Free Republic

Xcel Energy wants to stop buying electricity from the world’s largest high-concentration solar energy plant, located in the San Luis Valley, and it will pay $41 million to the federal government to do it. The utility company has been purchasing power from the 30-megawatt solar plant in southern Colorado since 2012, when the federally backed project was one of the first of its kind and the largest using the technology anywhere. But parts on the solar farm have been starting to fail and there are no ready replacements — and the project’s owner, Kepco Solar of Alamosa LLC, tells Xcel...

...just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world...Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists... While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago...about 1,300 documented species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded... Read more: What is a 'mass extinction' and are we in one...

Joe Biden is preparing to deal with climate change in a way no U.S. president has done before – by mobilizing his entire administration to take on the challenge from every angle in a strategic, integrated way. The strategy is evident in the people Biden has chosen for his Cabinet and senior leadership roles: Most have track records for incorporating climate change concerns into a wide range of policies, and they have experience partnering across agencies and levels of government. Those skills are crucial, because slowing climate change will require a comprehensive and coordinated “all hands on deck” approach. **SNIP**...

World leaders and businesses are not putting enough money into adapting to dangerous changes in the climate and must “urgently step up action,” according to a report published Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Last year was the joint-hottest year on record and disasters struck every continent. Smoke-belching wildfires burned through communities from Australia to the Arctic. Extreme storms battered coastal cities from the Philippines to Nicaragua, while floods put a third of Bangladesh underwater and covered entire villages in Nigeria. Extreme weather and climate-related disasters have killed more than 410,000 people in the past 10 years, almost...

The election of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and their ultra-progressive cabinet will hasten the death of the internal combustion engine in the United States, despite the nearly even party split in the House and Senate. They will just take their narrow victory as a license to implement all manner of decisions in the name of saving the planet. Or so we’re told. And maybe they’re right. President-elect Biden has promised his $2-trillion “climate change” plan will include “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring that 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emission vehicles...

January 11, 2020 ======================================================== Meteorologists declared it the largest snowfall in the region since 1971. Between January 7–9, 2021, a moist, low-pressure weather system over the ocean collided with a cold air mass sitting over western Europe. The result was the heaviest snowfall over Spain in fifty years. After barely seeing significant snowfall for a decade, the capital city of Madrid was blanketed with widespread accumulations of 20 to 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches). Some suburban and rural areas in central, northern, and eastern Spain were coated with up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) of snow. The country’s State...

Bill Gates has been accused of hypocrisy after entering a bid to buy the world's largest private jet operator, just one month before he releases a book preaching about climate change. The Microsoft boss's company Cascade Investment entered the bidding war for Signature Aviation Friday, teaming up with Blackstone Group to make a $4.3 billion play for the British private jet servicing company. Cascade and Blackstone are now going head-to-head with private equity firm Carlyle, which had already made an initial takeover approach.

Much of the world may be in store for particularly intense winter weather in the coming weeks, according to a study just released by a team in the United Kingdom. Researchers report a major meteorological event is occurring high in the sky above the North Pole. This sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event is estimated to occur in early January 2021. What exactly does that mean? The Earth’s stratosphere is a layer of the atmosphere located around six to 30 miles above the ground. Scientists consider an SSW event to be among the most extreme atmospheric phenomena. It usually leads to...

The greenies have a new battle in the "war on climate change." They want to rid the world of sea walls. Sea walls are barriers that property owners put on the waterside of the beach to protect their property from encroaching waves. According to the environmentalists, though, sea walls exacerbate the way anthropogenic climate change and the resulting rise of the sea destroy beachfront property. I'm sure this a fine theory, except for the part about anthropogenic climate change causing the sea to rise.In fact, as this article from Watts Up With That explains with tremendous clarity, any sea level...

New Jersey regulators rejected a Chinese-backed windmill project twice, but that didn’t stop the Department of Energy. The federal government has awarded $47 million to sweeten the deal for a $188 million project the Garden State has deemed too risky for ratepayers. ... The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities concluded in April that the Chinese company did not demonstrate financial integrity.

Humanity should sacrifice “personal freedom” just as many nations did during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to successfully fight climate change, a German MP has said, adding that there will “never” be a vaccine against CO2. Germany had barely started its coronavirus vaccination campaign when a Social Democratic MP, Karl Lauterbach, warned that his compatriots need to brace themselves for yet another challenge: global warming. “We need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic,” the professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne wrote...

