Free Republic

BOLSTERING NATIONAL SECURITY BY PRESERVING CRITICAL SUPPLY CHAINS: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order mobilizing the Defense Production Act to protect domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides — two critical inputs essential to military readiness and America’s agricultural strength, respectively. The Order finds that any interruption of supply of either of these critical materials could leave our defense industrial base and food supply vulnerable to hostile foreign actors. The Order delegates the President’s authority under the Defense Production Act to the Secretary of Agriculture to require the performance of contracts or orders related to these...

On Thursday (February 12) President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin held a press briefing at the White House where they announced the issuance of the final rescission of what is known as the “Endangerment Finding” — the 2009 Obama-era regulatory edict purporting to find that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” are a “danger to human health and welfare.” The regulatory document finalizing the rescission then came out the next day, February 13. The Rescission Document has the title “Rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards Under the Clean Air Act.” It is...

The good news is that the Trump administration has announced its repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding.” As Matthew Hennessey puts it in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter this morning, the finding is the “2009 determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. It was the legal basis for most federal climate regulation, allowing Washington technocrats to treat carbon dioxide, methane and four other gases as pollutants.” The White House trumpeted the repeal as “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Let us cheer while we can. Woo hoo! It represents a victory...

The Trump administration said it's ending a credit for automakers that install a so-called "start/stop feature" in the vehicles, part of a broader rollback of environmental regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The start/stop feature, which is today widely used in newer vehicles, shuts off gas engines when cars idle, such as when they're stopped at a red light or stuck in traffic. The Environmental Protection Agency described the technology as "almost universally hated" in its Thursday announcement about the broader overhaul. About two-thirds of cars are now manufactured with the start/stop feature, which is aimed at making internal combustion...

President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday announced the repeal of a 2009 policy allowing the federal government to regulate the emissions of fossil fuels by declaring them dangerous to public health. Trump called the repeal “the single largest deregulatory action in American history” and said it would “save American consumers trillions of dollars.” “We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers,” Trump said in the White House Roosevelt Room. “Effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding...

Word on the street is that tomorrow is the big day when the federal government’s phony-baloney greenhouse gas “Endangerment Finding” will finally get rescinded by EPA. It has now been more than 16 years since this idiotic and massive government power grab got foisted on the American people by the Obama EPA in December 2009. I don’t have any good insight into what the rescission documentation will look like. If the people writing it do what is really appropriate, they will heap mounds of scorn, derision and ridicule upon the Finding itself, and upon the legions fools, dopes and grifters...

WASHINGTON (AP) — On New Year’s Eve, Lee Zeldin did something out of character for an Environmental Protection Agency leader who has been hacking away at regulations intended to protect Americans’ air and water. He announced new restrictions on five chemicals commonly used in building materials, plastic products and adhesives, and he cheered it as a “MAHA win.”It was one of many signs of a fragile collaboration that’s been building between a Republican administration that’s traditionally supported big business and a Make America Healthy Again movement that argues corporate environmental harms are putting people’s health in danger. The unlikely pairing...

Under Trump, the media elites treat the executive branch as an evil empire, but under Biden, journalists were so eager to help promote the Democrats that they sometimes offered their sources the ability to edit their articles to their liking. New documents shared exclusively with MRC Business just exposed the latest example of elitist media hacks violating every modicum of journalistic integrity to genuflect to the Biden administration’s whims and wishes. Forbes contributor Rhett Buttle and his associate Abdullah Kahn offered to delay a story schmoozing President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan on his “environmental justice” focus...

DELIVERING A WIN FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES AND AUTOMAKERS: Today, President Donald J. Trump is delivering major relief to American families by resetting the Biden Administration’s costly and unlawful Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.President Trump is returning CAFE standards to levels that can actually be met with conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. The Biden Administration standards imposed unrealistic fuel economy targets that effectively resulted in an electric vehicle (EV) mandate.The Trump Administration’s reset of the CAFE standards ensures the program’s fidelity to the legal restrictions set forth by Congress.The Biden standards broke the law by going far beyond the requirements...

The Environmental Protection Agency has removed references to human-caused climate change from its website - tweaking some pages to focus on the “natural processes” driving climate change and wiping other pages from the internet. In October, the EPA page on “Causes of Climate Change,” for example, included a statement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that noted, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.” That clear statement has been deleted from the page, which now mentions only climate changes from natural sources, such as volcanic activity and variations in solar activity. Another page,...

