of desinformatsiya – systematic reputational destruction or “unpersoning” by Communist front groups posing as environmental campaign entities but in reality fostered, funded and too often founded by Moscow and Beijing – has all but silenced thousands of skeptical climate researchers who had formerly been able to debate the climate question in the sunlight...

On Monday night, all three evening newscasts hyperventilated over a report from the United Nations (U.N.) that allegedly claims the world will suffer grave environmental consequences if nothing is done about "climate change". Instead of reporting on the breaking news that Hunter Biden's former business partner was just convicted of defrauding an impoverished Native American tribe, the networks decided to needlessly frighten their viewers about the climate. On ABC's World News Tonight, anchor David Muir -- while sitting in front of a screen that says "alarming climate change report" -- glumly reported the window to solve climate change is "rapidly...

For the past hundred years, the public has been warned of an existential threat that the Arctic ice would soon be gone and coastal cities would be devastated. This is from 1922 in the Washington Post by the Associated Press. The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer The only time the media deviated from saying that the ice was melting fast was in the 1970s, when they said we were under an existential threat that there was a coming ice age. Somehow, all the things we are constantly told cause warming, including coal, oil, humans, cars, CO2,...

Major U.S. oil and gas industry groups urged the Biden administration Thursday to boost domestic energy production amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. On Thursday, the global price of oil surged past $100 per barrel for the first time in nearly eight years after Russia unleashed a full-scale offensive against Ukraine. Oil prices are the largest factor in determining gas prices for fossil fuel companies. Russia provided more oil to the U.S. than any other country except Canada between January 2021 and November 2021, U.S. Energy Information Administration data showed. The country, which exported nearly 65% of the 10.5...

Last summer, the Biden administration announced more details regarding the President’s plan to promote a massive increase in electric vehicle use in the United States, replacing internal combustion engine cars with all of their climate-wrecking carbon emissions. In December, they unveiled an ambitious plan to have charging stations in place around the country to keep the electric vehicles running. And, of course, Biden instructed all federal agencies to immediately start replacing their gas-powered vehicles with electric replacements. That was supposed to include the United States Postal Service, which operates one of the largest fleets of government vehicles in the world....

When was the last time you were stuck in an elevator due to a power blackout? Or patients at your local hospital were put at risk for the same reason? These are very common occurrences in the energy impoverished Third World. And they could become a reality for many in the West if deluded leaders there continue down the path of “green-energy” decarbonization. A rare inconvenience usually associated with bad weather in the West, power blackouts are everyday events in the East. In my southern India hometown, I recently had to climb the stairs of a multi-story apartment not once...

Ethanol made from corn grown across millions of acres of American farmland has become the country’s premier renewable fuel, touted as a low-carbon alternative to traditional gasoline and a key component of the country’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But a new study, published this week, finds that corn-based ethanol may actually be worse for the climate than fossil-based gasoline, and has other environmental downsides. “We thought and hoped it would be a climate solution and reduce and replace our reliance on gasoline,” said Tyler Lark, a researcher with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of...

While some of the recent energy price rises have been due to international market factors, part is the direct result of government policy. I mentioned the role of carbon pricing a few months ago in pushing up the cost of electricity. Since then carbon prices have jumped even higher to £84.50 per tonne. Two years ago they were trading at below £15/tonne (via the EU scheme). This increase has been deliberately engineered by government, in order to push up the cost of fossil fuel generation so as to make expensive renewables competitive. The policy is also to track EU carbon...

It’s a certainty that Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” when she heard about France’s peasants starving for lack of bread. However, it’s the absolute truth that, even as 82% of Americans are paying above sticker price for cars, while the last year has seen them struggle with rising fuel prices, Biden chose to announce that he’s going to buy a whole new fleet of cars for federal workers—600,000 cars, to be precise—all of them electric. The past year has been a tough one for Americans. Inflation has rocketed, with three primary causes: the government’s non-stop money-printing presses;...

A new initiative by environmental organization Friends of the Earth (“FoE,” called “Milieudefensie” in The Netherlands) threatens to plunge the Dutch economy into a green abyss. Last Thursday, FoE sent a letter to the 30 largest companies in the Netherlands demanding that those companies submit a “climate plan” by April 15. To support its demands, FoE relies on the verdict it won in a case against Shell, in which the District Court of The Hague ordered Shell to accelerate its emission reductions to solve the “climate crisis.” With that verdict in hand, FoE is now trying to bring the entire...

Actor and superyacht enthusiast Leonardo DiCaprio told Deadline planet Earth has “literally” nine years left on its “ticking clock,” and that “we should not have any elected leaders, on a state level, on a city level, or a national level that don’t listen to science.” In the Titanic star’s latest Netflix film Don’t Look Up, two astronomers (played by DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) go on a media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy Earth. But instead of taking the astronomers seriously, the comet becomes politicized. The film goes on to make several thinly veiled references...