The mass die-off of thousands of songbirds in south-western US was caused by long-term starvation, made worse by unseasonably cold weather probably linked to the climate crisis, scientists have said. Flycatchers, swallows and warblers were among the migratory birds “falling out of the sky” in September, with carcasses found in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and Nebraska. A USGS National Wildlife Health Center necropsy has found 80% of specimens showed typical signs of starvation. Muscles controlling the birds’ wings were severely shrunken, blood was found in their intestinal tract and they had kidney failure as well as an overall loss...

Axios must like propping up Democratic senators as crusaders against fossil fuel special interests while ignoring their own deep ties to special interests, including dark money. Axios climate and energy reporter Amy Harder praised how Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was “calling on the incoming Biden administration to have the Justice Department investigate organizations that fossil-fuel companies have in the past funded.” Harder said Whitehouse was accusing these organizations of “propagating ‘climate denialism and climate obstruction and political ownership of the Republican Party.’” Harder herself took aim at the conservative Heartland Institute, reportedly a Whitehouse target, and attacked it as “an...

Gina McCarthy and Deb Haaland are on Biden’s climate team. This should be interesting given both of their ties to the disastrous Gold King Mine spill of 2015. That year, a mine up near Silverton, Colorado was under clean-up protocols by the EPA. The same EPA that Gina McCarthy was running at the time. Then, the spill happened. The Animas River turned into yellow sludge from southwestern Colorado all the way into and nearly through New Mexico. Who lives in New Mexico and just the year before lost her bid to be NM Lieutenant Governor? Joe Biden’s new choice for...

Now it is just dangerous. While the world holds its breath over the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, the Chicoms are doing what thugs and bullies do. They have banned the import of a number of Australian commodities: coal, barley, wine, and lobsters. The first reaction of Australia's trade minister to China's ban on Australian coal was "But it will increase China's CO2 emissions!" if China burns Indonesian, Mongolian, or Russian coal instead of the high-quality stuff that Australia produces. The stupidity and naïveté of that reaction was enough to generate a headline on Instapundit: "Australia: Chinese Embargo of...

Last week, President-Elect Biden tapped two prominent individuals at the world’s largest money-management firm for key positions within the new administration’s economic team. Brian Deese, a BlackRock managing director who is responsible for overseeing the sustainable investment strategy of the firm, has been named as the new head of the National Economic Council. Wally Adeyemo, who served as a senior advisor at BlackRock and was Chief of Staff to CEO Larry Fink, has been nominated for U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Staffing is Policy as the DC saying goes, and such corporate picks might be a disappointment to some...

This year's economic shutdowns have done little to reduce the world's carbon emissions. While pollution has dipped, greenhouse gases keep accumulating in the atmosphere, locking in future decades of climate disruption and extreme weather. A recent United Nations report says the so-called emissions gap - the "difference between where we are likely to be and where we need to be" on climate policy - is as big as ever. As for who's chiefly responsible for the gap, it's the global rich, the report says. Just 10% of the world's population emits nearly half of the world's carbon pollution. The top...

As president, Biden will lead the world to address the climate emergency and lead through the power of example, by ensuring the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050. The Biden Plan will: Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050. On day one, Biden will sign a series of new executive orders with unprecedented reach that go well beyond the Obama-Biden Administration platform and put us on the right track. And, he will demand that Congress enacts legislation in the first year of...

This morning, The Weather Channel continues (as usual) to broadcast the climate change indoctrination scare tactics, courtesy of the worldwide push by the globalist elites bent of worldwide dominion. Their screed today includes showing how shipment via air, ground by choosing a fast shipment option negatively impacts our climate, and we need to select slower options so that there are not so many aircraft and trucks running around with partial loads. So...delivery by bicycle? If they've eaten veggies, they'll fart and emit methane. Bad. Pony express? Poop methane. Walk? Oh no, COVID spread! Local pickup? Invite total strangers to case...

World leaders should declare a “climate emergency” in their countries to spur action to avoid catastrophic global warming, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in opening remarks at a climate summit on Saturday. On the fifth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement, more than 70 world leaders are due to address the one-day virtual meeting in the hope of galvanizing countries into stricter actions on global warming emissions. Guterres said that current commitments across the globe did not go “far from enough” to limit temperature rises. “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” Guterres said. “That is...