Free Republic

Energy: It won't matter which light bulbs we use as the administration's implementation of cross-state pollution rules shuts down coal plants across the country. Where will the jobs be when the lights go out? It's called the Cross-State Pollution Rule, announced last month, and its implementation over the next 18 months will likely result in the loss of a fifth of the nation's electricity-generating capacity. The result will be likely power shortages, skyrocketing rates and inevitable brownouts and rolling blackouts. Based on Bush-era EPA proposals that the federal courts threw out in 2008, this latest example of legislation is designed...

Scientists discovered in 2005 that birth control chemicals were deforming fish in the nation’s waterways — a phenomenon known by science today as “fish feminization.” The problems first made national news when strange intersex fish were found in pristine-looking Boulder Creek, in Colorado. The fish were the first thing that had ever frightened then 59-year-old University of Colorado biologist John Woodling during his scientific career. Two years after finding the fish, hideously deformed mostly by steroid hormones that had seeped into the water from birth control pills and patches, lead study scientist David Norris, a University of Colorado physiology professor,...

Eco-Extremism: A light bulb factory closes in Virginia as mandated fluorescents are made in China. It's now a crime to make or ship for sale 75-watt incandescent bulbs in the European Union. Welcome to green hell. Thomas Alva Edison was a genius credited with the invention of many things — the phonograph, the motion picture, the incandescent light bulb, global warming. That last credit was given by those who rank light bulbs right up there with the internal combustion engine as ravagers of the planet. The General Electric light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed this month, a victim, along...

Energy Policy: President Obama says the oil disaster proves the need to get off fossil fuels. But before we save the planet, let's save the Gulf and stop exploiting crises to deny America the energy it needs. Saving the planet is nice, but just how do we plug the hole again? With an abundance of hand gestures, the president didn't really say in his speech Tuesday night. He did say fossil fuels were bad and green energy is good, but the people of the Gulf states don't need wind turbines right now. Contrary to Obama's assertions, our "addiction" to foreign...

Politics: The Senate just claimed the title of the world's most delusional body by refusing to strip unelected EPA bureaucrats of the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This was the day freedom died. One wonders why we have a Congress at all. The 53 profiles in cowardice that could not get a cap-and-tax bill through the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to let the Environmental Protection Agency keep the unprecedented power Congress did not expressly give it. It is power that the EPA arrogated to itself through regulation to control every aspect of the American economy and our...

Overregulation: The Senate votes on blocking a government bureaucracy from usurping power never delegated to it by Congress. This administration may put Copenhagen above the Constitution, but we the people have other plans. The GOP's 1994 "Contract with America," a gift that keeps on giving, hopefully will rescue us once again from the clutches of an unelected bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court to regulate every breath we take and every machine we operate. When cap-and-tax legislation was introduced in Congress, the Obama administration threatened that if Congress failed to act, the EPA...

Energy Policy: To save the environment, a senator from Pennsylvania wants to shut off a major source of natural gas. Weren't the roads to the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters paved with equally good intentions? Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989's Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment. The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the...

Climate Science: Noted scientists at a Chicago climate conference declare that global warming is not only dead, but that the planet faces a big chill for decades to come. What about those frozen wind turbines? It's not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own in the most liberal sense. "Global warming is over — at least for a few decades," Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering. "However, the bad news is that...

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House. Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore's appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation's philanthropic leaders. "Time's running out (on climate change)," Gore told them. "We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together." Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the...

Science: An Icelandic scientist says climate change spurs volcanic eruptions such as the one disrupting air traffic in Europe. Rather, the evidence suggests volcanoes cause global cooling and Arctic ice to melt. The stunning eruption of a volcano under Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier has disrupted air traffic over the continent of Europe as vast plumes of steam and ash were spewed into the atmosphere. Once again, we witness the power of nature over man even as man blames himself for nature's acts. Almost every malady on earth has been blamed on global warming, so it wasn't all that surprising when Freysteinn...

