Free Republic

The much-touted green energy economy and the net zero goals it aims to obtain are built upon a dirty little secret: slavery and child labor. A large percentage of the rare earth elements and critical minerals required for modern electronics, in general, and green energy technologies in particular, are produced and/or refined in countries where, if labor and environmental standards exist at all--and are enforced if they do—the standards are far short of what is required in developed countries. The mining, refining, manufacturing, and transportation of the huge amounts of rare earth elements and critical minerals is a dirty business....

The World Economic Forum insect overlords have convened in Davos, Switzerland for their annual confab this week, and once again, their focus is “crisis.” Everything is a “crisis” for the WEF and their minions seeded throughout the world’s governments and corporate leaders, and those crises are always “unprecedented.” But this year, they’re trying to foment even more global panic; they’ve declared 2023 to be the “year of the ‘polycrisis.’” In other words, multiple crises at the same time. (Which is the same thing they’ve been saying for years, but with a new, scary epithet attached to it.) Also consistent with...

The Biden administration announced an initiative Thursday to track the “economic role and value” of nature in the U.S., claiming that current economic indicators do not accurately track the impact of the “natural world” on the U.S. economy. The “National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions” was announced as a joint initiative between the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), and represented the work of “27 Federal departments, agencies and offices” to “account for natural assets.” The initiative notes that the Gross Domestic Product...

When they open their 30-day session on January 11, Virginia’s Senate and House of Delegates must correct some serious energy mistakes they made two years ago, when Democrats controlled nearly the entire state government and passed the “Virginia Clean Economy Act.” One of those party-line decisions requires that Virginia adopt California’s requirement that only low-emission vehicles (LEVs) be sold by the model year 2025 and only zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) by MY 2035. That means in barely twelve years only new electric vehicles (EVs) could be sold in Virginia. Again mimicking California, in addition to EVs, the VCEA also requires a...

The spectre of future energy blackouts is once again looming in Germany, with the country’s plan to cut consumption falling significantly short amid cold winter weather. A cold snap that has hit the north of Europe is now seriously threatening Germany’s energy security, with the country now reportedly falling far short of hitting gas savings targets of 20 per cent needed to avoid rolling blackouts. While many officials across the country had warned that there is a very real threat that Germany could be facing serious energy shortages over the next few months, bigwigs close to the government have repeatedly...

Leading activists with climate change protest group Just Stop Oil have admitted that they drive petrol cars, but still claim that this doesn’t make them hypocrites. Erm, okay then. “Dr Larch Maxey, 50, a climate scientist from the eco group, said some members still drive cars and fill up with petrol – but rejected the idea that it was hypocritical,” reports the Telegraph. According to activist leaders, they are “victims” of the “fossil fuel economy.” Maxey says that people who call for the oil industry to be shut down but then drive petrol cars shouldn’t be called out for hypocrisy...

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a new proposed rule that will prevent new or newly renovated federal buildings from being powered by fossil fuels by 2030. The new standards will force the government to use green energy technologies to power its buildings in hopes of cutting carbon emissions and meeting international climate goals, according to an Energy Department (DOE) memo. Starting in 2025, government buildings, which are responsible for roughly 25% of all federal carbon emissions, must also reduce their on-site emissions relating to energy use by 90% compared to 2003 levels. “Ridding pollution from our buildings and adopting...

Why do some climate alarmists essentially wish us all dead? Because they think people are bad for the earth. They don't believe in God. They claim to believe in science. But what is the evidence that people are supposedly bad for the earth? The Atlantic recently had an article (January/February 2023 issue), focusing on this idea that some experts today are promoting human extinction, for the sake of the planet. They write: "From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity's reign on Earth is...

Farmers in Germany have been banned from properly fertilizing large areas of their land under strict EU rules pushing the green agenda. The use of nitrate fertilizers has been further restricted for large swathes of farmland in North Rhine-Westphalia, which is now likely to drastically reduce yields. Although German authorities have implemented the ban, it is ultimately at the behest of the European Union, which is seeking to reduce the amount of nitrogen to tackle ‘climate change.’ The policy has already wreaked havoc in the Netherlands. As The Daily Fetched reported in September: Dutch farmers have risen in protest to...

