Free Republic

President Obama has opposed any expanded oil drilling off American shores largely on environmental grounds, turning a deaf ear to conservative cries of "Drill, Baby, Drill." But now Obama may start hearing cries of "foul" after the U.S. Export-Import Bank promised Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil company, $2 billion in loan guarantees to help finance lucrative drilling off the shores of Rio De Janeiro. Some see a contradiction in an executive branch agency, independent but with board members appointed by the president, facilitating abroad the very kind of energy exploration Obama opposes domestically.

And yet Dems block offshore oil production in the U.S. Two pieces of information here. Connect the dots: 1. The Obama Administration is offering billions in loans for oil drilling off the coast of Brazil. 2. George Soros, the Dems top money man has a huge financial stake in the offshore drilling company. Obama Underwrites Offshore DrillingToo bad it's not in U.S. watersWall Street Journal AUGUST 18, 2009 You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil. The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance...

Chuck DeVore discusses the hypocrisy of the Obama administration on offshore drilling http://chuckdevore.com/ - The Obama administration recently lent $2 billion to Brazil to help in their off-shore drilling efforts ignoring the revenue potential here in the US. Chuck DeVore describes the details behind this pathetic decision. VIDEO

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal broke a story regarding Americans funding off-shore drilling…in Brazil. According to the paper, the United States is loaning Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, $2 billion in the form of either a direct loan or loan guarantees. Even more bizarre, we obviously don’t have $2 billion sitting around; we are taking out a loan to make a loan, something similar to speculators and day-traders who put their house at risk to borrow to play the stock market. The implications here are staggering. First, there is the environmental implications. Aren’t we arguing over cap-and-trade because we are...

Former United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged the world's richest nations to take the lead in tackling the impact of global warming on developing countries. Annan said attempts to forge a global agreement on climate change by the end of the year should focus on the "overwhelming destruction that climate change is causing and will continue to cause" on the world's 50 poorest nations. Yet the least developed countries account for just one percent of greenhouse gases, according to a recent report by Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum. "It is this injustice -- as well as the urgency and...

The Prime Minister last night saw off a concerted attempt to make him quit by promising to change his leadership style. In an unprecedented humiliation for a serving Premier, several former ministers demanded his head at a make-or-break meeting of Labour MPs. They said Gordon Brown was leading the party to disaster after it suffered its worst poll results since 1910, gaining just 15 per cent of the vote in the European elections. But former Labour leader Lord Kinnock rode to the Prime Minister's rescue, telling MPs that disunity would cost the party the next General Election. The majority of...

(CNSNews.com) - President Obama has asked Congress to authorize $100 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help create a $500 billion global bailout fund. If passed by both the Senate and the House, the bill would allow the IMF to borrow up to $100 billion from the U.S. and increase the U.S. fiscal contribution to the IMF by $8 billion. “It’s a new appropriation,” Rob Blumenthal of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, the committee that drafted the bill, told CNSNews.com. But the move is questioned by some lawmakers who are skeptical about lending money when the...

WASHINGTON — The debate on global warming and energy policy accelerated on Tuesday as two senior House Democrats unveiled a far-reaching bill to cap heat-trapping gases and move the country quickly from dependence on coal and oil. But the bill leaves crucial questions unanswered and as of now has no Republican support. For those reasons, it marks the beginning, not the end, of debate in the current Congress on how to deal with two of President Obama’s top priorities, climate change and energy. The draft measure, written by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts,...

The joint media availability in the White House Rose Garden was dropped Monday because the nation's capital was blanketed in snow, but administration officials didn't explain why the event was not moved inside, The Times of London reported Tuesday.

Gordon Brown will seek to make common cause with President Obama next week over the best way to take the world out of recession. The Prime Minister aims to use a two-day trip to Washington to bond with the US President over the issue on which Mr Brown has staked his damaged political reputation: the massive state-funded stimulus packages to the world’s stricken economies. One Downing Street aide described their White House meeting as an attempt to present a united front against the “forces of global conservatism”. Mr Brown’s trip will include a rare address to a joint session of...

