Free Republic

A coalition of conservative and free market think tanks are heaping praise on an anti-carbon tax resolution that was recently introduced in the lower chamber of Congress. Americans for Tax Reform, along with more than 20 like-minded organizations, issued a joint statement Thursday in support of a House resolution that explicitly condemns a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. Majority Whip Steve Scalise and West Virginia Rep. David McKinley introduced the nonbinding resolution. The one page resolution states that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”...

Front-line negotiators from more than 190 nations gathering for climate talks in Bonn on Monday face a daunting task: bring the 2015 Paris Agreement to life. The world's only climate treaty pledges to cap global warming at "well under" two degrees Celsius and prevent manmade CO2 from leeching into the atmosphere by century's end. But it left a mountain of critical rules and procedures to be worked out. "This may sound like a technical exercise, but it matters," Todd Stern, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and the top climate diplomat under Barack Obama, said in...

RUSH: Yeah, the little guy was just cruising right along. It was as good a speech as Nicholas Sarkozy gave. I don’t think people remember this, but Sarkozy, when he was the president of France, came to Washington, had a big state dinner and had a joint speech, had a speech before joint session of Congress. And he dazzled and he wowed everybody. And the guy came off as much more of a patriotic conservative American than any Democrat in the House of Representatives. And today, the new French president, Macron, was off on the same riff and he was...

One of the most electrifying moments of the 2018 Winter Olympics came when American cross-country skier Jessie Diggins surged from behind in the final seconds to win gold for her and teammate Kikkan Randall in the team sprint. It was a gutsy feat. Future Olympians may not get a shot at the dream Diggins achieved in PyeongChang. That’s because climate change is warming our winters, reducing our snowpack, and shortening our seasons - all changes that make it difficult to participate in snowsports. Diggins and four other winter Olympians - Stacey Cook, Arielle Gold, Maddie Phaneuf, and David Wise -...

Florida and Texas are the two states expected to suffer the greatest economic damage from climate change, according to a new study from Science magazine. The study used a model that aimed to calculate the future impact on each state’s gross domestic product (GDP) from events including hurricanes, storm surges, changes in agricultural yields, changing electricity demands, changes in mortality rates, changes to the labor supply, rising sea levels and rising crime rates. The study comes amid a concerted effort by climate activists to help the U.S. meet the goals of the Paris Accord of limiting temperature change to below...

(CNSNews.com) - California Gov. Jerry Brown predicted that if carbon emissions aren’t reduced, billions of people will die from “heat events,” and one billion will be subjected to vector diseases. “When you pick up the paper or turn on cable news, you’d think it’s another planet. It’s all about the nonsense of Washington, and carbon emissions are growing, and we’ve got to radically turn that around, or the migrations you’re seeing now are going to be child’s play,” Brown told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to have widespread disruption, more conflicts, more terrorism,...

POHAKULOA TRAINING AREA — “Take it to outer space,” exclaimed 7-year-old Reggie Shropshire as an unmanned aerial vehicle took to the sky Friday morning in the Saddle between Mauna Loa and Maunakea. Using the UAV, Jason Dzurisin, an ecological data specialist with Colorado State University, showing dozens of excited keiki attending Pohakuloa Training Area’s annual Earth Day event how the U.S. Army’s Natural and Cultural Resource Program uses technology to map the area. (snip) The annual free event is PTA’s “premiere community engagement event,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Marquez, the training area’s commanding officer. All students from all schools, as...

Environmental activists rode buses up to Albany from New York City to tell Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to mandate the use of 100 percent green energy and move the state away from fossil fuels … wait, what? That’s right. Activists affiliated with the group Food & Water Watch will converge on New York’s capital to “demand 100% renewable energy & a ban on fracking infrastructure,” the group tweeted. Food & Water Watch backed New York’s ban on fracking in 2014, and now wants the state to get off all “fracked” gas — that’s pretty much all their gas. Food &...

Having witnessed the use of children to promote gun control after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, a group of Florida lawyers has decided to do the same thing with regard to climate change. On April 16, a squad of politically-minded ambulance chasers used a group of children as human shields by filing suit against Florida Governor Rick Scott because of Scott’s “deliberate indifference to their fundamental rights to a stable climate system in violation of Florida common law and the Florida Constitution.” Also named as defendants in the suit are Noah Valenstein, the head of the Florida Department of Environmental...

