Free Republic

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court should consider a basic constitutional reality: county officials from Boulder, Colorado, cannot force their preferred climate policies on the rest of the nation. Obvious as it seems, that is what’s at stake in Suncor Energy Inc. v. Boulder County, a climate change case the court will weigh for review on Dec. 12. Like the other thirty-odd copycat climate lawsuits filed by states and localities from Honolulu to my hometown of Charleston, Boulder’s suit weaponizes tort law to try to transform state courts into vehicles for deploying sweeping climate mandates. If Boulder gets its way,...

CALGARY - A Canadian pipeline boss led a new report advising the Trump administration on how to more quickly build new oil and gas infrastructure in the United States amid a push north of the border to do the same. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright requested the study on permitting from the National Petroleum Council, which includes 200 members he appointed from both inside and outside the oil and gas industry. The body was formed just after the Second World War. .... The fact that Wright gave the council five months to put together the report — work that would...

Gas prices across the United States have plummeted to their lowest levels in years, with many states seeing prices dip below $3 per gallon. Officials predict that prices could eventually fall to as low as $2 per gallon. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum attributed the drop to several factors, including the reversal of Biden-era regulations that had restricted access to public lands for oil and gas production. "The big thing, of course, that Biden did was basically try to shut down access to public lands," Burgum said. He explained that the previous administration's policies had discouraged investment and drilling,...

A new five-year offshore oil and gas leasing plan proposes 21 sales in Alaska, from the Gulf of Alaska to the High Arctic, and 13 more off the U.S. West Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. .... Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, was among a group of mostly California Democrats in Congress who blasted it during a news conference Thursday. “We are here because President Trump just put out what we believe is an asinine pro-polluter plan to open up our coast to offshore drilling,” Huffman said.

President Donald Trump has signed a resolution backed by members of Alaska’s Congressional delegation to revoke restrictions on drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve on the North Slope. The White House announced Friday evening that Trump had signed Senate Joint Resolution 80 into law. SJR 80 uses the Congressional Review Act to reverse restrictions enacted during the administration of President Joe Biden. Those restrictions, imposed as part of a 2022 activity plan for the reserve, were intended to protect environmentally sensitive areas against harm from oil and gas drilling. ... Friday’s signing was one of several Trump administration actions taking...

‘We are building these things so damn fast that by the time they are online and activated, the problems are already built in.’Since returning to office, President Trump has made the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) a key focal point of his second administration. Just last week, the president signed an executive order launching the “Genesis Mission,” a new “national effort” that seeks to utilize AI to “transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery.”“With the Genesis Mission, the Trump Administration intends to dramatically expand the productivity and impact of Federal research and development within...

Gov. Newsom is single handedly sending California into energy poverty, rather than economic and energy prosperity Most California residents recognize that California’s highest-in-the-nation gas prices are self-inflected, as is the gasoline crisis in the state. This has subsequently increased dependency on foreign oil suppliers and shippers to supply fuels, and as we reported recently, this poses a direct threat to U.S. military force readiness on the West Coast. California today produces less than 23% of its own in-state petroleum needs and imports over 65% of its crude oil from foreign sources, yet the oil and gas industry in California account...

The Airbus A319 that always flies Maduro touched down in Santa Elena de Uairén, right on the Venezuela-Brazil frontier. No official confirmation he's on board or that he's requested asylum in Brazil, but the timing is screaming "I'm out." Brazilian authorities say they haven't been contacted yet. If Maduro actually bolts, 26 years of Chavismo might die overnight The military splits: some will celebrate, some will try a last stand The opposition (Edmundo González, María Corina) instantly becomes the legitimate government in the eyes of the world Cuba loses its oil lifeline and implodes within months, while the U.S. bombing...

New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill (D.) turned to former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, an architect of Biden-era green energy policies—which polls show are unpopular with Garden State voters—to co-chair her transition team’s energy task force. The governor-elect’s energy team is a quasi-reunion of Biden administration alumni—in addition to Granholm, former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) member Allison Clements will serve as its other co-chair. It’s a signal that although Sherrill ran to the middle on energy issues during her gubernatorial campaign, she is prepared to govern as a climate hawk. Granholm and Clements have a long history of supporting far-left...

Two oil tankers, the M/T KAIROS and M/T VIRAT, alleged to be part of the “Russian Shadow Fleet” exploded and caught fire earlier today in the Southern Black Sea, shortly after crossing north through the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey. The tankers, which were enroute to the Russian Port of Novorossiysk from Egypt, are suspected to have been targeted by several uncrewed surface vessels and/or naval mines set by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The crews aboard both vessels were able to be successfully evacuated, with it expected that the tankers will soon sink in the Black Sea, according to Turkish...

