Free Republic

The Port of Baltimore is “closed until further notice” following the Francis Scott Key Bridge tragedy, sending several industries into disarray and jeopardizing national security. In 2023, the port handled a record amount of international cargo, ranked ninth for both dollar value and tonnage in the United States. Vital for both imports and exports of a variety of commodities, the Port of Baltimore has always had international significance and the impact of its closure will be wide-ranging and long-term for the supply chain in the United States and beyond. Given the seriousness of this issue, Congress must come together to...

CNN — In a sweeping win for climate and environmental advocates, the Biden administration on Friday finalized a rule to ban fossil fuel drilling on nearly half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, alongside other major conservation actions. The Interior Department will block oil drilling on over 13 million acres in the Western Arctic, including about 40% of the land of the NPR-A – a remote area that is home to protected animal species including polar bears and caribou. The reserve is more than 23 million acres of public land and an underground emergency oil supply for the US...

The New York HEAT Act might not make the final budget. The bill reduces the state’s reliance on natural gas and cuts ratepayer costs by eliminating certain rules. It was in both legislative chambers’ one-house budgets, but last-minute scrambling could remove it. New York League of Conservation Voters Policy Director Patrick McClellan said, aside from people’s preference for natural gas, other challenges have made the bill hard to pass. “I think that there has also been some irresponsible fear-mongering against this bill from some people who oppose it,” said McClellan, “basically telling people this means that their natural gas service...

Hundreds of U.S. troops are effectively being held as “hostages” in Niger with medical supplies running low — stuck between the military junta-controlled government’s demands for them to leave and the Biden administration’s refusal to let them go home after the end of their deployments, according to a report prepared by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and obtained exclusively by Breitbart News.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden reinstated oil and gas sanctions on Venezuela on Thursday, a recognition that lifting the sanctions did nothing to entice the socialist regime to host a free and fair election. The Biden administration lifted some of the strictest U.S. sanctions on dictator Nicolás Maduro’s regime last year as part of a dialogue in which Maduro agreed to host a presidential election sometime in 2014. The deal collapsed rapidly; Maduro scrapped it in October and launched a new wave of violence against anti-socialist dissidents, likely bankrolled by new oil profits. The Biden sanctions relief lasted...

Over four years ago, someone sent me a November 2019 Huffington Post article titled “Coal Knew, Too” by Élan Young, a writer for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of (UTK). The story, remarkably, also promptly appeared in Mother Jones, the UK’s Daily Mail, and even in an article from the Kent Law School. We were told that the Department head, Chris Cherry, “accidentally discovered what is, so far, the earliest known evidence of the coal industry acknowledging its awareness of the impending climate crisis”. The supposed “confession”, which fit nicely into an ongoing activist litigation...

Energy prices, particularly the cost of electricity, have skyrocketed since President Biden took office, outpacing inflation and putting a dent in Americans’ wallets. Since January 2021, electricity prices have soared 29.4% — 50% more than overall inflation — rising 13 times faster than the previous seven years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Meanwhile, in those seven years before Biden took office, electricity prices rose just 5%. News of the astronomical increase in electricity came in the wake of March’s Consumer Price Index, which showed US inflation rose 3.5% in March. Wednesday’s data...

The USA has called for Ukraine not to attack Russian refineries despite Russia's widespread offensive against several energy facilities in Ukraine. The Department of Defense has warned that such an attack could bring another spike in fuel prices worldwide. Michaelo Podoliak, advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, claimed that such facilities were legitimate military targets. In a recent interview, he also claimed that such an attack was not only legitimate but desirable on a worldwide level in order to weaken Russia's hold on the energy lobby. “Ukraine must destroy Russia's refineries. They have no impact on worldwide pricing, and are...

By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now. This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken. However, to date, relative to this project there exists no environmental impact statement, no feasibility study, no prototype, and no demonstration project to show how this can be done, let alone any detailed cost analysis to show how much...

About 2 1/2 years ago I wrote a post titled "California plans to kill the residential solar industry." At the time, I had just had solar panels installed on my roof to save money and within months California announced a new plan (Net Metering 3.0) that would have taxed me and anyone else who owned a rooftop solar system for owning the panels. I predicted that if this plan passed, California's rooftop solar industry would fall off a cliff.The result of Net Metering 3.0 is likely going to be the end of the residential solar industry in California. I have...

