Free Republic

The European Commission is facing a furious backlash over plans to allow gas and nuclear to be labelled as “green” investments, as Germany’s economy minister led the charge against “greenwashing”. The EU executive was accused of trying to bury the proposals by releasing long-delayed technical rules on its green investment guidebook to diplomats on New Year’s Eve, hours before a deadline expired. The draft proposals seen by the Guardian would allow gas and nuclear to be included in the EU “taxonomy of environmentally sustainable economic activities”, subject to certain conditions. The taxonomy is a classification system intended to direct billions...

Arctic Sea Ice for 1-1-2022 is the highest since 2004.

It could be a coincidence—or it could foretell an historic Supreme Court term. The Court has now accepted two cases for this term that could threaten the essential legal underpinnings of the federal administrative state. The first is American Hospital Association v. Becerra, in which the plaintiff questions the Chevron doctrine—a rule fashioned by the Supreme Court itself in 1984 that requires lower federal courts to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of their delegated authorities, where the statute is ambiguous and the agency’s decision is “reasonable.” Under this rubric, lower federal courts have given administrative agencies wide leeway to interpret...

While EU member states provide financial support to poor households affected by rising energy bills, the European Commission is focusing on long term solutions like energy efficiency and renewables, which have the potential to “eradicate energy poverty” once and for all, an EU official dealing with the issue has said. Energy poverty is “a pre-existing problem” to the current energy price hike, which is linked to the inability of people to pay their fossil fuel bills, said Adela Tesarova, an official at the Commission’s energy department. “We want to avoid that decarbonisation makes this problem worse,” she told a EURACTIV...

The new Netflix film Don’t Look Up is a star-studded allegory about climate change. The world faces a clear and imminent threat, and the question the movie poses is: Will we be able to overcome the narrow self-interests of politicians, the business community, and individual nations to defeat the threat we collectively face? Will too many people around the world be too gullible and passive to demand the right actions from their leaders? In the case of the film, it does not give away too much to suggest that doing the right thing is a challenge. The film is not...

Protesters with a group called "Occupy Biden" have spent the past week in President Biden's Delaware neighborhood calling on him to declare a "national climate emergency." According to a description for the protest, which took place near President Biden's residence in Delaware, the group said that "nonviolent action" is needed in order to push President Biden towards making changes to his climate policy. On Saturday, the final day of the group's protest, individuals protested on a road near the president's house while members of the Secret Service were nearby monitoring the group.

Germany on Friday shut down half of the six nuclear plants it still has in operation, a year before the country draws the final curtain on its decades-long use of atomic power. The decision to phase out nuclear power and shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy was first taken by the center-left government of Gerhard Schroeder in 2002. His successor, Angela Merkel, reversed her decision to extend the lifetime of Germany’s nuclear plants in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and set 2022 as the final deadline for shutting them down. The three reactors now being...

Ever-growing environmental threats are pushing many animals and plants to the brink of extinction — the scale of which hasn’t been seen since dinosaurs died out, the German branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Wednesday. The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its “Winners and Losers of 2021,” an annual list of animals whose existence is now acutely under threat — as well as conservation victories. There are currently 142,500 animal and plant species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — 40,000 of which are “threatened with extinction.” It...

No one is safe. That’s the disturbing lesson of 2021, a year when every corner of the US was pounded by deadly weather disasters.

Conservatives have enjoyed Elon Musk's behavior in recent weeks, blasting Elizabeth Warren, opposing lockdowns, and insulting CNN, but the giddiness spewing from conservatives about Musk is foolish. To those embracing Elon Musk's political conversion, remember that Musk has been one of the most prominent advocates of the continuous scam known as climate change. Like Bill Gates and Al Gore, Musk is an extremely wealthy man who fattens his own pockets through propagating climate change. And like those other rich guys, Musk doesn't refrain from using private jets to fly around the world to save it. In 2018, Elon Musk reportedly...