President Joe Biden, fresh from a surprisingly good November election for his fellow Democrats, has redoubled his commitment to rid the world of natural fuels (oil, gas, coal) and impose an all-electric universe powered in large part by offshore wind farms. To that end, Biden recently announced massive wind lease areas offshore from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Galveston, Texas. One is a 188,023-acre tract located 56 miles offshore from Lake Charles; the other is a 508,265-acre tract 24 nautical miles offshore from Galveston. While Louisiana’s Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards is ebullient about the economic prospects for offshore wind, his...

“Let them eat cake,” famously attributed to Marie Antoinette by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has become universal shorthand for a monarch’s total disregard for her famished citizens stealing and wreaking havoc in the streets to survive. World leaders are making the same faux pas this week at their opulent stay in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for COP27, the United Nations’ climate change conference. While they eat the best food in the world and enjoy luxurious tourism opportunities, they will leave the conference telling billions of people that the only way to combat the “climate crisis” is to stop eating meat, stop production...

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not attend the COP27 United Nations Climate Conference, even though their nations are two of the world’s top three carbon emitters. Although China is responsible for more pollution than all other developed nations combined, Xi Jinping is not scheduled to attend the conference, which began Sunday in Egypt, according to Reuters. More than 100 heads of state are expected to attend COP27 before the conference officially ends on Nov. 18; however, no representatives from India, the world’s third-largest carbon emitter, are currently scheduled to attend the climate summit. Together,...

The hype about wind and solar energy keeps colliding with the hard reality of land-use conflicts. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Ohio, where 41 townships have rejected or restricted the expansion of wind and/or solar projects since last November. In addition, at least eight Ohio counties have implemented restrictions on Big Wind and Big Solar over that same time period. The soaring number of rejections – all of which are documented in the Renewable Rejection Database – brings the total number of solar rejections in the U.S. this year to 67. That total includes the October 12 unanimous...

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy,...

Decarbonizing the United States by the year 2050, as many policymakers advocate and a strong majority of Americans support, would likely be the most challenging infrastructure overhaul in the history of our country. Frankly, the odds are heavily stacked against it happening. Though many support the idea in abstract, they may not necessarily grasp what such an energy transition would entail in practice. The International Energy Agency (IEA) and researchers from Arizona State University recently spelled it out in detail. Here is a summary of what a carbon-free United States might look like in 2050: The grid will be producing...

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wanted regulatory reform, in part to reverse some of the Biden Administration's reversals of Trump-era reforms intended to expedite permits for fossil fuel projects. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) needed Manchin’s vote in the 50-50 Senate to enact his latest spending extravaganza, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was primarily a massive climate and “green” energy subsidy arrangement. It gives Schumer allies some $370 billion in wind, solar, battery, and other funding, tax credits, and subsidies. In exchange, Schumer would offer a path for Manchin’s reform bill. Manchin voted YEA and promptly got bushwhacked. Once he’d helped...

CALIFORNIA CITY -- California's precariously out-of-date hybrid power grid can't handle the state's growing amounts of solar and wind energy coming online, with system managers already forcing repeated cutbacks in renewables and a continued reliance on conventional energy to keep the grid stable, according to state data. Department of Energy No place to go: Image from the Energy Department report “Queued Up … But in Need of Transmission." Department of Energy The shortcomings of the transmission grid, which energy consultants in this bellwether state have warned about for years, raise the prospect that marquee products of the growing battery economy...

New York, along with other states, is moving forward with massive wind turbine projects. The push for "9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy" comes at a high price, not only for families who are left dependent on expensive and unreliable energy, but for the planet. Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors. A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals. Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment. One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out"...

The climate hysteria movement is replete with predictions of utter doom for various ecosystems on Earth owing to the scourge of man-made global warming, which has been re-branded “climate change.” But a new study shows that one of those ecosystems — Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — seems to be doing just fine despite dire warnings of its imminent demise. For several years, climate alarmists have been claiming that the Great Barrier Reef, along with all the coral reef systems on the planet, is essentially doomed because of climate change. The predictions have been apocalyptic for the reef. A 2020 story...

If you want to watch the pinkos fret, simply state the indisputable truth that what they call “climate change” is a massive hoax. Their fallback is inevitably that “science” – which they purport to love except when it demonstrates that there are only men and women and that you can’t change the sex you are born as – has decreed that because we peons insist on not living in caves like primitive tribesmen (okay, non-binary tribespeople) the Earth is going to cook. And, of course, the only solution is to do a whole bunch of things that leftists always wanted...