Free Republic

Hannah Holmes of South Portland loves her electric lawnmower. It's quieter and more eco-friendly than your typical gas mower. She can push it with one hand. But it has its drawbacks. One battery has just enough charge to last about 30 to 45 minutes. People who have big yards either need multiple batteries — which are not cheap, Holmes noted — or need to accept that mowing the lawn will have to happen in stages. And you can't let the lawn grow too long. "It doesn't like tall grass, it just doesn't have the horsepower of a gas-powered motor, so...

Reports on the climate are proliferating, but can you really take them all in? In Europe, where climate reporting is well established, many may feel there is an onslaught of bad news. Better to not read it, and be able to relax. In response to this “climate news avoidance”, German psychologists have come up with recommendations for reporters, suggesting a more emotionally engaging approach. First, they say, reporting should focus on how climate change impacts the most important aspects of society, such as health and the economy. Second, it should acknowledge and validate readers’ feelings. Reporters should let the reader...

For climate advocates, the growing state deficit unveiled in the revised 2023-24 state budget offers some bad news, some good news and a great deal of uncertainty. The good news is that despite California’s projected budget shortfall jumping from January’s estimate of $22.5 billion to the new estimate of $31.8 billion, the state isn’t planning additional cuts for climate projects. That leaves intact a five-year plan to spend $48 billion on climate. “We were really expecting there to be another round of massive cuts to the climate budget,” said Jamie Pew, climate fellow with the progressive group NextGen Policy. So,...

These three arguments are simple, but they are strong. The true economic, social, and political cost of the measures proposed by governments (in the West only) to destroy their nations' businesses and jobs and to impoverish every household is becoming ever more visible. At last, therefore, a few brave souls in the scientific and academic communities are beginning to question what I shall call — with more than a little justification — the Communist Party line on climate change. Three devastating equations have emerged, each of which calls fundamentally into question the imagined (and imaginary) basis for the economic hara-kiri...

Governments must introduce measures to reduce the public’s standard of living by a staggering 75 percent, using force if necessary, globalist corporate media outlets are now warning. The public must take drastic measures to reduce individuals’ so-called “carbon footprint” to stop “global warming,” according to the BBC. In its “Future World” series, the BBC warns viewers that choosing to live an “ultra-low carbon lifestyle” is no longer an option and calls for the standards to be mandated by governments. The public-funded British media outlet insists that a dramatic reduction in living standards is now required if the planet is to...

But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report. “It is just...

A multibillion-dollar energy developer has wired tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine's campaign in recent years while aggressively pushing a massive offshore wind project. The Richmond, Virginia-based Dominion Energy's political action committee (PAC) has funneled $23,000 to Kaine for Virginia since 2011, with the latest, a $1,500 contribution, coming in February. In that same time span, Dominion Energy has given another $44,500 to Common Ground PAC, the leadership PAC affiliated with and chaired by Kaine. Since 2021, Dominion Energy executives led by CEO Robert Blue and Senior Vice President William Murray have donated $19,600 to...

Spain’s government has decided to cut water brought from the Tagus River to irrigate crops in the bone-dry southeast of the country. Spain is one of the EU’s biggest fruit and vegetable producers. Almost half of the country’s exports are grown by farmers like Juan Francisco Abellaneda, co-founder of farming cooperative Delior. His salads and watermelons fill the shelves of Europe’s supermarkets throughout the year. These crops are irrigated by water brought from the River Tagus, hundreds of kilometres to the north of Abellaneda’s 300 hectares of fields near Murcia. But, as Spain faces the realities of climate change with...

The Realitometer, which will be published each month, shows the real-world global warming per century equivalent since January 1990 from the satellite monthly temperature dataset of the University of Alabama in Huntsville...Month by inexorable month, the Realitometer will show just how absurdly exaggerated were and are the official predictions of global warming...Yet not one mainstream news medium has reported just how startlingly large the ratio of prediction to reality is proving to be.

