Free Republic

The United Nations ruled that “climate refugees” cannot be returned back to their home countries. This ruling forces the United States to allow all Central Americans into our country. Literally, anyone can claim the new refugee status. This will essentially open US borders for good. Now the left has combined open borders with junk science to create climate refugees. Via The Central Tibetan Administration: It is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis, a landmark ruling by the United Nations human rights committee has found. The judgment – which...

Spain’s new government declared a national climate emergency on Tuesday, taking a formal first step toward enacting ambitious measures to fight climate change. The declaration approved by the Cabinet says the left-of-center Socialist government will send to parliament within 100 days its proposed climate legislation. The targets coincide with those of the European Union, including a reduction of net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Spain’s coalition government wants up to 95% of the Mediterranean country’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2040. The plan also foresees eliminating pollution by buses and trucks and making farming carbon neutral. Details...

“The goal is ensuring the green economy benefits folks who are hurt first and worst by global warming,” says Oriana Magnera. In just a few months, the city of Portland will begin investing the proceeds from a groundbreaking new tax on large companies. No other city in the U.S. has such a tax. The Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund, or PCEF, will raise as much as $60 million a year from a new tax on big retailers. The money is supposed to supply clean, efficient energy and jobs to people the city has long slighted. The overarching goals:...

Editor's Note: This piece was co-authored by Duggan Flanakin.  “We are all born ignorant,” Benjamin Franklin once said, “but one must work very hard to remain stupid.” Greens are incensed over suggestions that anything but fossil fuels and climate change might be turning green California and Australian ecosystems into black wastelands, incinerating wildlife, destroying homes and killing people. The notion that they and their policies might be a major factor in these fires gets them so hot under the collar that they could ignite another inferno. But the facts are there for all to see. PG&E certainly failed to maintain, upgrade and...

ST. PETERSBURG — As she arrived to speak at the region’s first ever resilience leadership summit, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor came upon a hotel parking lot packed with cars. Hundreds of people from local governments, universities and scientific consulting firms had shown up Tuesday. Valets at the Hilton in Carillon Park double-parked vehicles, choking the entry. The scene summarized the day: a symbol both of the growing interest in climate change in Tampa Bay and the enormous hurdles officials face as they aim to curb emissions (from cars, for instance) contributing to rising seas. **SNIP** Among the first speakers was...

Larry Fink’s recent letters to CEOs and investors were certain to press buttons, because they dealt with BlackRock’s plans to address climate change. Yet the reactions, Fink tells Barron’s, have been positive even as climate change has become a political football. “I received one of the great letters of my career from a client in a red state,” says the CEO of BlackRock (ticker: BLK). “This client was very thankful. This client said, ‘We have a 10- to 20-year investment horizon. We now need to look at how we think about investing.’ ” BlackRock puts climate-risk analysis at the heart...

The U.S. Court of Appeals decided in a split decision the court could not decide on matters of climate policy. The president and Congress are the decision-makers on climate policy. The teenagers’ attorneys would now have to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the trial to continue where it was filed in Oregon. Twenty-one young climate activists were involved in Juliana v. United States. The group wanted a court order requiring the feds to implement a national plan to phase out carbon emissions.

Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg wants all new cars to be electric by 2035, according to a plan released by the former New York City mayor's campaign on Friday. Bloomberg's campaign said he would instate mileage and pollution standards and "put in place an aggressive schedule to put the U.S. on pace to make 100% of new vehicles pollution-free by 2035." SNIP Bloomberg's plan also calls for building metro-area public transit and intercity rail and bus systems and incentivizing local governments to prioritize "zero-emission" transit systems such as biking and walking. His campaign did not specifically outline how much the...

Last year was the second warmest year on record around the globe, making the last decade the warmest in recorded history, according to a new government report released Wednesday. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the higher average temperatures are the result of human activities that release greenhouse gases and that the trends of warming show that the effects of global warming and climate change are continuing beyond year-to-year fluctuations in temperature and weather. Experts from NASA found that average global surface temperature has consistently increased since the 1880s, which their...

Green activist John Cossham, 52, on how he earns very little so he can live a low-carbon lifestyleName: John Cossham Age: 52 Income: £10,000 Occupation: Entertainer and ecology educator I’m an enthusiastic green activist and I earn very little so I can live a low-carbon lifestyle. That’s the way I like it; I don’t want much money, because people who earn a lot have a high carbon footprint. This green lifestyle saves my family about £10,000 a year on utilities, food and travel compared to the average family of four. But that’s not the reason I do it. I’m proud...

