Free Republic

President Donald Trump plans to sign a trio of resolutions Thursday to revoke California’s nation-leading vehicle emissions standards. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), author of a resolution to nix the state’s electric vehicle sales mandate via the Congressional Review Act, and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) confirmed that the White House has scheduled the signings at 11 a.m. on Thursday. Trump’s signature will finalize his administration’s monthslong effort to thwart California’s authority to set stricter electrification rules for passenger vehicles and commercial trucks, along with higher standards for heavy-duty diesel engines. Trump’s EPA revoked an earlier version of California’s vehicle emissions...

President Donald Trump rescinded 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive actions with the stroke of a pen on Monday night. “Several EOs imposed crushing emissions standards designed to end gas powered vehicles, set an EV mandate by 2030, canceled the Keystone Pipeline, stopped drilling, and prevented permitting,” the sheet notes.

Starting Jan. 1, Washington may halt sales of new motorhomes and large trucks powered by diesel or gasoline due to emissions regulations modeled after California’s standards. The new rules apply to vehicles with more than 8,500 pounds gross vehicle weight, impacting most RVs, medium- to heavy-duty trucks and interstate tractor-trailers. “This has caused quite a disruption in the industry,” Washington State Truckers Association CEO Sheri Call told KIRO Newsradio Thursday. The changes stem from California’s Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) legislation, which Washington lawmakers committed to follow in 2020. The RV and trucking industries are now bracing for a major shift...

A new study has found that a vast majority of climate policies enacted since 1998 across 41 countries have been utterly ineffective.The Biden-Harris administration has spent more of taxpayers’ money on climate policies than any previous U.S. administration. But a new study found that most of the climate policies enacted in the last 25 years, including the ones the Biden-Harris administration imposed on American businesses and consumers, haven’t work.The study, published in the Journal of Science, evaluated about 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 by 41 OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The study found...

Too hard and too costly. That sums up the reason Air New Zealand has abandoned a goal to cut its carbon emissions by 2030, blaming a range of difficulties Tuesday for the decision. Delivery delays of fuel-efficient aircraft and the affordability of alternative jet fuels were the two key factors in the surprise move. The move makes it the first major carrier to back away from such a climate target, the BBC reports. The airline added it is working on a new short-term target and it remains committed to an industry-wide goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 as...

A coalition of energy, biofuel and agriculture groups, – including the Illinois Corn Growers Association – are taking their challenge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions mandate to the nation’s highest court. The group filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the EPA’s decision to grant a waiver to California for its 2021-2025 electric vehicle mandate. Illinois lawmakers have considered adopting California’s strict EV policies. The petition asks the high court to throw out an appeals court decision that rejected legal arguments by 17 states over California’s EV mandate. The states had...

A “climate cartel” made up of left-wing advocacy groups and Wall Street firms have colluded to force American companies to reduce carbon emissions, a congressional committee charged in a scathing report Tuesday. The interim report is the first of its kind produced by the Republican-led Judiciary Committee in the House since it launched an investigation in late 2022 into whether corporate efforts to tackle climate change violate antitrust laws. It accused business groups and advocacy organizations of “muzzling corporate free speech” and “handcuffing company leadership” through “ever-escalating pressure tactics,” which included “taking out” directors at firms that are deemed “recalcitrant.”...

Professor Bill McGuire is a well-known vulcanologist and climate scientist who doesn't care much for humanity. He tweeted out a scathingly brilliant idea if you're in the mortuary business or work as a grave digger. "If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic #climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate." https://t.co/hzga69EhV3— Bill McGuire (@ProfBillMcGuire) May 11, 2024Ooopsie. McGuire deleted the tweet a few hours later but had no regrets. The trouble is, we just don't...

The Senate on Wednesday afternoon voted in favor of passing a bill reversing the Biden administration's actions mandating states to track and set reduction goals for greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles on highways. The chamber approved the resolution in a 53-47 vote in which Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Jon Tester, D-Mont.; and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., joined every Republican voting in the affirmative. The bill was introduced in February by Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; and Manchin. "Few things are more frustrating in government than un-elected bureaucrats asserting authority they don’t have and foisting federal...

