Free Republic

With or without Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidates have much to talk about during their first debate Wednesday night. One key topic that should not be omitted but normally receives short shrift in these debates is energy, and what steps related to energy any new Republican president should take upon assuming office in January 2025. Joe Biden felt energy policy so important that he had his Day 1 promise to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline despite the operator, TC Energy, not being found in violation of any U.S. law or regulation related to it, and he carried it out....

No aspect of the vaunted “energy transition” screams out the word “fantasy” quite so starkly as projections that the U.S. will have to install 47,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission lines by 2035. That’s the assessment not by renewable energy skeptics, but by the enthusiastic promoters of renewables at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As part of an assessment published in early March, the DOE stated that much new transmission will be required, assuming moderate load and massive expansion of “green” energy “in line with the future power sector enabled by all currently enacted laws.” In other words, this...

Vice President Kamala Harris gave a stern warning about the "existential threat" of climate change while speaking with farmers in Africa. Harris, visiting Panuka Farm in Zambia on Saturday, thanked the farmers for a tour of their facilities and demonstrations of their work before turning the conversation to the climate. "The impact of the climate crisis is unmistakable, and without any question in my mind, poses an existential threat to the entire planet," the vice president said. Vice President Kamala Harris gave a stern warning about the "existential threat" of climate change while speaking with farmers in Africa. "The relevance...

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report. Unsurprisingly alarming, the report aimed to turn up the heat on governments, the business world, and every one of us to do more about the energy transition. Decarbonization, the report said, had to move faster and more dramatically. Yet that wasn’t the only document that made the headlines this week. Shell also released a report in which it detailed two different scenarios for the future to 2050. In those scenarios, the supermajor’s analysts pitted energy security against the energy transition – something the IPCC reports have never done....

ROME — Climate change alarmists are pressing for faster transition away from affordable fossil fuels, insisting that the world has only nine years to avoid a “critical climate change threshold.” Citing the yearly Global Carbon Budget report, Zack Budryk wrote in the Hill Friday that humanity must radically reduce its consumption of fossil fuels to avoid crossing the 1.5-degree warming threshold, warning that at current levels that threshold will be reached in just nine years. Assuming 2022 emissions levels, the Global Carbon Budget to limit global warming to 1.5, 1.7, and 2º C has reduced to the equivalent of 9,...

Americans suffering under the crushing weight of historic inflation should be happy to know they can reduce their energy costs by weatherizing their homes, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on "Fox News Sunday." "If you are low income, you can get your home entirely weatherized through the expansion from the bipartisan infrastructure laws, a significant expansion — you don't have to pay for anything," Granholm said. "If you want heat pumps, insulation, new windows, that is covered," she continued. "If you are moderate income, today you can get 30% off the price of solar panels. Those solar panels can be...

Just two years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts made only one grant to an art project that promised to address the issue of climate change, awarding $25,000 to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to commission work informed by "research on the Earth's dissolving permafrost layer." During the last two years, the federal agency has provided $1,369,000 to fund some 40 climate-focused projects. The 29 such grants approved for fiscal year 2022 include support for multidisciplinary artist Hajra Waheed's collaboration "with researchers and organizers on issues such as land sovereignty and food and climate justice"; development of a...

Global warming is not a serious topic. No one cares, but the left wants us all to suffer in order to drop the Earth's temperature by less than a degree or whatever. Let's cannibalize future economic growth, curb population growth while we're at it, and declare war on burgers. These are the most miserable people on Earth. The problem is fighting back against their climate lies is hard when you have the shield of Big Tech there to flag and censor stories that shred their narrative. Before that crackdown, we used to torch the climate change crew. I'll do so...

Here's an amazing but true statistic. After more than a decade of declining carbon emissions here in the United States, in 2021, President Joe Biden's first year in office, emissions rose. In other words, not only have Biden's energy policies been a disaster for our economy and national security as we have become more dependent on Russia and Iran, but they haven't worked as a global warming solution. To understand the utter futility of Biden's "renewable energy" crusade, we must go back about 15 years in time to when the amazing shale revolution, thanks to energy pioneers such as Harold...

Leading Biden officials outlined their methods to keep pushing the administration’s climate agenda if the Supreme Court limits the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday. The Supreme Court is likely to weaken the Biden administration’s efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions in West Virginia v. EPA, with several of the justices having probed the extent of EPA’s authority in oral arguments. President Joe Biden’s senior officials remain confident in their ability to advance the administration’s aggressive environmental agenda by using the Clean Air Act and other government powers. During a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, EPA...

