Free Republic

Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioting in Brazil’s capital was the result of “political right” in America who rioted and entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anchor Nicolle Wallace asked, “What did you think when you saw the insurrection in Brazil over the weekend? That these acts in America that you spent 18 months investigating were copycatted by Trump’s international allies in Brazil?”

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said Wednesday that the U.S. will back proposals to phase out the use of “unabated” fossil fuels at the ongoing COP27 climate summit. “It has to be unabated oil and gas,” Kerry told Bloomberg in Egypt Wednesday. “Phase down, unabated, over time. The time is a question, but ‘phase down’ is the language we supported.” The “unabated” distinction will open the door to continual operation of fossil fuel developments that offset their greenhouse gas emissions with technology like carbon capture.

Far-left Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the audience at a climate change event on Tuesday that he believed the escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was “accelerating” the “energy transition” away from fossil fuels and towards a zero-carbon electric grid. Trudeau asserted that Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian oil and natural gas clearly endangered the continent and positions countries like Canada, with its own abundant natural resources, to usurp the dominance that tyrannies like Russia and China have taken in both fossil fuels and industries such as rare-earth metals, used for many of the products necessary for a...

The oil producing nations basically told the U.S. to "shove it", furthering the case that the BRIC nations are moving away from the U.S. dollar and separating economically from the West. ... OPEC humiliated Biden on a global stage by cutting oil production after he specifically lobbied them not to. There’s no “nice” way of putting it - they straight-up snubbed the U.S. and have now, in my opinion, made it officially clear that they 1) are not our friends, 2) do not care what we want, 3) do not take us seriously and 4) are not here to help...

Former President Barack Obama has made an unusual request to install a massive 2,500 gallon commercial-grade propane tank at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, according to reports. The cost of installing the large tank and filling it with gas could reportedly cost up to $75,000.

The shortage threatens the pace of the U.S. transition away from fossil fuels as the Biden administration seeks to decarbonize the grid by 2035.. U.S. renewable energy developers have delayed or scrapped several big battery projects meant to store electrical power on the grid in recent months, scuttling plans to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar energy. At least a dozen storage projects meant to support growing renewable energy supplies have been postponed, canceled or renegotiated as labor and transport bottlenecks, soaring minerals prices, and competition from the electric vehicle industry crimp supply. .... Storing power is considered vital...

Russia has nearly doubled its revenues from selling fossil fuels to the EU during the two months of war in Ukraine, benefiting from soaring prices even as volumes have been reduced.Russia has received about €62bn from exports of oil, gas and coal in the two months since the invasion began, according to an analysis of shipping movements and cargos by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.For the EU, imports were about €44bn for the past two months, compared with about €140bn for the whole of last year, or roughly €12bn a month.The findings demonstrate how Russia has...

A globalist climate change-focused organization in the United Kingdom has issued an analysis that claims rich countries should be the first to drop the harvesting of all fossil fuels by 2034 in order to keep the global warming cap at 1.5 degrees Celsius. This would give poor countries more time to divest of oil and gas.

More than 30 million years ago, the Peruvian sea was home to one of the largest predators to ever emerge in the ocean. Its colossal size has surprised the scientific community.Species endangered by this fearsome marine animal that remained hidden in the Peruvian sea. In 2021, one of the most important discoveries ever recorded in the country was announced. It was only at the beginning of 2022 that the first assessments of the skeletal remains of Peru's so-called 'sea monster', an ancient whale considered one of the largest predators that existed 36 million years ago, were reported. Its impressive size...

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Wednesday asked fossil fuel executives at a conference to increase production levels “to stabilize the market and to minimize harm to American families.” Granholm asked them to start “producing right now” during remarks at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference taking place this week in Houston, which attracts energy leaders from around the globe.