The Biden administration has announced in recent weeks new stringent emissions requirements for virtually the entire American transportation system.The Environmental Protection Agency will mandate by the year 2035 that virtually every car made and sold in America must be an EV. No more gas cars. The New York Times comically declared that motorists don't have to worry because this "is not a ban on gasoline-powered vehicles." Sure it isn't. Today less than 2% of cars use the electric power grid for fuel. So soon we will see 50 times more demand for electricity from autos. Then the EPA announced new...

California would need to triple the rate of emissions cuts that the state has undertaken since 2010 in order to meet its climate goals for 2030, a new report has found. The Golden State’s aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990’s levels by 2030 may be unachievable, according to this year’s California Green Innovation Index, released Thursday by the San Francisco-based nonprofit Next 10. After California’s emissions plunged during the pandemic, they jumped 3.4 percent, per the report, prepared by Beacon Economics and citing information from the California Air Resources Board (CARB). “The increase in emissions...

Two years ago, an emissions data firm known as Emissions Analytics, published a study that revealed E.V.s emitted more pollution than gas-powered cars, and the type of pollution they emitted is the most common vehicle-related environmental contamination. The study flew relatively under the radar until a few days ago.

Under intense pressure from farmers, the European Commission has dropped key passages in a proposal for a new 2040 goal for cutting greenhouse gas pollution. “All sectors” would need to contribute to the effort, the EU executive's plan says. But a mention of a possible 30 percent cut to agricultural pollution between 2015 and 2040, which was in previous drafts seen by POLITICO, had been removed. Also excised were recommendations for citizens to make changes to their behavior, like eating less meat, and a push to end fossil fuel subsidies. Farmers' protests have broken out in many countries across Europe...

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...

Loud fart sound erupts during John Kerry’s speech at climate panel John Kerry might need to cut back on his own emissions. The Biden Administration’s climate envoy was discussing US policy on coal power plants at the Climate Change Conference in Dubai on Sunday when Kerry may have unleashed a burst of wind energy. The former secretary of state was speaking next to Becky Anderson, Managing Editor of CNN Abu Dhabi, and Fatih Birol, Executive director of the International Energy Agency, when a Bronx cheer suddenly erupted midsentence. “There shouldn’t be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the...

President Joe Biden has issued two veto threats to protect several controversial agenda items as Republicans in Congress seek to roll back or hamper his administrative goals. If he follows through with the vetoes, that will bring Biden's total vetoes to 10 since he took office in 2020, with all of them occurring this year. The president has vetoed high-profile legislation this year, such as a repeal of a Washington, D.C., crime law and an effort to overturn protections for the nation's waterways. The veto threats floated on Monday involve two areas that are central to both the Biden administration's...

The California Trucking Association is suing the state’s air-quality agency over a new climate action rule that requires truckers to switch to zero-emissions vehicles by 2042, claiming it “threatens the security and predictability” of the trucking industry. In a federal lawsuit filed against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) Oct. 16 in Sacramento U.S. District Court, the trucking association is seeking the court to permanently stop the agency from enforcing its Advanced Clean Fleets rule that goes into effect Jan. 1. The proposed regulations (pdf) would require trucks operating at California ports to be zero-emission by Jan. 1, 2035, and...

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a case that challenged a Minnesota law that would mandate auto dealers to offer more hybrid and electric vehicles. The high court did not provide an explanation for declining the case on Monday. No justices offered a dissent. The Minnesota Automobile Dealers Association (MADA) challenged the emissions law, known as the “clean car” rules, after they were adopted in 2021 by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency at the request of Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat. The emissions standards are slated to go into effect in 2024 for 2025 model-year vehicles. MADA has...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Large businesses in California will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Saturday — the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the nation. The law requires more than 5,300 companies that operate in California and make more than $1 billion in annual revenues to report both their direct and indirect emissions. That includes things like emissions from operating a building or store as well as those from activities like employee business travel and transporting their products. The law, SB 253, will bring more transparency to...

The maximum carbon emissions that several leading green energy states could reduce would only counter a small amount of China’s expected increase in emissions, according to a report published by the John Locke Foundation.The report assessed the costs of “decarbonizing” electricity production across every state, standardizing each state’s maximum possible reduction in carbon dioxide emissions relative to 2005 levels in terms of how many daily minutes of new Chinese emissions those reductions would offset. The report found that states with carbon-free electricity goals, including California, New York and Minnesota, would not make much impact relative to newly-generated Chinese carbon dioxide...