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump will eliminate fuel standard regulations imposed by President Joe Biden when he signs an executive order on Dec. 3 in the Oval Office. His directive will reduce the number of miles a vehicle must travel on a mile of gasoline, a move that will mitigate car price increases of about $1,000 and save Americans approximately $109 billion, according to administration officials. Representatives from Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis are expected to join the president for the signing ceremony. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the Department of Transportation, oversees the Corporate Average Fuel Economy...

I have long been a proponent of the deep exploitation of nuclear power, and watched this video today from Bill Whittle titled: LINK: It’s Atom-Splitting Time! that tipped me off to what is afoot on this front, and it is the first IV Generation Nuclear Power plant scheduled to be built and operated in the United States by 2026...next year! I would like to hear opinions here on Free Republic from our members who have experience in the field, are interested, or simply wish to comment, since I believe this is our path forward. I don't advocate this for "green"...

The Environmental Protection Agency has launched an internal review to determine if traces of abortion pills like mifepristone are contaminating America’s wastewater and drinking water. Leading pro-life groups warn the chemicals could be causing miscarriages and stillbirths in unsuspecting communities. The probe, directed by senior EPA officials over the summer, stems from a June 18 letter signed by 25 Republican members of Congress, including Sen. James Lankford and Rep. Josh Brecheen, both of Oklahoma. The lawmakers urged EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to investigate potential pollution from the drug, questioning: “Are there existing E.P.A.-approved methods for detecting mifepristone and its active...

As Congress faces a Sept. 30, 2025, deadline to fund the federal government, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has put the EPA on the chopping block. But even before Congress decides about the administration’s recommendations to slash its staff, the EPA’s political leaders have made even more significant cuts to the agency’s workforce. And a look at past efforts to cut EPA staff shows how rapidly those changes can affect Americans’ health and the environment. Using publicly available government databases and a collection of in-depth interviews with current and former EPA employees, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a...

Yesterday, along with two excellent colleagues, I submitted a Comment to EPA on the subject of the proposed and pending repeal of the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009. The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the absurd regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to find that the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes a “danger” to human health and welfare as it accumulates in the atmosphere from the current level of about 0.04%, to perhaps 0.05% or maybe even (the horror!) 0.06% by some time later this century. The EF is then the basis for all the subsequent regulatory initiatives...

Environmental organizations lost their bid Tuesday to immediately access $16 billion in grant money that was frozen by the Trump administration earlier this year. In a split decision, a three-judge panel from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals found the Trump administration was within its rights to stop $20 billion from the Biden-era Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that was promised to eight groups. “While some grantees may be forced to shutter their operations during the litigation, their harms do not outweigh the interests of the government and the public in the proper stewardship of billions of taxpayer dollars,” Tuesday’s ruling...

An appeals court has overturned a federal judge’s ruling blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from terminating $20 billion in grants for several climate groups. A three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Tuesday issued a 2-1 ruling in favor of the Trump EPA’s efforts to slash billions of dollars in grant money to green groups obligated during former President Joe Biden‘s administration. The District of Columbia Circuit Court judges were Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Cornelia Pillard, who dissented. The district court “abused its discretion” by issuing the injunction preventing the EPA from rescinding the funds, the judges wrote. They...

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been an instrumental figure in dismantling the climate science regime during the second Trump administration, including major funding cuts in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency. Now, nearly half of the states' attorneys general have called on Zeldin to strike at the head of another climate institution: the Environmental Law Institute. Headed by Attorney General Austin Knudsen of Montana and signed by 22 other state AGs, the letter calls on Zeldin to cut funding grants for the Environmental Law Institute, which operates the Climate Judiciary Project. The letter says...

EPA Director Lee Zeldin told Miranda Devine, her podcast, that $20 billion was laundered through a network of "pass-through" NGOs from the "Inflation Reduction Act" to groups controlled by former Obama and Biden administration officials. EPA DIRECTOR LEE ZELDIN: When I was going through the confirmation process, this video comes out—it was done through Project Veritas. It was of a Biden EPA employee who was talking about how the agency was “tossing gold bars off the Titanic,” rushing to get billions of dollars out the door before Inauguration Day. He was also talking about the desire to get themselves jobs...

Known for the eponymous reptiles that inhabit the nearby swamps, the migrant detention center dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" faces the possibility of being shut down over concerns about some of the area's lesser-known inhabitants -- the Everglades' bats, panthers, and storks.A federal judge on Wednesday is set to hold an evidentiary hearing over whether to block operations at the controversial facility because construction of the site allegedly bypassed federally required environmental impact studies.The hearing -- at which federal, state, and tribal officials are expected to testify -- comes amid heightened scrutiny of the facility, which was once touted as a "one-stop...