Free Republic

A reduction of more than 12% in energy consumption in Ireland must be achieved by 2030 under a new EU directive. Minister for Environment Eamon Ryan brought details of the Energy Efficiency Directive to the Government today. The target is being decried as very challenging and it will require Ireland to consume 12.6% less energy by 2030 when compared to 2022 figures. …

The Biden administration plans to use American tax dollars to convince people across the United States that “eating more bugs” will not only help “save the planet” but also a cost-efficient alternative to meat, falling in line with the World Economic Forum (WEF) ‘Great Reset’ agenda. The new push for a “meatless future” came after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began pouring hundreds of thousands of tax dollars into researching trash-fed crickets as an alternative to “unsustainable” protein production.

The Biden administration is poised to soon finalize gas-powered car tailpipe emissions standards that consumer advocates and energy industry groups have dubbed a "de facto electric vehicle mandate." The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed tailpipe emissions – which were in recent weeks submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget for final review – are designed to ensure a staggering 67% of new car sales are electric by 2032. Over the weekend, the New York Times and Washington Post reported the White House is set to double down on that lofty goal while loosening earlier targets. "The President...

A green nonprofit that is indirectly funded by a foreign billionaire is pressuring broadcasters to drop advertisements that criticize the Biden administration’s massive electric vehicle (EV) agenda. Climate Power wrote to numerous broadcasters this week demanding that they stop airing American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers (AFPM)-funded advertisements in swing state markets that rail against President Joe Biden’s plans to impose widespread EV adoption in the coming years. The charitable organization affiliated with Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss health care mogul and billionaire philanthropist, donates millions of dollars to the Fund for a Better Future, which was the fiscal sponsor for Climate...

Sacramento, capital city of the EV-loving Golden State, is the latest city proposing to ban new gas stations or upgrading existing stations, unless of course you’re adding electric vehicle charging. The government recently issued a 2040 Sacramento General Plan, first reported by OPIS, which calls for “future-ready” gas stations. The plan states that the “city shall prohibit the establishment of new gas stations or the expansion of new fossil fuel infrastructure at existing gas stations unless the project proponent provides 50kW or greater direct current fast charger (DCFC) electric-vehicle charging stations on site at a ratio of at least one...

JPMorgan Chase and institutional investors BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors announced Thursday that they are quitting or, in the case of BlackRock, substantially scaling back involvement in a massive United Nations climate alliance formed to combat global warming through corporate sustainability agreements. In a statement, the New York-based JPMorgan Chase explained that it would exit the so-called Climate Action 100+ investor group because of the expansion of its in-house sustainability team and the establishment of its climate risk framework in recent years. BlackRock and State Street, which both manage trillions of dollars in assets, said the alliance's climate initiatives...

New York City could soon ban detergent pods across the five boroughs in the latest “green” push from lawmakers. The “Pods are Plastic Bill,” introduced by City Councilman James Gennaro last week, would make it illegal to sell any pods and laundry sheets if they’re made with polyvinyl alcohol. Fines for selling the pods would start at $400, double for a second violation and top off at $1,200 for flouting the rules more than twice, if the bill becomes law. The bill would also require education and outreach to businesses on the ban for the first year. The law wouldn’t...

Today, Joe Biden is cracking down on manufacturing, but I bet he doesn’t have the scientific data to give credibility to the new policies, but he doesn’t care. He is bending over for the green pushers. Here’s this, from Fox News:Biden’s latest climate rules crack down on manufacturing, ignoring industry warnings of economic devastationBiden admin’s actions will ‘grind permits to a halt for a large portion of our country’The Biden administration finalized regulations severely tightening restrictions on fine particulate matter that the manufacturing and energy sectors are legally allowed to emit, an action that industry said would have devastating economic...

London’s far-left Mayor Sadiq Khan is investing up to £150 million in Great Reset-style technology, which reportedly could be used to charge drivers in the city per mile they travel. According to a series of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests from The Telegraph broadsheet, Transport for London (TfL) — at the direction of Mayor Khan — established a scheme to develop a “more sophisticated… new core technology platform for road-user charging”. The scheme, dubbed “Project Detroit” in an apparent nod to the American automobile hub city hollowed out by decades of leftist governance and mismanagement, currently has 157 staff, some...

The bill also requires a pet animal owner to designate a caregiver for the owner’s pet animal. The caregiver is responsible for the care and safekeeping of the pet animal during an emergency that incapacitates the pet animal owner. First responders will use the system to identify the designated caregiver of the pet animal and notify the caregiver of the incapacitation of the pet animal’s owner. A caregiver must agree to be responsible for the pet animal. If a caregiver later refuses to take custody of the pet animal or cannot be located, a first responder will place the pet...