The “climate hell” mentioned in the run-up to the latest COPout conference by the excitable Mr Guterres, Sekjen of the United Nations, is not a happening thing. As the New Pause in global warming lengthens inexorably, month by month, real-world global warming departs more and more visibly from what was and is predicted. Yet the Thermageddonites, flogging the dead horse like a bull in a china shop even though the emperor has no clothes, are ignoring the elephants in the room. Their latest wheeze is to point out that the real-world global-warming trend in the third of a century since...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York state is banning natural gas stoves and heating systems in most new buildings, a policy that’s part of a national movement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The law negotiated by Gov. Kathy Hochul and her fellow Democrats in the Legislature is part of the state budget and puts New York in the forefront of states targeting emissions from buildings. When the phase-in starts in 2026, newly constructed buildings will have to forego fossil fuel equipment in favor of devices like induction ranges and heat pumps that run on electricity. The state mandate applies...

Climate change activists have announced plans to protest at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday where President Joe Biden is set to speak. Climate Defiance organizers told ABC News that they plan to blockade the area near the dinner on Saturday night is an effort to hold Biden, who announced his reelection bid on Tuesday, accountable for what they say was his 2020 campaign promise to end fossil fuel extraction on public lands. "Number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry...

Thanks to his commitment to the Democratic Party’s climate cult, President Joe Biden is now pledging to pass money through the United Nations to the Chinese Communist Party. On Thursday, Biden promised to send $1 billion in taxpayer money to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. The corrupt bureaucrats at the U.N., who are increasingly beholden to the CCP, consider China to be a developing country. Therefore, that $1 billion can be funneled to China. This would be at least the second time in the past few months that Biden promised to help the U.N. funnel American taxpayer dollars to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Friday plans to sign an executive order that would make “environmental justice” the mission of federal agencies, the White House said. The Democratic administration wants to ensure that poverty, race and ethnic status do not lead to worse exposure to pollution and environmental harm. Biden will sign the executive order to continue delivering on “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda in our nation’s history,” the White House said in a statement. The order tells executive branch agencies to use data and scientific research to understand how pollution hurts people’s health, so that work...

Climate change is a major concern for a majority of religious Americans, but it’s not discussed much in congregations, according to the Pew Research Center. This has led to increased feelings of sadness, loss, and despair as people witness negative effects on the environment. This is known as “ecological grief,” which has led some to turn to religion for comfort and support. In response, leaders from the four biggest faiths in Pennsylvania (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) will gather at the Gettysburg Seminary Chapel for an Earth Day interfaith service focused on environmental stewardship. Judy Young, a former pastor who...

GENEVA (Reuters) - Global sea levels are rising at more than double the pace they did in the first decade of measurements in 1993-2002 and touched a new record high last year, the World Meteorological Organization said on Friday. Extreme glacier melt and record ocean heat levels - which cause water to expand - contributed to an average rise in sea levels of 4.62mm a year between 2013-2022, the U.N. agency said in a major report detailing the havoc of climate change. That is about double the pace of the first decade on record, 1993-2002, leading to a total increase...

Last month, TikTok updated its community guidelines to add policies that prohibit videos with climate change misinformation on the app. As The Daily Beast notes, the change is taking effect today, April 21st. According to the service's announcement, TikTok will no longer allow content that "undermines well-established scientific consensus" regarding the climate crisis. TikTok will still allow videos that tackle discussions about climate change, such as government policies related to it, as long as they don't go against scientific consensus. However, it will start deleting content that violate its new policy today, and any user searching for climate information will...

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres bluntly challenged the climate efforts of President Joe Biden and other world leaders Thursday in a message for a White House summit, charging that expanded oil and gas drilling and other policies of the richest countries amount to a “death sentence” for the planet. The warning marked a public rebuke from the U.N.’s highest official of what he described as “the major emitters” of gases from burning fossil fuels that are heating the planet. The challenge — recorded by Guterres in a video for the White House virtual climate summit — came as...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Biden will announce plans to increase U.S. funding to help developing countries fight climate change and curb deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest during a meeting on Thursday with leaders from the world's largest economies. The president will announce a U.S. contribution of $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which finances projects on clean energy and climate change resilience in developing countries, doubling the overall U.S. contribution, the White House said. He will also announce plans to request $500 million over five years to contribute to the Amazon Fund, which works to combat deforestation in...

Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray?“Saving humanity from the climate crisis,” says EarthDay.org, requires us to “push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy.”Sounds logical.But my latest video explains why doing that is cruel to poor people. “Three billion people in the world still use less electricity than a typical refrigerator,” explains Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” If they’re going to have “their first well-paying jobs … their first consistent supply of clean water … a modern life … that’s going to depend on fossil fuels.”But the greens say we have a better replacement: wind and...