Free Republic

Joe Biden enraged environmentalists in March when he gave the go-ahead to allow the $8 billion Willow Project to drill on Arctic land. The greenies felt that Biden had betrayed a campaign promise of “no new drilling, period” on federal lands. They needn’t have worried. Biden has never wavered from his goal of destroying the fossil fuel industry, nor has he ever deviated from his position that the U.S. will be weaned off of fossil fuels even if it costs tens of thousands of jobs and an untold amount of pain to consumers. The Biden administration announced that it would...

Some of the Democrats who have been spiking the ball in the end zone after the passage of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” probably didn’t read all of the finer details in the bill. They’ve been celebrating its passage along with Joe Biden as the “biggest climate legislation” to ever be passed. They have also been grudgingly thanking West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin for getting the bill over the finish line. But it turns out that Manchin snuck in a few items that haven’t drawn many headlines yet and the climate warriors aren’t going to be very happy about them....

Tehran (AFP) – An air defence test triggered a loud explosion near Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility Saturday as nuclear talks with major powers stumble. The explosion was heard in the skies over the Iranian city of Badroud, just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the nuclear plant, the official IRNA news agency reported. "Badroud residents heard the noise and saw a light which showed an object had just blown up in the skies over the city," a witness told IRNA. But the spokesman of the Iranian army, General Amir Tarikhani, told state television there was no cause for concern. "An...

"This step has been taken for the sake of our nature, for the sake of our fisheries, for the sake of our tourism industry, and to focus our business on sustainable potentials," the government, called Naalakkersuisut, said in a statement. "We can see the consequences in our country every day, and we are ready to contribute to global solutions to counter climate change,"

Two days after touching down on asteroid Bennu, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission team received on Thursday, Oct. 22, images that confirm the spacecraft has collected more than enough material to meet one of its main mission requirements -- acquiring at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of the asteroid's surface material.

Make sure to go to the link and click on the hotlink highlighted as "Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event" for a video of the touchdown. A photo sequence is also shown in the last hotlink in the Explanation or by clicking on the image at the link. Explanation: On October 20, after a careful approach to the boulder-strewn surface, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid Bennu. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this snapshot. The close-up scene was recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam...

America’s oceans, coastal waters, and Great Lakes are national treasures, providing beauty and recreation, along with valuable resources that enhance our health, security, and economic prosperity. America’s oceans and coastlines contribute greatly to America’s economy, supporting 154,000 ocean-dependent businesses, $373 billion of economic activity annually, 2.3 million jobs, and $162 billion in wages.Advancing understanding of our oceans and coastlines has been a top priority for President Trump, particularly as it relates to further mapping the United States Exclusive Economic Zone (U.S. EEZ) –an area surrounding the United States that is larger than the areas of all fifty states combined....

Nothing quite tickles the fancy of energy investors like a giant oil or gas find. But here’s the secret sauce: stocks of small-cap companies tend to enjoy serious leverage whenever they strike oil, whereas the heavyweights, well, not so much. You don’t have to look very far for an example: shares of ExxonMobil Corp. (NYSE:XOM) are down more than 20% since the company announced a 14-strong string of good discoveries off the coast of Guyana in 2015, one of its best finds ever. That’s because companies like Exxon have their fingers in too many pies, and their share prices depend...

Morris Khan, Beresheet's largest funder and president of SpaceIL, announced on Saturday night that he is establishing Beresheet 2 to complete the mission of an Israeli spacecraft landing on the moon. "In light of the wonderful messages of support and encouragement and excitement I received from all over the world, I decided that we're going to establish Beresheet 2," Khan said. "We're going to put a new spacecraft on the moon and we're going to complete the mission. Tomorrow [Sunday] morning - first thing- we have a task force - we're going to sit down and plan...

As American scientists prepare to announce the location of the remains of Endeavour, a battle is expected over whether Britain, the United States or Australia gets the wreck of James Cook's famed ship. A team of marine archaeologists from Australia and the US said they believe they may have found the resting place of the ship – used by the British explorer on a voyage of discovery to Australia in 1768 - 25 years after beginning their search. They are expected to announce on Friday 'one or two' sites in Newport Harbour in Rhode Island, where the Endeavour was scuttled...