On Thursday, a Facebook glitch revealed who’s posting on climate change alarmist Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page: her father Svantes Thunberg and “Climate Crisis activist” Adarsh Prathap. “[A] bug that was live from Thursday evening until Friday morning allowed anyone to easily reveal the accounts running a Page, essentially doxing anyone who posted to one,” Wired reported Friday. “We quickly fixed an issue where someone could see who edited or published a post on behalf of a Page when looking at its edit history,” Facebook responded to the controversy in a statement. “We are grateful to the security researcher who alerted...

... The truth, as one anonymous blogger aptly put it, is that your generation is unable to work up to forty hours per week without being chronically depressed and anxious. Its members cannot even decide if they want to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or a “they.” They cannot eat meat without crying. I might add that your generation needs “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” as pre-conditions for learning in school. Its members have a pathological need to be coddled and protected from the challenging realities of life. Your generation is the biggest demander and...

The transition to the new inhalers was mandated by Congress to remove one of the last remaining exemptions to the Montreal Protocol, a treaty signed in 1987 to reduce chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC, emissions that can damage the Earth’s ozone layer. The Food and Drug Administration was charged with phasing out all medications using CFC propellants once viable alternatives became available. Albuterol inhalers, used as rescue medicines for asthma attacks, were some of the last holdouts.

If your home isn’t carbon neutral, Elizabeth Warren might not let you build it. And if that means no new homes get built, she’s OK with that. In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, the Massachusetts senator and fading presidential candidate talked about her Thunberg-lite plan to help end climate change. (Climate crisis? Catastrophe? What are we going with these days?) She promised “to do everything a president can do all by herself, that is, the things you don’t have to do by going to Congress.” This includes putting an end to energy mining and drilling on federal...

Climate experts are apparently backing President Donald Trump’s repeated arguments that California’s wildfires were a result of poor land management rather than climate change, E&E reported Thursday. Roughly 75% of damage stemming from California’s wildfires was a result of “the way we manage lands and develop our landscape,” Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley, said Wednesday at a conference in Washington. Wildfires used to burn through 4.5 million acres a year in the 18th century, when indigenous communities populated California’s countryside, Stephens noted. “Fire was almost as important as rain to ecosystems,” he...

British police say it was an “error of judgment” to include environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion in an official document that listed extremist organizations. The counterterrorism police unit for southeast England included the climate change protesters alongside Islamic extremists and banned neo-Nazi group National Action in a guide to “safeguarding young people and adults from ideological extremism,” The Guardian newspaper reported. The guide said that “while concern about climate change is not in itself extreme, activists may encourage vulnerable people to perform acts of violence.” …

The latest poor saps to join the oops club are the authorities in charge of Montana’s Glacier National Park. For years they’ve been warning on their visitor signs that their main attraction, the glaciers, would be “gone by 2020.” Instead, it’s those misleading signs that have had to go, because 2020 has now arrived and those pesky glaciers, all 29 of them, remain stubbornly unmelted by climate change.

Fresh off his Golden Globe win and ahead of Oscar nominations being announced, Joaquin Phoenix was arrested, along with other climate change protestors, on Friday, Variety has confirmed. Jane Fonda’s last Fire Drill Friday protest in Washington, D.C., saw the actor march with hundreds, including stars Martin Sheen, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Susan Sarandon, and give a speech about the effects of the meat and dairy industries on climate change. According to United States Capitol Police, 147 protesters were arrested in total for the unlawful demonstration.

Grasses, shrubs and mosses are growing and expanding around Mount Everest and across the Himalayan region as the area continues to experience the consequences of global warming, researchers have found. Scientists from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom used satellite data to establish increases in subnival vegetation -- plants that grow between the tree line and the snow line -- in the Himalayas. Using NASA Landsat satellite data from 1993 to 2018, remote sensing scientists measured "small but significant" increases in vegetation cover across four height brackets between 4,150 and 6,000 meters (13,615-19,685 feet) above sea level. "There...

CNN)The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed. The signs in the Montana park were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen told CNN. But the glacier warning isn't being removed entirely, she told CNN. Instead, the new signs will say: "When they will completely disappear depends on how and when we act. One thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.