The Hallucigenia sparsa. (Caron et al., Proc. Royal Soc. B, 2013) We sort of take for granted the depictions of prehistoric beasties illustrated in the books of our childhood. But piecing together Earth's murky past is a lot harder than it sounds. Scientists have to rely on fragmentary bones, weathered footprints, impressions in rock – these don't always capture the fine details of the complex, living, breathing animal that passed through or died there. Sometimes, while doing this painstaking work, researchers get it wrong. And not just a little wrong! Here are some of our favorite fossil flubs, and what...

On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Alex Witt Reports,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) argued that changes in the price of gas are one reason why “we have to accelerate our program to get off of fossil fuels” and control of the oil supply by other countries is “another reason why we need to accelerate our efforts to get off of fossil fuels.” Cardin said, “The challenge, of course, is we have to transition off of the fossil fuels to renewable fuels. We need to do that for our economy. We need to do it for our environment. We need to do...

Entombed in a limestone shelf of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave, the fragmented skull of a Homo naledi child has suggested that the prehistoric species may have been more similar to modern humans than previously thought. Two new studies, published this week in the journal PaleoAnthropology, have revealed new details about the mysterious Homo naledi people, based on a set of fossils first discovered in 2017, which are believed to be that of a young Homo naledi of 4- to 6-years-old. An international team of researchers has estimated the child would have lived between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, before...

Nothing quite says 'look at me!' like an extravagant set of tail feathers. Plenty of modern birds sacrifice agility for a chance to grab attention, but examples among relatives in the fossil record have been harder to come by. Scientists have now described the remains of a 120-million-year-old feathered dinosaur roughly the size of a bluejay, with an extremely long and extravagant behind. The remarkably-detailed fossil was found in northeastern China and named Yuanchuavis (Yuanchuavis kompsosoura) after a phoenix-like bird in Chinese mythology. It's the first time a bird-like fossil from the Mesozoic era has been discovered with such a...

Ancient New Zealand has been home to an incredible array of absurdly large birds. This has included a waist-high parrot, nicknamed Squawk-zilla (Heracles inexpectatus) – the largest parrot ever known on Earth, possibly hunting for flesh around 20 million years ago. Two-meter-high flightless Moa also made their home there, along with their predator, Haast's Eagles (Hieraaetus moorei), with a monstrous 3-meter wingspan, around 2 million years ago. Now researchers have added a new giant penguin to this gloriously super-sized menagerie – one discovered by a lucky group of school kids back in 2006. "It's sort of surreal to know that...

This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...

A fight that erupted over snow shoveling allegedly led to a Pennsylvania man shooting two of his neighbors to death, authorities said. The fatal gun violence occurred in Plains Township, about 15 miles southwest of Scranton after 2 feet of snow blanketed the area, officials said. Just before 9 a.m. on Monday, Plains Township police officers responded to a report of shots fired in a residential neighborhood and discovered 50-year-old James Goy and his 48-year-old wife, Lisa Goy, lying dead in the street in front of their home, according to a joint statement by Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis...

As our planet's permafrosts continue to melt in record-breaking heat, we can expect to find astonishing things from the ancient past. Like this huge wolf head, preserved since the last ice age and unearthed in incredible condition in Siberia in 2018, an estimated 40,000 years since being entombed in frozen wilderness. The giant head, discovered by a local man in 2018 along the shores of the Tirekhtyakh River in the Russian Republic of Sakha (aka Yakutia), measures a whole 40 centimetres in length (about 16 inches), making it unlike any existing wolf specimen scientists have studied from so long ago....

One of the most important archaeological sites for our understanding of Neanderthals is still disgorging its secrets. A new skeleton has been found in Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it's helping reveal how the Neanderthals dealt with their dead. Shanidar Cave is famous for what is known as the Flower Burial. Among 10 fragmentary Neanderthal skeletons unearthed there in the 1950s and 1960s, one was found with clumps of pollen mixed in with the surrounding dirt. This was interpreted as evidence that the bones - belonging to a man aged between 30 and 45 years - had been buried...