Free Republic

On Thursday (February 12) President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin held a press briefing at the White House where they announced the issuance of the final rescission of what is known as the “Endangerment Finding” — the 2009 Obama-era regulatory edict purporting to find that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” are a “danger to human health and welfare.” The regulatory document finalizing the rescission then came out the next day, February 13. The Rescission Document has the title “Rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards Under the Clean Air Act.” It is...

Planting trees on 6.4 million hectares of northern taiga forest could remove 3.9 gigatons of CO2 by 2100 — five times Canada's annual emissions. Canada could remove more than five times its annual carbon emissions from the atmosphere by the end of the century by planting trees along the northern edge of its boreal forest, a new study suggests. In recent decades forests have slowly moved north in response to climate change — in particular the taiga area on the edge of the boreal forest, the massive belt of forest stretching across northern Canada, Europe, and Russia, where it transitions...

Irresponsible Trump, responsible China: that is the message the BBC’s climate editor seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the President had repealed Barack Obama’s “endangerment finding” and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is otherwise committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. But is there any truth in that? The endangerment finding was a piece of legalese issued in a 2009 ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It stated that six greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide,...

The good news is that the Trump administration has announced its repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding.” As Matthew Hennessey puts it in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter this morning, the finding is the “2009 determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. It was the legal basis for most federal climate regulation, allowing Washington technocrats to treat carbon dioxide, methane and four other gases as pollutants.” The White House trumpeted the repeal as “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Let us cheer while we can. Woo hoo! It represents a victory...

The Environmental Protection Agency repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being. It means the agency can no longer regulate them. President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather. Led by a president who refers...

President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday announced the repeal of a 2009 policy allowing the federal government to regulate the emissions of fossil fuels by declaring them dangerous to public health. Trump called the repeal “the single largest deregulatory action in American history” and said it would “save American consumers trillions of dollars.” “We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers,” Trump said in the White House Roosevelt Room. “Effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding...

Two of the most hotly debated bills of the session — one targeting emissions policy and the other unconstitutional sweeping gun regulations — triggered marathon hearings, sharp partisan divides, and dueling victory statements this week at the Roundhouse.Clear Horizons Act Goes Down in the Senate On Wednesday, the Senate rejected Senate Bill 18, the so-called “Clear Horizons Act,” on a 19–23 vote, with seven Democrats joining all Republicans in opposition. The measure, sponsored by Senate President Pro Tempore Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, would have placed into state statute emissions-reduction benchmarks first advanced under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration. According to reporting...

Apparently The New York Times has snowflakes for brains as it struggled to find the climate change link in the blistering cold that has gripped the Eastern Seaboard. Times reporter Eric Niiler ran a ridiculous February 7 piece of propaganda disguised as news that was laced with a complete lack of self-awareness: The headline? “What’s Up With This Big Freeze? Some Scientists See Climate Change Link.” Niiler floated the possibility that “A warming Arctic can stretch the polar vortex, a high-altitude air ribbon, one says. The ‘wobble’ can disrupt the jet stream, causing extreme cold in the East.” At least...

Per the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Pima County Sheriff’s Office, a person has been detained in connection with the kidnapping of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, the mother of TODAY co-host Savannah Guthrie. Earlier on Tuesday, the FBI’s elite hostage rescue team was deployed on the ground in Tucson, along with the mobilization of several SWAT teams in multiple counties. This was following the FBI's release of images and video showing a masked individual approaching Guthrie's front door and making efforts to obscure the Nest camera. BREAKING: The Pima County Sheriff’s Department, with assistance from the FBI, has detained...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is expected this week to revoke a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, according to a White House official. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule rescinding a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding. That Obama-era policy determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. “This week at the White House, President Trump will be taking the most significant deregulatory actions in history to further unleash American energy dominance and...

Here at Manhattan Contrarian, we get results. After my last three posts harshly critiquing the Federal Judicial Center’s newly revised Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, and particularly its chapter on Climate Science, suddenly on Friday the Center’s Director sent a letter stating that the Center has now “omitted” that chapter! Well OK, I was not the only one objecting. On January 29, a coalition of state Attorneys General from red states, led by the AG of West Virginia (JB McCuskey), had sent a letter to Judge Robin Rosenberg, the Director of the Center, asking for immediate withdrawal of the offending...

