Free Republic

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”

The phrase “You can’t fight city hall” expresses the futility of opposing an entrenched bureaucracy. For hard-pressed ranchers, miners, oil and gas drillers and developers, and even solar-energy entrepreneurs, the refrain has instead been, “You can’t fight the Endangered Species Act” (ESA). Until now. This week, the Obama administration announced that it would not declare the dunes sagebrush lizard an endangered species, as it had seemed likely to do, because voluntary conservation agreements in Texas and New Mexico offer promise that the lizard can be protected without halting economic development in the two states where the lizard is found. “Today’s...

CLEVELAND (AP) - A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday. Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale...

February 6, 2010 Save the planet? Darling, that’s so last season Ring-pull handbags and frocks made of milk? Celebrity fashionistas aren’t helping ecology, they are glorifying themselves Janice Turner Although I celebrate the Oscar nomination for Colin Firth, undisputed king of simmering internal conflict, I’m concerned about his wife Livia. I’m not sure she will cope, not after the Screen Actors Guild Awards when, “just hours” before the ceremony, her dress woven from milk — yes, milk — didn’t fit, and her clutch bag encrusted in ring-pulls clashed with her gold vegetarian shoes. Undeniably, as her Vogue blog put it,...

WASHINGTON – A Democratic senator on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee inadvertently explained why her colleagues have no intention of ending the moratorium on offshore oil drilling or increasing the areas open for exploration and production – no matter how popular the idea might be with gas prices soaring. In an interview with Bloomberg TV's "Money and Politics" last night, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., explained Democrats don't want to increase supplies of oil and gasoline because they want to wean Americans off of petroleum products. Asked point-blank if Democrats in the Senate would consider how increasing the supply of...