Free Republic

More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term. The smog decision is...

t may have taken the largest wildfire in Arizona history, but for the first time in decades, environmentalists and government officials agree on a key element of future forest management. The U.S. Forest Service said in a report this month that “intense thinning treatments” can ease future wildfires, by removing trees between six and 18 inches in diameter to allow for additional space between trees. “Everyone agrees that a lot of the dry forest types need to be treated in terms of removing the vegetation,” said Morris Johnson, a research ecologist with the Forest Service and co-author of the report....

As late as April of 2011, the Water Management Chief for the Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, expressed an opinion in an e-mail to a concerned citizen that the mountain snow melt this year would "be nothing to write home about." This internal e-mail, among many others recently released through a Freedom of Information Act request by Gannett's Washington Bureau, exposes that assertion as a gross misstatement of known facts. The e-mails reveal that a cadre of hydrologists, engineers, and National Weather Service (NWS) officials had repeatedly warned the chief, Ms. Jody Farhat, beginning in January about the danger posed...

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann claims the U.S. has more energy resources than any other country but isn't exploiting them because of radical environmentalists. ... As president, Bachmann said she would unlock those resources and eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Before Hurricane Irene made landfall, environmental extremists were spouting off three certainties about the storm: It is catastrophic; it was caused by global warming; and it is all President Obama’s fault. On Thursday, climate alarmist Bill McKibben wrote, “Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.” ... [snip] The past few years have seen significant body blows to the global warming theory, including major revelations of altered, misused or just plain fraudulent data, undue financial interests and appearances of impropriety among climate scientists, and contrived “carbon markets” closely tied to global warming alarmists who stood to make millions of...

Each summer, animal activists travel across the country to meet and discuss the latest topics of the animal rights movement. This year, animal agriculture was once again the focus. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) hosted its annual Taking Action for Animals Conference in Washington, D.C. on July 15-18, and Farm Animal Rights Movement’s Animal Rights 2011 Conference (AR 2011) was held two weeks later on July 21-25 in Los Angeles. Both events claimed to have “record-breaking” attendance, attracting a combined total of more than 1,600 activists from around the world, ranging in age from 20-60 years old....

The American Renewable Energy Day conference in Aspen didn't cite Gore by name, but one of the opening speakers on Thursday suggested that audience members adopt aggressive tactics when dealing with climate deniers. Jigar Shah, CEO of an organization called the Carbon War Room, told the audience they must “confront the liars” on climate change issues or they are “part of the problem.” Shah urged them to “make a scene in public” by confronting politicians or speakers who suggest that alternative energy isn't a viable option for handling power needs and reducing carbon emissions. ... Lester Brown...founder and president of...

“They Did It!” The President just concluded a frenzied “jobs” bus tour to explain why unemployment is at 9.1% — after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in stimulus the last three years. You know the usual suspects responsible for our, not his, malaise: George Bush did it; the Republican obstructionists in the Congress who were wary of approving another $2 trillion in debt did it; the Tea Party did it; Standard and Poor’s did it; the Japanese earthquake did it; the Japanese tsunami and nuclear accidents did it; the Middle East unrest did it; the European debt crisis did it; new...

A controversial proposal to build a massive underground pipeline to carry 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas has become the environmental issue of the summer, pitting developers and labor unions desperate for construction jobs against environmentalists and Native American tribes who fear the pipeline will spell environmental disaster. TransCanada Corp.'s proposed Keystone XL project would consist of more than 1,700 miles of 36-inch-diameter pipe, about 327 miles of which would be in Canada while the rest would snake southward through the central United States. Because the pipeline would...

The economic impact of the 1995 Deep Water Royalty Relief Act is huge as are the consequences that would result from its modification or repeal by Congress.

<p>With 9.1% unemployment and gasoline prices in the stratosphere, President Obama must sometimes wish that some big corporation would suddenly show up and offer a shovel-ready, multibillion-dollar project to create 100,000 jobs and reduce U.S. reliance on oil from dictatorships.</p>

The most prolific marine ecosystem on earth is being systematically destroyed on orders of the U.S. Department of the Interior.(snip)Dept. of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last September 15, “We are notifying offshore operators of their legal responsibility to decommission and dismantle their facilities when production is completed.”Dismantling their production platforms could cost oil operators “$6 billion to $18 billion in lost future production,” according to a report by Mark Kaiser and Allan Pulsipher of the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies. The federal government, however, is unmoved by such projections. Production? Costs? Profits?—come on!