Pollution Control: From cars to coal mines, the imposition of economy-killing restrictions is under way. Are the new EPA regulations on auto emissions the precursor to regulating carbon dioxide by executive order? In announcing the Environmental Protection Agency's first regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cars, Administrator Lisa Jackson has promised they won't be the last such rules stemming from the EPA's "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide, six pounds of which every human being exhales every day, is a dangerous pollutant. "These are the first regulations that cover greenhouse gas emissions in the United States," Jackson told reporters in...

Politics: The water spigots are back on, at least temporarily, in California's Central Valley. Turned off to protect a tiny fish, they happen to be in the districts of two congressmen "undecided" on health care reform. One could chalk it up to good fortune or just good constituent service. But in the middle of a contentious health care debate marked by Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases, we may be forgiven if we find an announcement by the Department of the Interior regarding California's water supply a tad too coincidental. On Tuesday, the Department of the Interior announced it was increasing...

Regulation: The New York Times says the EPA should use its authority to regulate our very breath if a Democratic Congress isn't "goaded" into action. Whatever happened to government of the people? It's been a pattern of this administration that if the American people are adamantly opposed to it, ram it through anyway. So it's been with the health care overhaul, offshore drilling restrictions and now the Environmental Protection Agency threatening to become the uber-regulator of the air we breathe. (snip) As Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, noted: "Lisa Jackson, Obama's...

Hoaxes: Instead of having his Nobel Prize rescinded for espousing climate fraud, the prophet of doom is set to receive an honorary doctorate of laws and humane letters from the University of Tennessee for his work. (snip) Gore has not changed the planet for the better. He has pushed policies that have stunted economic growth and increased joblessness, poverty and hunger around the world. He's a climate charlatan, the Elmer Gantry of global warming, and it matters not if his latest undeserved award is printed on recycled paper.

Climate Fraud: Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you. If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it." Perhaps he's trying to protect...

Summary 1. Reconstructions of temperature over the past 1000 years have been an highly visible part of IPCC presentations to the public. CRU has been extremely influential in IPCC reconstructions through: coauthorship, the use of CRU chronologies, peer review and IPCC participation. To my knowledge, there are no 1000-year reconstructions which are truly "independent" of CRU influence. In my opinion, CRU has manipulated and/or withheld data with an effect on the research record. The manipulation includes (but is not limited to) arbitrary adjustment ("bodging"), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data. The problem is deeply rooted in the sense that...

Climate Fraud: A senator wants an investigation of the false climate testimony before Congress and wants Al Gore to reappear. The illegalities may involve more than just lying to Congress. At a hearing Tuesday by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, ranking Republican James Inhofe told EPA head Lisa Jackson that man-induced climate change was a "hoax" concocted by ideologically motivated researchers who "cooked the science." More than that, Inhofe, in releasing a GOP report questioning the science used to support cap-and-trade legislation, hinted that such activities may be part of a vast...

A lot has happened since Newsweek's Nov. 9 cover story -- mostrecently the retraction of Al Gore's rising-seas scenario. Climate Fraud: The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels — this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up. We've not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses. Perhaps he's off reading how scientists were forced to withdraw a study on a projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding two...

States' Rights: A revolt against economic hardship imposed by unelected bureaucrats based on junk science is brewing. This Tea Party movement wants the faulty finding on carbon dioxide to be reviewed and dumped. They say you shouldn't mess with Texas, and on Tuesday the state filed suit to overturn the "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that must be regulated. CO2, the basis for all plant and therefore all animal life, was targeted early by environmental activists as the root cause of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW). But the Earth has cooled...

Energy: A new study shows that our reluctance to develop domestic energy will cost the beleaguered U.S. economy trillions in opportunity costs, reduce our gross domestic product and increase our trade deficit. From trying to stimulate jobs in nonexistent ZIP codes at great expense to worshiping the false gods of climate change, our biggest deficit these days may be in the area of common sense. A new study shows that many of our wounds are self-inflicted as we forgo the wealth and jobs to be found in our waters and under our feet. The study by Science Applications International Corp....