According to a new poll, nearly 90 percent of ivy league grads support the “strict” rationing of gas, meat and electricity to fight climate change. That's 90%! “Strict rationing!” The poll, conducted by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, is titled “Them vs. U.S.: The two Americas and how the nation’s elite is out of touch with average Americans.” It was intended to assess the beliefs of “elites.” According to the College Fix, the poll was comprised of two surveys of 1,000 folks each conducted in late 2023, and the "Elites" were defined as “people having at least one post-graduate degree,...

ROME — Pope Francis warned of the dangers of “Big Data” Wednesday, noting “algorithms are not neutral” and can be used to spread fake news and create groupthink. Artificial intelligence systems can “be a source of ‘cognitive pollution,’ a distortion of reality by partially or completely false narratives, believed and broadcast as if they were true,” the pontiff argues in his 2024 Message for the World Day of Social Communications. The digital revolution can imprison people “in models that nowadays are called ‘echo chambers,’” the pope states, and rather than increasing a “pluralism of information,” they create confusion.

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday eagerly touted a report from two climate alarmist think tanks, Common Wealth in the United Kingdom and the Climate and Community Project in the United States, that claimed the British and American militaries “owe” $111 billion in “climate reparations” to communities supposedly threatened by their carbon emissions. The Global Times is the house organ of the Chinese government, the worst polluter and carbon emitter on Earth by a very wide margin, but it naturally left China’s emissions unmentioned as it focused on the “social cost of carbon” calculations run by the two think tanks...

In the bizarre world of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a speaker has boldly declared farming and fishing as “ecocide,” pushing for its recognition as a “serious crime.” Welcome to WEF Davos 2024, where the seemingly rational takes a backseat. The claim that the path to peace involves more weapons, more war, and inevitably more death is nothing short of mind-boggling. These declarations sound like a script from a dystopian novel rather than a serious discourse on global issues.

The International Criminal Court should add “ecocide” to its brief alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes to criminalise the side effects of farming, fishing and energy production, a green activist argued during the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Greta Thunberg ally and CEO of Stop Ecocide International Jojo Mehta demanded during a WEF Davos panel dubbed “Where Nature Meets Conflict” on Tuesday that a new international criminal category of “ecocide” to prevent the “mass damage and destruction of nature”. Mehta, who co-founded Stop Ecocide in 2017 alongside the late green legal activist Polly Higgins, said...

Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes condemns free speech on Twitter-X as scary at the annual Davos globalist gathering.Naomi Oreskes: For a long time I was on Twitter, and now it’s become such a toxic place that I’ve concluded it’s not a worthwhile place to spend time. And as you’ve said, it is exhausting. So you do have to pick and choose and you have to think about where, the places where you can get your message across. But I am trying to figure out, I mean, I have given up on X. What a scary name that even is, right. And...

After a summer of record-breaking heat, vast swaths of the United States are now grappling with extreme cold as a brutal Arctic blast brings snow squalls, deadly ice and life-threatening wind chills. As unprecedented heat makes way for cold, it can provide fuel for climate-change deniers who point to freezing temperatures as evidence that global warming is overstated. But scientists are clear: cold extremes will still occur even as winters warm overall. Global heat records outpace cold records — 2023 was the hottest year on record by a huge margin. And even as the US struggles to cope with intense...

Of all the things Pope Francis has on his plate -- from an apparent pervert in the Grand Inquisitor's chair, to looming schisms, to dioceses bankrupted by sex scandal payouts, banking scandals, lavender mafias, and empty churches save in Africa, dialogue with avowed Marxists seems like something that ought to be very low on the papal to-do list. But here we are, the pope suddenly in 'dialogue' with members of the world's biggest failed philosophy, holding a mano-a-mano as if the two were equals, and that includes a pep talk. According to LifeSiteNews: VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Hosting a Marxist-Christian...

President Joe Biden’s climate change-obsessed Department of Energy (DOE) was wrong when it reversed Trump-era rules making dishwashers and laundry machines more efficient for Americans, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday. A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the agency acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner when it repealed laundry machine and dishwasher rules designed to cut down on wash times. The order, penned by Judge Andrew Oldham, also notes that “it is unclear that the DOE has any statutory authority to regulate water use in dishwashers and clothes washers.”

An international team of scientists led by Oregon State University researchers has used a novel 500-year dataset to frame a "restorative" pathway through which humanity can avoid the worst ecological and social outcomes of climate change. In addition to charting a possible new course for society, the researchers say their "paradigm shifting" plan can support climate modeling and discussion by providing a set of actions that strongly emphasize social and economic justice as well as environmental sustainability. Oregon State's William Ripple, former OSU postdoctoral researcher Christopher Wolf and collaborators argue their scenario should be included in climate models along with...