Free Republic

I’ve covered Washington government for years. I understand rounding errors. I get that numbers shift, estimates change, projections don’t always pan out. That’s bureaucracy. That’s life. And then the Department of Commerce dropped a bombshell. Washington drivers are paying billions more at the pump. For what, exactly? The national average for gas is $2.82 a gallon. Idaho is $2.80. Oregon is $3.39. Washington? We’re at $3.82 statewide. In Seattle, it’s $4.12. We have the third-highest gas prices in the entire country. Washington families have paid billions more at the pump since the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) took effect. Before the...

The big news in 2025 for the climate scare was that all of a sudden this scare wasn’t such big news any more. We’re talking here about something that all of the right people had agreed for decades was an “existential” threat to humanity. It was supposedly the single most important thing that we all needed to focus on and transform our lives to stop. We only had ten years to “save the planet”; or maybe it was only five. If we failed, we would shortly be inundated by sea level rise, or maybe devastated by floods and droughts, or...

The New Mexico Environment Department on Friday published a “Climate Action Plan” that contains more than three dozen steps to meet Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. NMED officials collaborated with their counterparts at the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department to craft the plan, which they describe as a roadmap to a carbon-neutral future for the state. Officials said the plan protects energy industry jobs for New Mexicans while also cutting emissions and tending to the state’s finite natural resources. “The New Mexico Climate Action Plan is more than a set of goals —...

A strong majority of Americans say they're worried about the climate. So why do they hear so little about it in the news? …The problem has become even more acute at a time when the US president is openly hostile to the scientific consensus on climate change. Donald Trump and his allies have pushed misleading narratives about the trade-offs of green energy, drawing reporters into covering false controversies instead of facts and making the job of reporting harder. "The Trump administration is playing reporters like a fiddle on the issue of trade-offs" by bringing up red herrings and sending reporters...

Europe stands at a crossroads: compete meaningfully in the AI race or stick to its world-leading climate goals. “It’s like a fork in the road moment for Europe,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives told CNBC. The bloc can either “play in the future” or risk “missing a big part of this technology wave.” The dilemma is compounded by the region’s mandates for green energy. Globally, energy is the biggest bottleneck for building out AI-related data center projects. While the U.S. fires up fossil-fuel plants to power its build-out, Europe requires developers to disclose energy and water efficiency measures, adding red tape...

We often think about human-induced climate change as something that will happen in the future, but it is happening now. Ecosystems and people in the United States and around the world are affected by the ongoing process of climate change today. Climate change affects the environment in many different ways, including rising temperatures, sea level rise, drought, flooding, and more. These events affect things that we depend upon and value, like water, energy, transportation, wildlife, agriculture, ecosystems, and human health.

For students of ancient civilizations, one of the curious facts is that the site of Troy (Hisarlik in western Turkey), whose walls Homer describes as overlooking the sea, is now 6.5 kilometers inland at the closest point to the Aegean. Millions of modern-day tourists have visited that inland site since Schliemann excavated it in the 19th century. Portions of the walls and towers are clearly visible — but the Aegean is nowhere in sight. Why? Because the world's oceans and seas were different at the time of the Trojan War that Homer celebrated in the Iliad. The seas were higher...

The Trump administration plans to break up Colorado’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, the largest federal climate research lab. Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, announced the plan Tuesday in a statement on X. “The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado,” Vought wrote. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.” The move would be a...

After decades of climate panic, the left quietly abandoned the weather—proof its causes shift not with science or facts, but with whatever outrage best sustains power, protest, and cultural revolt. “Stand with Ukraine! Free Palestine! No one is illegal!” Did I forget any other empty slogans? For the last eight years, the basement-dwelling interlocutors of the left have screamed and yelled for revolution, bearing their signs, blocking the streets, and bawling in front of politicians’ homes. Conservatives and the general public have endured these mantras blasted all over social media and the airwaves. These empty epithets have dominated college campuses,...

Woman who helped build the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset exposes ESG labels we’re all a scam based on nothing to make money “They're lying to the public. They've manufactured a climate crisis. It's a multi-trillion dollar industrial complex.” She explains how ESG labels were slapped onto funds with no data, no evidence, and no accountability. Desiree Fixler “In 2020, I got my dream job as the chief sustainability officer at Deutsche Bank. That’s when I saw the fraud, everything was a marketing scam. The bottom line is this: we could not issue this annual report. It was a legal...