It would be a hell of irony if useless preparation for a nonexistent threat simply set us up for a knockout blow from a real one. It has been two weeks since western PA experienced a dump of two feet of snow, the product of the continent-wide storm that was supposed to ravage the nation and throw back civilization 500 years or more. That, needless to say, did not happen, at least outside of Missouri, where it would never be noticed. But there is that two feet of snow. Pennsylvania is in the melt belt, a region in which even...

SANTA FE — The highest-profile climate change bill under consideration during this year’s 30-day legislative session passed its first Senate committee hearing Tuesday, but only after weathering a broad blast of opposition from business and industry groups. After five hours of public testimony and debate, the Senate Conservation Committee voted 5-4 to advance the Clear Horizons Act to its next assigned committee. The vote on the legislation, Senate Bill 18, broke down largely along party lines, with Sen. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, joining the committee's three Republican members in casting "no" votes. He voiced concern the legislation could lead to...

Is it possible just to enjoy a long-cherished international sports tradition without injecting climate scareporn into the mix? Apparently not so for the Gaia-worshipping sub-optimal intellects at The Washington Post. Post reporters Janice Kai Chen, Nick Kirkpatrick and Júlia Ledur apparently forgot it was winter when they collectively blurted out the following headline February 2, “Climate change is making the Winter Olympics harder to host.” Kicking the doom-mongering into high gear, the authors cried that “Even with the intervention of machine-made snow, climate change will substantially shrink the number of locations able to host the Games.” The 2026 games, which...

The World Wildlife Fund, the posh flagship of the global environmentalist movement, has just released its biennial publication assessing “the state of the planet.” Entitled “Living Planet Report 2012,” the publication bemoans alleged catastrophic effects that humanity is inflicting upon the Earth, and calls for drastic curbs on civilization as a necessary corrective measure.According to the WWF, the human race is currently consuming at a rate that would be sustainable only if we had 1.5 Earths. Since we do not, overall human activity needs to be reduced by 33 percent to put mankind “in balance with the Earth’s biocapacity.”The...

As discussed in the previous post, the Federal Judicial Center’s recently-updated Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence contains a new chapter on Climate Science. That chapter focuses on the promoting the hocus pocus of “attribution” studies that seek to blame every latest hurricane or flood or drought on human emissions of CO2, and thus on fossil fuel producers in particular. In my post, I characterized the authors’ write-up of the methodology of these attribution studies as relying on “logical fallacy,” and as “double-talk and bafflegab.” But I think that I inadequately articulated the nature of the fallacy. So I will try...

The Grammy Awards took place last night, and — just like last year — it was less a show about music than it was an anti-ICE political demonstration. Several performers wore "ICE Out" pins, similar to those on display at the Golden Globes last month, including Billie Eilish. Eillish also called America "stolen land" and said no one is illegal. Eillish has not given up her stolen land, which was once occupied by members of the Tongva tribe. It would be hilarious if one of them sued Eillish for her property, just to see what she says. ... Bad Bunny,...

The last time temperatures in Tampa, Florida, reached or dropped below 32°F was on January 13, 2011. During that event, temperatures dropped to 29°F, causing ice to form on the Veterans Expressway. While a significant cold blast occurred in January 2018, the most recent official 32-degree (or lower) reading for the city occurred in 2011. That was fifteen years ago.

As most know by now, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” global warming propaganda film turned 20 a few days ago. It won a couple of Oscars in 2007, one for best documentary. The latter should be returned. The movie was filled with errors. Exalting the celluloid screed with an Academy Award for best documentary is the equivalent of handing the Nobel Peace Prize to a terrorist, an incompetent, a fraud, an unaccomplished charlatan, and, yes, Gore himself, because it was far more a faux-umentary than an honest account of the facts. In the same year that Gore was given his...

Over the past 5,000 years, East Africa has dried out. Now, new research finds that this change may be making the continent pull apart faster. Faults in the East African Rift Zone have sped up since the levels of large lakes have dropped, according to research published in November in the journal Scientific Reports. The findings highlight the two-way relationship between the climate and plate tectonics, said study senior author Christopher Scholz, a geologist, physicist and professor emeritus at Columbia University.