The meatpacking industry causes 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the release of methane from animals. The livestock industry also consumes huge amounts of feed and water in relation to the amount of meat that it yields, and many find the industry to be inhumane and cruel to animals. These factors alone are reason enough for vegetarians to replace their meat intake with vegetable proteins and legumes. But Ikeda, a scientist at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama, sought to further the field of alternative proteins by recycling a form of protein-rich waste : sewage mud....

"It's not an understatement to say liberalism is lost," Shellenberger said. "It might win some elections, it might have a majority here or there, it might get health care done, but as a governing philosophy, it's really at its end." [snip] ...questions posed at the weekend sessions, dubbed the "Breakthrough Dialogues," will be the kind that liberals don't discuss publicly and certainly not at the start of a presidential campaign, when canned sound bites dominate: What kind of entitlements should liberals fight to preserve in an era of shrinking resources? .."What does poverty mean in a society where the poor...

On the heels of a scathing critique by former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Wednesday, President Obama faced pressure from a burgeoning environmental justice coalition demanding stronger action on ozone, a component of smog, in predominantly Latino communities. Fourteen groups sent a letter to Obama expressing dismay at missed opportunities and delays in bringing permissible ozone levels down to between 60 and 70 parts per billion: The EPA estimates that the strongest standard of 60 parts per billion would avoid as many as 12,000 deaths and 58,000 asthma attacks per year. Implementing a weaker standard would mean more lives lost...

This Friday will mark the release of the May unemployment report. A report that will reflect the last effects of the Obama trillion-dollar stimulus and of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE2). The report is likely to show that job creation is mediocre at best, with unemployment insurance claims continuing well above the 400,000 weekly level, housing in a double-dip recession and the gross domestic product contracting to a paltry 1.8 percent growth rate for the second quarter of 2011. The situation is so dire on the economic growth front that The New York Times has awoken from its slumber...

SANTA FE – The Environmental Improvement Board asked for testimony about the best way to cost-effectively reduce haze caused by power plants, but many of the people EIB heard from Wednesday wanted to talk about eliminating coal as a fuel and switching to renewable energy. "Coal is a moral issue,” said Marlene Perroti of the Sisters of Mercy. Because of its environmental, health and climate effects, use of coal violates religious values of justice, stewardship and respect for life, she said. The haze that the federal Environmental Protection Agency is requiring states to address is “a superficial indicator” of bigger,...

Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life: What You Can Do to Stop Them As I’ve suggested in the past, never wrestle with a pig; you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. ^ With that out of the way, let’s move on to the business at hand: How do you debate (if you so choose) the Al Gore-following, American industry-hating, I-don’t-want-to-hear-anything-that-contradicts-man-made-global-warming, Kool Aid-drinking wing-nuts who wish you would burst into flames for your stupid, stubborn refusal to see the light? (Not to mention the global havoc being wreaked by those Republican light bulbs you’re using to produce said light.)...

This April 22, if you find yourself frustrated at rising gasoline prices, or rising electricity prices, or rising natural gas and heating oil prices, make sure you place plenty of blame on the environmentalists behind Earth Day; for decades they have found a reason to oppose every practical form of energy in the name of "saving the planet." Start with their opposition to fossil fuels, including the oil that fuels our vehicles, the coal that powers our factories, and the natural gas that heats our homes. Environmentalists have long thwarted drilling and mining projects on the ground that fossil fuels...

One year later, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history looks more and more like just a big bump in the road in the drive to drill deeper in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially closer to Florida's coastline. The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 rig workers, spewed 60,000 barrels of oil a day for four months, cost five states billions of dollars in lost jobs and business, slimed marshes, beaches and wildlife from the Louisiana bayou to the Florida Panhandle, and left lingering toxic stains across complex food webs that scientists say will take years to recover. A...