President Joe Biden keeps lecturing corporate America to “pay your fair share” of taxes. It turns out he’s right that some companies really are getting away scot-free from paying taxes.But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart. They pay billions in taxes.The culprits here are the very companies that President Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.It turns out that despite all the promises over the past decade about how renewable energy is the future of power production in America, by far the biggest tax...

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that recent Ukrainian attacks targeting Russian oil refineries could have a "knock-on effect" on the global energy market, Bloomberg reported on April 9. Ukrainian forces have launched a series of drone strikes aimed at damaging Russia's oil industry. A total of 12 Russian oil refineries were reportedly successfully hit in multiple regions deep inside Russian territory as of March 17.

Inflation ticked higher once again in March, with consumer prices up 0.4 percent over the previous month and 3.5 percent compared to one year earlier. The latest data marks the third month in a row that the consumer price index (CPI), a closely watched gauge of inflation, has come in hotter than expected, likely throwing cold water on hopes that the Federal Reserve would begin cutting interest rates soon.

Joe Biden’s massive electric vehicle (EV) agenda will subsidize the lifestyles of America’s well-to-do while hitting average people the hardest.... The Biden administration is aggressively regulating the U.S. auto market to drastically increase the proportion of EVs sold over the coming decade, but consumer demand has not taken off as quickly as proponents had projected despite the subsidies made available by Biden’s flagship climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Manufacturers are slashing prices of their EVs to make the vehicles more appealing to consumers, which will increase prices for internal combustion engine (ICE) cars to compensate; this dynamic will...

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act propelled forward President Joe Biden’s vision of a clean energy economy. As outlined in a 2023 guidebook, this remaking of the U.S. economy includes billions in funding for green tech manufacturing — everything from hydrogen production to batteries to solar panels. The plan will not only create jobs and investments for Americans, according to the Biden administration, it will lower the nation’s dependence on China, which currently controls 80% of the global production in polysilicon and other components used in solar panels, 80% of wind-turbine components, and 89% of the refining to produce...

John Sabo and Josh Thieler grew up in Pittsburgh-area communities that were hit hard as 200,000 steel and manufacturing jobs disappeared from the region, upending their parents’ generation and leaving main streets pocked with empty storefronts. Sabo, the son and grandson of mill workers, says his father rarely found steady work after losing his job in a U.S. Steel mill, leaving Sabo to “know what government cheese tastes like.” Thieler spent part of his childhood in a trailer park in a small city that shed nearly half its population as families hunted elsewhere for work. Today, both men have good...

The final coal-fired power plants in New England are slated to shutter in the coming years, making it the second region to phase out the energy source that powered the U.S. economy for decades.

At first glance, nothing extraordinary jumps out about what’s happening in the Permian to depress Waha prices. Permian supply is in line with or lower than where it has been all winter, except for during the mid-January freeze-offs.Is it pipeline maintenance? Weirdly low demand?We’ve dug into it and determined that no single driving factor or event is to blame for the recent run of negative prices.Instead, it’s a combination of low demand (both within the basin and without), as well as pipeline work along several key routes, including El Paso Natural Gas (EPNG) and some of the newer greenfield pipelines...

Reuters said Novatek had stopped operations at its Arctic LNG 2 project, which processes gas from the Utrenneye field on West Siberia' Gydan Peninsula, in the latest blow to Russian fuel exports. It comes as Russian exports funding Putin's war have been hampered by repeated drone strikes on oil facilities, blamed on Ukraine. One energy industry expert told Newsweek that state oil giant Rosneft had reduced daily oil processing in March by a fifth. Sanctions have caused a lack of specialist tankers to transport the LNG from Russia through thick sea ice. Six Arc7 tankers were due to be built...

Bidenomics is really about insane money printing after Covid and the installation of Biden as President. Biden and The Federal Reserve are both pushin’ too hard. Biden to fundamentally change the US and The Fed trying to cope with the inflation reaction. With Covid and then Biden’s selection as President, Federal outlays exploded (blue line) and remain elevated under Biden. To help finance the (outrageous) spending The Federal Reserve massively increased the M2 Money supply (green line). Now, The Fed has withdrawn some of the excessive monetary stimulus, but there is a staggering amount monetary stimulus still swimming around the...