The rumor that the Netflix film, Don’t Look Up, is an allegory about climate change is true. Writer/director Adam McKay, a self-declared democratic socialist and Bernie fan, has admitted as much. In fact, McKay calls climate change “the biggest story in 66 million years. It’s the biggest story in the history of upright apes.” That much acknowledged, my skeptical friends on the right have found the film much more amusing than those on the left. My only question is whether McKay is Bernie Bro’ enough to have intended that outcome. Spoiler alert: Don’t Look Up tells the story of a...

The eco-extremists at the liberal Guardian should realize by now that the internet is forever. The outlet freaked out over 17 years ago about a frosty future thanks to a ridiculously inaccurate Pentagon prediction. The Guardian published a report in 2004 sounding the alarm bells over a “secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs” and obtained by sister newspaper The Observer. Here was the harrowing message, according to The Guardian: “[M]ajor European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.”

The European Union’s executive Commission is considering whether to include nuclear and natural gas in its “sustainable finance taxonomy”, a rulebook that will restrict which activities can be labelled as climate-friendly investments. “We are going to have most likely a discussion tomorrow in college, which then will lead… to approval next year,” EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told a news conference on Monday, referring to the Commission’s weekly “college” meeting.

When Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced on Fox News on Sunday that he won’t vote for the current version of Build Back Better, experts predicted he may have single-handedly killed the world’s best hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

One of the ever-looming threats of climate change is sea level rise, which already threatens to displace millions of people worldwide and force them to move inland by the end of the century. A big part of the rising water levels are hotter temperatures at the poles—home to giant glaciers and ice shelves that hold crucial quantities of frozen H2O. The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, nicknamed the “doomsday glacier,” is already losing 50 billion tons of ice each year. That in itself accounts for around 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. But unpublished research shared at the...

Environmentalism, as much as anything, represents semi-educated man's yearning to return to a less complicated past, one in which man was dependent upon nature's vagaries rather than master of them. Maybe that explains why European environmentalists have decided that the way to reduce carbon emissions from shipping is to use "giant kites" — or, as humans called them for thousands of years, "sails." This is not a joke. It's absolutely real and highlights just how ludicrous the modern left has become. There is nothing in the world more charming than a movie or TV series based upon Jane Austen's books....

NEWS RELEASEEnvironmental Quality Commission votes to establish Climate Protection Program Date: Dec. 16, 2021New DEQ program will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon by 90% by 2050Statewide, OR — Today the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission voted 3-1 to establish the Climate Protection Program which sets enforceable and declining limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels used throughout Oregon. The limits apply to diesel, gasoline, natural gas and propane, used in transportation, residential, commercial and industrial settings.Along with other actions by the Oregon Legislature, this makes Oregon one of the few states in the nation with a comprehensive and...

"An attempt by the U.N. Security Council to pass what would have been the first-ever standalone resolution linking climate change and the council’s primary mandate of maintaining international peace and security was torpedoed Monday by Russia. Russia used its veto power to kill the resolution drafted by Ireland and Niger. India also voted “no” while China abstained. ..."

The Left’s credo: Never, ever, ever let a good crisis go to waste.FEMA chief says powerful storms ‘new normal’ in era of climate change.As usual of course the existing facts don’t support her stupid claim.Mind you, the US didn’t even have a nationwide Doppler Radar system during the 1954-74 tornado cycle. It wasn’t installed until the mid-90s and has been significantly updated ever since so we are now reporting previously undetectable tornadic events. So who knows how many tornadoes there actually were between 1954-74. It wouldn’t have been less but it could have been more – much more, maybe double...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has twisted the climate change movement into a political and economic weapon against the West, according to a new report by The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a London-based non profit.Titled “China’s Energy Dream,” the report details the CCP’s manipulation of international climate agreements and comes to a startling conclusion: “China uses climate policy both as a way to strengthen its economy and as a weapon for weakening other countries.”According to the report’s author Patricia Adams, ample evidence of this corruption was seen at the recent “COP 26” climate summit held in Glasgow. At China’s insistence,...