In the end, somehow we knew it would come to this. The Left, in the form of the think thank RAND, has gone full Luddite: Since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, society has organized efforts to limit the magnitude of climate change around the concept of stabilization — that is, accepting some climate change but holding it within acceptable bounds. This report offers an initial exploration of the concept of climate restoration — that is, approaches that seek to return atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to preindustrial levels within one to two generations. Using a simple...

In a bizarre irony, the German daily newspaper Die Welt has proclaimed U.S. President Donald Trump “the most successful climate protector in the world” after a new global climate report revealed that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped dramatically during Trump’s first year in office.... The United States led the small pack of countries that managed to lower greenhouse gas emissions, accompanied by UK, Japan, and Mexico. According to IEA figures, the United States managed to reduce CO2 emissions in 2017 by 0.5 percent, or 25 million tons, to 4810 million tons. ... Mr. Wetzel doffed his hat to President Trump,...

In a recent New York Times op-ed, two former EPA officials criticize a Trump administration plan that would require the EPA to reveal the details of studies used to craft environmental regulations. In this piece, Obama’s EPA director Gina McCarthy and assistant director Janet McCabe, claim that: Current EPA director Scott Pruitt and “some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the EPA from using the best available science.” EPA’s studies “adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.” the...

Earth is a dangerous place. Of all the species that have ever lived, over 95% have already been extinguished by natural disasters. Ice, not global warming, is the big killer, and this recurring calamity often strikes quickly. Thousands of mammoths and other animals were killed by ice storms, and their snap-frozen bodies are still entombed in ice around the Arctic. Just 15,000 years ago, great ice sheets smothered the northern hemisphere as far south as Chicago, Moscow, and London, and all life had migrated toward the equator. This deadly ice had gripped Earth for about 50,000 years. Ice ages are...

Scientists first started writing about global warming in the 1850s. More than a century ago, others explored the possibility of human-caused climate change. And yet in 2018, a lot of people still lack a basic scientific understanding of the concept, so argues Boulder-based astrophysicist Jeffrey Bennett. “There’s nothing really controversial in terms of the basic science,” he says. Outside of textbooks, Bennett first wrote about global warming in his 2012 kids’ book The Wizard who Saved the World. “I felt like we needed to have a way to get kids to understand the topic without scaring them; make them feel...

In September 2017, a team led by the University of Exeter’s Richard Millar published a paper in Nature Geoscience, which was widely reported as suggesting that the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures is still technically within our reach. Many other climate scientists were skeptical of this result, and the journal recently published a critique from a team led by the University of Edinburgh’s Andrew Schurer. The debate lies in exactly how the Paris climate target is defined and measured, which has not been precisely established. Tackling climate change boils down to...

Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai says his country is an innocent victim of climate change which he will always remind the perpetrators of global warming. Mr Salwai made the comment as he thanked the European Union's Ambassador to Vanuatu for funding the country's biggest solar power farm that has over 2000 solar panels. Without naming any particular country, the prime minister said it was those superpowers who refused to endorse the Paris climate agreement. He said he had reminded the United Nations three times of the urgent need for Pacific Islands to be compensated for their land loss due to...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent. What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated "adjustments" to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate. Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in...

The legal battle against oil companies for their purported role in contributing to a climate change crisis is starting to take shape. This past Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco made history, holding the first-ever U.S. court hearing exploring the impact of climate change. Lawyers representing the cities of Oakland and San Francisco as well as five of the largest multinational oil companies named in the lawsuit, participated in a climate change “tutorial,” a chance to explore both sides’ positions on several questions related to climate change. Here’s what we learned from the hearing: future litigation will pit reasoned...

Climate change will be the fastest-growing cause of species loss in the Americas by midcentury, according to a new set of reports from the leading global organization on ecosystems and biodiversity. Climate change, alongside factors like land degradation and habitat loss, is emerging as a top threat to wildlife around the globe, the reports suggest. In Africa, it could cause some animals to decline by as much as 50 percent by the end of the century, and up to 90 percent of coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean may bleach or degrade by the year 2050. The reports, released last...

Securing enough money to combat climate change will be a challenge, but is “non-negotiable,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said yesterday, a day after experts said Boston should expect to pay as much as $2.5 billion to curb the effects of rising seas and increasingly intense storms. “Two billion dollars is (an issue), our budget is $3 billion a year, so of course it’s going to be an issue,” Walsh said. “It’s non-negotiable, we have to do something. We’ve been doing things, we have to actually increase what we’ve been doing.” Earlier this week, climate experts warned city councilors that the...