The untold story about "green energy" is that it can't possibly be scaled up to provide anywhere near the energy to replace fossil fuels (unless we are headed back to the stone ages, which is what some of the "de-growth" advocates favor). Right now, the United States gets about 70% of its energy from fossil fuels. To go to zero over the next 20 years would be economically catastrophic and cost tens of millions of jobs. With gas prices at nearly double their price back from when Donald Trump left office and inflation up from 1.5% to 8% in just...

Imagine one of your kids freezing to death in your home. Eleven-year-old Cristian Pineda's mother found her son dead during the Texas blackout in February 2021. Or you have a power outage for three days, losing a couple of hundred dollars worth of food because your refrigerator didn’t work, as Michelle Jones did last summer. The food she had just bought to feed herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter spoiled without electricity. This is likely to become all too common in the future. What do they all have in common? Increasing their reliance on solar and wind and closing coal...

Amidst the serious and sometimes devastating issues facing our nation today, you'll be glad to know our leaders are focusing on the important stuff. I refer to the guidelines published by the Department of Energy for helping Americans prepare for blackouts over the summer. Among its routine advice, it offers this jaw-dropping gem: "Have sustainably sourced disposable utensils and dinnerware on hand so you do not need to use water to wash dishes." I'll admit I blinked in shock when I read this. Sustainably sourced cutlery and dishes? Really? Of all the potential advice for handling blackouts, why did the...

ROME — The city of Bologna, Italy, has announced a pilot program to reward “virtuous” citizens for recycling, taking public transportation, and curbing energy usage. The program, which has been likened to China’s social credit system, is slated to go into effect in September, 2022, using a “smart citizen wallet” app for cell phones. “In September, we will start with a pilot project for the city: at the center is the virtuous citizen, the one who, for example, separates waste well or does not waste energy, or uses public transport and does not receive fines, or actively uses the Bologna...

Team Biden doubled down on calls for America to switch from gasoline cars to electric vehicles, and from coal and natural gas electricity generation to wind, solar, and expensive backup battery power. They claim this massive, costly restructuring of America can replace “dirty, planet-threatening” fossil fuels with “clean, renewable, sustainable” wind, solar and battery energy. It’s a duplicitous con. Wind turbines and solar panels on this scale would defile millions of acres of crop, scenic and habitat land. They would kill millions of birds, bats and other wildlife. They require massive amounts of raw materials (and thus mining) to create...

On Monday night, all three evening newscasts hyperventilated over a report from the United Nations (U.N.) that allegedly claims the world will suffer grave environmental consequences if nothing is done about "climate change". Instead of reporting on the breaking news that Hunter Biden's former business partner was just convicted of defrauding an impoverished Native American tribe, the networks decided to needlessly frighten their viewers about the climate. On ABC's World News Tonight, anchor David Muir -- while sitting in front of a screen that says "alarming climate change report" -- glumly reported the window to solve climate change is "rapidly...

Ethanol made from corn grown across millions of acres of American farmland has become the country’s premier renewable fuel, touted as a low-carbon alternative to traditional gasoline and a key component of the country’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But a new study, published this week, finds that corn-based ethanol may actually be worse for the climate than fossil-based gasoline, and has other environmental downsides. “We thought and hoped it would be a climate solution and reduce and replace our reliance on gasoline,” said Tyler Lark, a researcher with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of...

Alternate headline: Will the Washington Post put the Babylon Bee out of business? We have barely moved off square one in the progressive push to eliminate internal-combustion engines (ICEs), and we’re already hearing about the upcoming systemic racism in their proposed replacement. Here’s the headline, which is almost a satire in itself of the old joke about media reporting on the end of the world: Without access to charging stations, Black and Hispanics communities may be left behind in the era of electric vehicles Get ready for some new and woke vernacular in the EV era. Now we have to...

CNN published an interesting story today about European environmentalism and the law of unintended consequences. It’s a lengthy story but the core of it is that back in 2009 the European Union embraced a plan (the Renewable Energy Directive) to reduced its reliance on fossil fuels and instead depend on renewable energy sources. In most people’s minds that would refer to solar panels, windmills and maybe hydroelectric power. But one of the sources specifically cited in the document was biomass, i.e. wood pellets. The European Union reasoned that the burning of woodpellets was better than the burning of coal since...

One of the country's top physicists, who served as the Department of Energy Undersecretary during the Obama administration, is out with a new book that pushes back on climate change hysteria and debunks the politically charged statement that the science is "settled" on the issue. "Physicist Steven Koonin kicks the hornet’s nest right out of the gate in “Unsettled.” In the book’s first sentences he asserts that 'the Science' about our planet’s climate is anything but “settled.” Mr. Koonin knows well that it is nonetheless a settled subject in the minds of most pundits and politicians and most of the...