Free Republic

The United States is rapidly becoming a “post-industrial” nation. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers left them, but the pace at which America is doing this is absolutely breathtaking. Nobody can deny that our economy is a complete and utter mess right now, and we only have ourselves to blame. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution. It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed...

Europe’s electricity has become so expensive that trade unions have started warning of the threat of deindustrialization. Deepening Europe’s crisis, the Biden administration has announced a pause in liquefied natural gas export license approvals. U.S. policymakers should heed warnings from Europe, and embrace a policy of making American electricity once again the most reliable and affordable on Earth. Copied After years of misguided energy policies, Europe’s electricity has become so expensive that trade unions have started warning of the threat of deindustrialization. The warning will hopefully prove a salutary one for the U.S., which is now headed down the same...

Leftist outlets like The Atlantic seem to have a bad habit of yanking the most insane political ideas out of the ether to make them sound less nutty than they are. Its recent treatment of “degrowth communism” to fight climate change is no exception. “Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism,’” read the magazine’s head-turning May 28 article. The author, Atlantic writing fellow Christopher Beam, tried to soften the expected blowback from such an off-the-wall idea being popularized by leftist Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito. Saito “knows he sounds like a madman,” Beam wrote. “That’s kind of the point,” he continued. “The...

In an illuminating piece by Tilak Doshi on Forbes, the economic trajectory of Europe under the weight of its environmental policies is critically analyzed. Doshi paints a stark picture of what he describes as a self-inflicted wound to Europe’s industrial base, driven by stringent regulations and a shift away from reliable energy sources. “Voltaire famously said that ‘common sense is not so common.’ Nowhere is this adage more relevant than in the field of energy policies in the European Union. These policies are most vigorously pursued in Germany—Europe’s industrial powerhouse—since it adopted the Energiewende legislation in 2010. The ‘green’ regulations...

Nearly 188,000 dementia cases in the U.S. each year may have been caused by air pollution, researchers estimate, with bad air quality from wildfires and agriculture showing the strongest links to a person's risk of Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of dementia later in life. Published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, the new estimates are the latest to underscore the range of health risks scientists have long warned are being driven by air pollution. "The environmental community has been working very hard for the past 10 to 15 years to be able to predict exposures," said Sara Adar,...

Eisenwerk Verlag GmbH has filed a claim to declare itself bankrupt. The reason for bankruptcy is standard for our time - energy resources have risen in price. Think about it, this Saxon metallurgical enterprise traces its history back to 1380. For 600 years it has survived the Hanseatic League, two orders of knighthood - the Teutonic and Livonian, the Reformation, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and the Global Economic Crisis, but didn't survive Olaf Scholz...

German deindustrialization, transitioning to service based economy The Duran: Episode 1399

OSLO - The sale of electric cars in Norway overtook those powered by petrol, diesel and hybrid engines last year, with German auto-maker Volkswagen replacing Tesla as the top battery-vehicle producer, new data showed on Tuesday. So-called battery electric vehicles (BEV) made up 54.3% of all new cars sold in the Nordic country in 2020, a global record, up from 42.4% in 2019 and from a mere 1% of the overall market a decade ago, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said. Seeking to become the first nation to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025, oil-producing Norway...

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swede and face of the youth climate change movement, arrived in New York City on Wednesday after setting sail two weeks on a solar-powered racing yacht from England. A substantial crowd greeted her after she was escorted into New York harbor by 17 sailboats — one for each of the U.N.’s “sustainable development” goals.

With few coal plants left to shutter, transportation is the main hurdle to meeting emissions targets. Liberal states’ carbon-cutting plans are stuck in traffic. Literally. Transportation emissions threaten to undercut blue states’ climate goals, raising questions about their ability to lead U.S. climate efforts at a time when the federal government is rolling back environmental regulations. Emissions from cars, trucks and other mobile sources are on the rise nationally. In 2016, they overtook power plants as America’s largest source of greenhouse gases. But the situation is exacerbated in blue states, where power-sector emissions have plummeted and planet-warming tailpipe pollution remains...