Maryland will launch a study to analyze the economic impacts of climate change to determine the costs associated with storm damage and health outcomes. The move is part of the Moore-Miller administration's strategic approach to investing in a clean energy economy and modernizing the state's energy infrastructure. "While the federal government has spent the past year rolling back climate protections and driving up energy costs, Maryland is taking a responsible step toward understanding the true price tag of climate change," Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement. "This study will give us a clear, data-driven look at the real burden...

If we are to propitiate the angry climate, we must make certain sacrifices — like the occasional school bus driver. Via KTLA: An electric school bus burst into flames in Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, prompting a massive emergency response and shutting down a stretch of the 210 Freeway in Sylmar, authorities said. The oversized moonbatmobile burst into flames as it went under an overpass at 9:20 a.m. Sky5 was over the scene as heavy flames and thick black smoke poured from the fully involved bus. The driver was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Fortunately, there were no...

American officials joined Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran in objecting to language on fossils fuels, biodiversity and plastics in a report that was three years in the making.The Trump administration sided with officials from Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran in a successful effort to block part of a United Nations report about the dire state of the planet because it called for phasing out fossil fuels, switching to clean energy and reducing plastics, according to two participants.The section targeted was a summary of the Global Environment Outlook 7, a 1,210-page report that translates scientific evidence collected and reviewed by 300...

The Environmental Protection Agency has removed references to human-caused climate change from its website - tweaking some pages to focus on the “natural processes” driving climate change and wiping other pages from the internet. In October, the EPA page on “Causes of Climate Change,” for example, included a statement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that noted, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.” That clear statement has been deleted from the page, which now mentions only climate changes from natural sources, such as volcanic activity and variations in solar activity. Another page,...

This writer remembers being in kindergarten when her teachers started talking about the hole in the ozone layer. It was going to get bigger, we were told, and the world would begin boiling from heat, crops would burn from acid rain, and cities would be uninhabitable thanks to smog. That was 1988, and now — 37 years later — this writer is staring at a foot of snow outside her window, and there's nary a drop of acid rain in sight. Cities are uninhabitable, but that's because of Democratic Party policies and not smog. Ah, so we didn't have to...

The rule of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa since 1994 has been marked by a widening chasm between poor black people, the majority and a tiny black elite, who get richer and richer. A quarter of our children are so badly malnourished that their brains are stunted for life. Amid this terrible hunger, President Cyril Ramaphosa lives in fabulous splendor. He is said to be worth 6 billion rand (around $350 million). He has mansions in the rich parts of South Africa. He has a fleet of luxury cars. He owns a game farm of 11,120 acres....

Classrooms across the European Union are about to change. A new decision folds climate education into the EU’s 2025 climate plan, from kindergarten through the end of high school in all 27 member countries. Students will not just hear about distant ice melt or heat waves. They will learn how climate science, local impacts, and job skills fit together as part of the European Union’s official response to the climate crisis. For young children, future lessons are likely to connect local weather, food, and energy use to simple climate ideas, instead of treating the subject as a one off event...

Opponents of a pair of radical California “green” mandates were handed a mixed bag in court last week as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily paused implementation of one state law but allowed another to remain in place for now. The brewing court battle could have serious implications for businesses nationwide – and the entire U.S. economy. The first law in question, SB 261, titled “the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act,” requires companies operating in California with more than $500 million in annual revenue to publish a report outlining their “climate-related financial risks.” Critics argue that SB 261 effectively compels...

For the first time in France, a private television channel, CNews, has been convicted of ‘climate misinformation’. The debate on climate change is no longer a matter of conflicting arguments or scientific controversy; it is now an official doctrine that cannot be questioned or even discussed without breaking the law. Meanwhile, on public service television, falsehoods and inaccuracies on the same subject are repeated without any contradiction. This is a first in France: the news channel CNews, owned by conservative Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré, has just been ordered by the council of state to pay a fine of €20,000 for...

As communism continues to gain ground in the worldview of democrats—a reality showcased through the recent election of Zorhan Mamdani to be New York City Mayor—President Trump took the historic step of signing a proclamation declaring “Anti-Communism Week” to highlight “one of history’s most destructive ideologies.” The Proclamation declared November 2 through November 8 as “anti-communism week,” with the President reiterating the United States’ commitment to ensure that communist systems “find their place, once and for all, on the ash heap of history.”