November 26 - The agreement reached two years ago at COP28 in Dubai seemed to signal the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. But the “implementation COP” that closed last Saturday in the Amazonian city of Belem in Brazil couldn’t find a route-map to make that vision a reality. For all the recognition that emissions trajectories are nowhere near in line with the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the window to act is rapidly closing, negotiators seem divorced from the real world. Petrostates, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, stymied any language of ambition and even...

Donald Trump recently announced that the United States would help Pakistan develop its "massive oil reserves," suggesting it could export oil to India in the future. In response, Baloch leader Mir Yar Baloch has written an open letter to the US president, highlighting how encouraging the exploitation of Balochistan's oil reserves would make the US complicit in enabling ISI to enhance its global terror networks. In his letter, the Baloch leader warned against allowing Pakistan's radicalised military and rogue ISI, long accused of sponsoring Al-Qaeda and various proxy groups responsible for the deaths of thousands of US soldiers in Afghanistan,...

America's electricity supply is becoming increasingly strained... As of March, the U.S. has 5,426 artificial intelligence ("AI") data centers. That's up from about 1,000 in 2018. As you're probably aware, data centers are gluttons for energy. In 2022, they consumed about 17 gigawatts ("GW") of power. (For reference, the Hoover Dam only produces about 2 GW per year.) But the power has to come from somewhere. Today, it's being pulled from American homes. Last year, a study by Bloomberg and Whisker Labs found that U.S. power supplies are being "distorted" by electricity-hungry data centers. It sounds like the plot of...

“Preserving our state’s natural beauty is deeply important to the millions who call the Sunshine State home, our visitors, and those whose livelihoods depend on tourism,” Moody wrote.

Last night, on October 19, a series of explosions occurred at the Novokuibyshev Oil Refinery in Russia’s Samara Region following a drone attack. Drones also struck a gas processing plant in the Russian city of Orenburg. According to eyewitnesses, black smoke rose above the Novokuibyshev refinery after the attack, and videos shared on social media show heavy smoke over the facility. Regional Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev confirmed the UAV attack but did not disclose details regarding the damage. The Novokuibyshev refinery, owned by Rosneft, is one of the key enterprises in the Samara Region, with a capacity to process up to...

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright might possibly be the biggest unsung hero in the Trump 2.0 Cabinet. While his fellow Cabinet secretaries like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth regularly get the big headlines, Wright flies a bit under the radar. But, that doesn't mean he's not busy taking bold, common sense actions to push America toward policies that prioritize affordable, reliable, and secure energy sources. Regular readers of RedState will know that Wright has been taking bold action to undo burdensome regulations and policies implemented by the Biden administration. Our own Ward Clark has...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration announced on Thursday new oil drilling off the California and Florida coasts for the first time in decades, advancing a project that critics say could harm coastal communities and ecosystems, as President Donald Trump seeks to expand U.S. oil production. The oil industry has been seeking access to new offshore areas, including Southern California and off the coast of Florida, as a way to boost U.S. energy security and jobs. The federal government has not allowed drilling in federal waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, which includes offshore Florida and part of offshore...

Grok Summary of Video Transcript:The speaker (a military analyst) discusses the major strategic shift caused by the U.S. finally supplying Ukraine with longer-range, modern ATACMS missiles (up to ~300 km / 200 miles range) in meaningful quantities.Key points from the summary:ATACMS are precision-guided, long-range army tactical missiles that have become a game-changer in the Ukraine war, especially for deep strikes against Russian rear-area targets.Ukraine previously only had short-range versions (~30–40 miles); the new ones allow strikes up to 200 miles inside Russia, targeting logistics hubs, troop concentrations, supply lines, and critical infrastructure.Recent Ukrainian strikes (last 24 hours at time of...

When New York passed its utopian Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019, it set mandatory targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s energy consumption. But none of the mandates were scheduled to take effect prior to 2030. The earliest mandates were: 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, and 40% overall reduction in GHG emissions by the same year. (Still more ambitious mandates were also set for 2040, followed by a “net zero” mandate for 2050.). These dates all seemed so terribly far away — plenty of time for somebody to invent some new...

Elon Musk: Everything is solar power. The rest is noise. “The sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter's about 0.1% and everything else is in the remaining 0.1%, and we are much less than 0.1%. So, if you burnt all of the mass of the solar system, then the total energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. If you just burnt Earth, the whole planet, and burnt Jupiter, which is very big and quite challenging to burn, turn Jupiter into a thermonuclear reactor, the sun is 99.8% of the mass of...