The UK’s climate laws forged a path for others to follow. But as progressive nations commit to zero emissions, it must reclaim its leading role, writes Sweden’s deputy prime minister. What does it mean for a nation to be a “climate leader” in 2018? At the very least, it must mean having a firm plan in place to deliver your nation’s fair share of the Paris agreement. During that stunning fortnight in December 2015, 195 governments freely and willingly committed not only to keep global warming well below 2C, but to aim for the safer level of 1.5C. And they...

Americans are paying a fearsome price for global warming. The federal government's National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported earlier this week that the three powerful Atlantic hurricanes of 2017 -- Harvey, Irma and Maria -- cost Americans $265 billion, and massive Western forest fires another $18 billion. Scientists have shown that human-induced climate change has greatly increased the frequency and intensity of such disasters This week, New York City showed bold leadership with decisive action for climate safety and justice. Big Oil bought the Republican Congress with massive campaign donations. Republican senators led the witless Donald Trump to pull out...

Last month, America lost a great defender of freedom, Michael Novak.Novak was committed to rightly ordered liberty and cared deeply about the principles and practices that produce it. His enormous body of work emphasized the cultural prerequisites for political and economic freedom, as he stressed that economic conservativism and social conservatism are indivisible.In the words of Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, “Michael forced those of us trained in the dismal science of economics to explain that we should be more than ‘free to choose’—rather we should be free to make good free choices.”Last year, I was the recipient of the...

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.

Disciples of Gaia and the Deindustrialization of America Anyone who has followed the debate over climate change in recent years has probably noted the seemingly religious fervor with which the pro-alarmist crowd approaches the subject. Opposition to the environmentalist agenda of deindustrialization is not just viewed as wrong policy, but the rankest heresy. To deny that man-made global warming is going to destroy the Earth is tantamount to spitting upon the holy scriptures of the “green” faith. Opposition is not just misinformed or wrong-headed, but is actually sinful and evil, unholiness that cannot be allowed to continue by the Disciples...

We’re witnessing the continuation of a long trend. Girls overtook boys for school exam performance in the 1980s and outnumbered them in universities in the 1990s. There is no reason why the progress should stop at equality: in field after field, women are starting to dominate. In the recession, four out of five British jobs lost were held by men. … And there is, of course, no discrimination. The economy is changing shape in a way that is to men’s collective disadvantage. Occupations requiring physical strength are rapidly disappearing; a quarter of manufacturing jobs have vanished in the past 10...

New income data from the Census Bureau reveal what a great job Barack Obama has done for the middle class as President. During his entire tenure in the oval office, median household income has declined by 7.3%. In January, 2009, the month he entered office, median household income was $54,983. By June, 2012, it had spiraled down to $50,964. That’s a loss of $4,019 per family, the equivalent of losing a little less than one month’s income a year, every year. And on our current course that is only going to get worse not better. Obama never tires of telling...

Washington, DC, December 1, 2011 -- Only 21 percent of surveyed medical students could identify five true and two false indications of when and when not to wash their hands in the clinical setting, according to a study published in the December issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of APIC - the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Three researchers from the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany collected surveys from 85 medical students in their third year of study during a lecture class that...

DAVID ROSENBERG: We Are In Year 4 Of A 7-10 Year Depression Cullen Roche, Pragmatic Capitalism Nov. 13, 2011, 6:56 AM David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff joined Consuelo Mack on Wealth Track this weekend to discuss his outlook for the economy. Rosenberg isn’t just bearish. He say the US economy is in a modern day depression similar to what Japan has suffered from for the last 20 years. He bases this view on the idea that de-leveraging tends to coincide during a prolonged period of economic weakness that is not merely consistent with recession. Rosenberg says we’re just 4 years...

The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.