Any doubts about just how serious the Obama administration would treat global warming were obliterated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named Todd Stern Climate Envoy for the State Department. In the June 2007 issue of the American Interest, Washington lawyer Todd Stern and think tank executive William Antholis wrote a memo to the next president. Addressed from the "United States Department of Brainstorms" to "The 44th President of the United States," the action memorandum laid out the case for "creating the E-8" -- a novel international group uniting leading developed nations and developing ones for an annual gathering focused...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday appointed a special envoy for climate change, vowing that the Obama administration would restore U.S. credentials and leadership in shaping environmental policy. Pledging that the United States would play a primary role in international efforts to stem global warming, Clinton named Todd Stern, a former White House assistant who was the chief U.S. negotiator at the Kyoto Protocol talks in her husband's administration, to the post. "American leadership is essential to meeting the challenges of the 21st century, and chief among those is the complex, urgent and global threat of climate change,"...

That didn’t take long. The big ruse during the transition was that so many of Barack Obama’s appointments were not as far left as he. This was supposed to prove that those of us who feared he might lurch left of left once in office were hysterical idiots. Well, this idiot likes to get his savant on and explain how things really are. There are just enough radical left components to President Obama’s vision for America to drag us so far that we’ll end up standing just to the left of Denmark in the New World Order class photo. Climate...

LONDON (AFP) — Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday the financial crisis must not be an excuse to retreat into protectionism and instead be viewed as the "difficult birth-pangs of a new global order". In a speech, he will urge countries to avoid "muddling through as pessimists" and "make the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting the new rules for this new global order", according to his office. Official data confirmed Friday that Britain is in recession. Days earlier, the government unveiled a new package of measures to help the flow of credit in the economy, but Brown...

LONDON (Reuters) - A new advisory firm launched on Monday seeks to boost carbon emissions trading in sub-Saharan Africa and raise the continent's lagging profile in the $120 billion global carbon market. CarbonStream Africa, a joint venture between South African state-owned CEF Carbon SA (Pty) and Nordic company GreenStream Network Plc, offers advisory services for firms seeking to trade greenhouse gas offsets in Africa under the Kyoto Protocol. "Africa is really lagging behind, but I really believe it has the strongest potential," said Deven Pillay, CEO of CEF's carbon trading arm and chairman of CarbonStream Africa. "It's where we need...

Change we can all believe in? How about the same song and dance, but just a different day? In opening remarks at her confirmation hearing on Jan. 13, President-elect Barack Obama’s Secretary of State designate Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations committee she would use the office to shape foreign policy that would fight climate change “You Mr. Chairman [Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.] were among the very first in a growing chorus from both parties to recognize that climate change is an unambiguous security threat,” Clinton said. “At the extreme it threatens our very existence. But well before that...

(CNN) — Senate Foreign Relations Committee [chairman] John Kerry expects a "fair and expeditious" hearing for the nomination of Hillary Clinton to secretary of state, a Kerry spokesman told CNN. Frederick Jones, director of communications for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the financial information disclosed by Clinton and her husband has not highlighted any problems, though there are some areas where "additional clarification is needed."

COPENHAGEN (AFP) – The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming. "Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a...

Politics: Is anyone surprised that the would-be czarina of federal climate and energy policy has ties to a socialist group? The environmental movement's goal is to afflict the economy, not comfort the ecology.Carol Browner, who'll run the new White House office of climate and energy policies, isn't new to Washington. The public will recognize her name from the years she served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton. The public, however, knows little or nothing about her work with Socialist International, a group that describes itself as a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labor parties that envisions...

I as I write this, I look outside and think where are the man-made global warming theorists right now? Are they sitting in some cozy location thinking of ways to cover their butts on new data that contradicts the theory that oceans will rise, the gates of weather hell will be unleashed and we will all be wearing some triple numbered SPF lotion? What is interesting is a new study that came out and was published in Science on January 2nd, 2009, has not made the rounds in the media. The meat of the study: A paper published by Science...