On August 3, 1492, Cristoforo Colombo (yes, you non-Italians spell it Christopher Columbus) set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, with three ships – the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – headed for Asia. And he might have made it, too, eventually… if the Western Hemisphere hadn’t been in the way. As it was, he gets the credit for discovering the Americas (even if a clever cartographer named Amerigo Vespucci grabbed up the naming rights first). Would some other European eventually have had the same idea, twenty, fifty or a hundred years later? Certainly. Eventually, the Europeans...

"...some HiRISE images taken in 2017 and early 2018 show slight blurring not seen earlier in the mission. The cause is under investigation. The percentage of full-resolution images with blurring peaked at 70 percent last October, at about the time when Mars was at the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun. The percentage has since declined to less than 20 percent. Even before the first blurred images were seen, observations with HiRISE commonly used a technique that covers more ground area at half the resolution. This still provides higher resolution than any other camera orbiting Mars — about...

The battle of the billionaires between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson looks set to finally blast its first passengers into space next year. Speaking at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado, Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is director of safety and mission assurance for Jeff Bezos' space firm Blue Origin, said the firm is now 'a year out' from human flights. It comes as Richard Branson claimed in October he will travel to space on his Virgin Galactic craft within six months. Elon Musk is also expected to soon reveal the launch schedule for a...

The Fighting Irish have a bone to pick with Christopher Columbus. Notre Dame students are calling for the removal of 12 iconic murals, which honor the famous explorer and have been on campus since 1884. The students have reportedly teamed up with alumni, faculty and staff in an effort to get rid of the 19th Century paintings. “In this era of political divisiveness and a renewed rise of dangerous nationalism, it is time for Notre Dame to remove its own version of a Confederate monument,” the group wrote in an open letter last week that was published in the school...

The New Horizons space probe, which made headlines around the world in 2015 when it beamed back humanity’s best-ever views of Pluto, is currently hurtling through the outer reaches of the solar system on its way to a rendezvous with a lump of ice known as MU69. New Horizons won’t get to MU69 for another year and a half – the flyby is expected to occur on 31 December 2018 or 1 January 2019 – so the spacecraft is hibernating to preserve its energy. Meanwhile, scientists on Earth are doing everything they can to find out as much as possible...

Two small bush planes are flying to the South Pole this week to evacuate workers at the Amundsen-Scott research station — a feat rarely attempted during the middle of the Antarctic winter. Kelly Falkner, the director of polar programs for the National Science Foundation (which runs the South Pole station), said that at least one seasonal employee for contractor Lockheed Martin requires medical treatment not available at the station and needs to be flown out. A second worker may also be rescued. Falkner couldn't provide further details about the medical motivation behind the rescues for privacy reasons. "We try to...

THE JACKI DAILY Show! Listen live at 2PM Eastern! Now playing also on station KWEL in Midland-Odessa! The host of the Jacki Daily show has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics.Most recently, Jacki served as General Counsel to an engineering firm specializing in energy, national security and environmental cleanup. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as...

In June 1495, the Italian historian Niccolo Squillaci wrote a letter describing a horrific disease that was sweeping through Europe. “There are itching sensations, and an unpleasant pain in the joints; there is a rapidly increasing fever,” he wrote. “The skin is inflamed with revolting scabs and is completely covered with swellings and tubercules, which are initially of a livid red color, and then become blacker.” And, tellingly, “It most often begins with the private parts.”

MOSCOW, December 29. /TASS/. Practically all the projects related to manned flights to the moon are absent from an updated version of the Federal Space Programme for the years 2016 through 2025 drafted by the Federal Space Agency after the downwards revision of its budget, Izvestia daily said on Tuesday referring to the document it had obtained. "As it follows from the text of the draft programme, which Roscosmos has submitted to the government for review, a decision was taken to sacrifice the lunar programme that was named a strategic goal for future development of Russian space research," the newspaper...

One casualty of the oil price downturn could be the megaproject. For years, as conventional oil reserves depleted and became increasingly hard to find, oil companies ventured into far-flung locales to find new sources of production. Extracting oil from these frontier areas required more advanced technology and a lot more capital: Ultra deepwater, Arctic offshore, heavy oil sands, and increasingly, the Lower Tertiary. Often these megaprojects projects were only the purview of the largest oil companies, as smaller players did not have the resources – financial or technological – to make them work. Meanwhile, smaller drillers, at least in North...