Free Republic

A North Dakota judge finalized a potentially fatal verdict against Greenpeace on Friday, affirming a $345 million jury award against the storied environmental group that Greenpeace has said may force it into bankruptcy in the United States. The verdict was reached last year after a bruising trial brought by the pipeline company Energy Transfer over Greenpeace’s role in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, an 1,172-mile pipeline that carries oil from North Dakota to Illinois. Energy Transfer claimed Greenpeace had played a major role in the protests a decade ago, forcing construction delays and costing the company money. Greenpeace has...

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will take up a major climate change lawsuit targeting the energy industry — a case that could determine the future of similar lawsuits filed by left-wing states and municipalities across the country. The Court agreed to review Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. They granted the hearing after the Colorado Supreme Court allowed Boulder County’s state-law claims to proceed, rejecting arguments from energy producers that the lawsuit is preempted by federal law. The decision comes amid a wave of nearly three dozen lawsuits brought by leftist jurisdictions seeking to...

Despite being far away from civilization, a melting Antarctic’s “disastrous” consequences will ripple across the world, researchers warn. Scientists have highlighted just how high the stakes are as human-made climate change continues to rapidly warm Antarctica. A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science, models the best- and worst-case scenarios for global warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost part of the mainland. Researchers warn that the continent’s future “depends on the choices we make today”, arguing that cutting emissions could avoid the most “important and detrimental” impacts of the climate crisis. […] Under the highest emissions...

Elite fashions harden into dogma, dissent becomes taboo, institutions fall in line—and only when reality intrudes does yesterday’s madness begin its overdue collapse. How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support—and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed? There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity. The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential...

(The Center Square) - The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a case over whether states can sue fossil fuel companies for damages related to climate change.The nation’s highest court agreed to hear arguments in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. Justices on the court asked both parties to submit briefs on whether it has constitutional authority to decide the case.The case, based out of Colorado, challenges the authority of state and local governments to use nuisance laws in proceedings against fossil fuel companies.“There is no constitutional bar to states addressing in-state harms caused by...

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what? Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources. The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy. Since the global warming crusade started some 30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree -- as even the alarmists will...

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what? Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources. The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy. Since the global warming crusade started some 30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree -- as even the alarmists will...

Researchers from the Romanian Academy have discovered a bacterial strain that has been frozen in Romania's Scarisoara Ice Cave for 5,000 years. Carefully extracting a sample, the researchers tested it against 10 common antibiotics, including those used to treat tuberculosis, colitis, and UTIs. 'The Psychrobacter SC65A.3 bacterial strain isolated from Scarisoara Ice Cave, despite its ancient origin, shows resistance to multiple modern antibiotics and carries over 100 resistance–related genes,' said study author Dr Cristina Purcarea. Previous research has shown that other strains from this genus are known to cause infections in humans, as well as animals. In their new study,...

Planting trees on 6.4 million hectares of northern taiga forest could remove 3.9 gigatons of CO2 by 2100 — five times Canada's annual emissions. Canada could remove more than five times its annual carbon emissions from the atmosphere by the end of the century by planting trees along the northern edge of its boreal forest, a new study suggests. In recent decades forests have slowly moved north in response to climate change — in particular the taiga area on the edge of the boreal forest, the massive belt of forest stretching across northern Canada, Europe, and Russia, where it transitions...

Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to academic sociology these days knows there are serious problems. I have been writing about this phenomenon now for a number of years, pointing out, e.g., sociology’s drift from its origins and how its journals and conferences clearly illustrate its biases. The discipline has become captured by an ideology and has given up on its earlier scientific promise. A glance at the titles of conference papers and journal articles, or indeed at the course offerings in sociology at any institution of higher learning, reveals the transformation. Even some Marxist professors have come...

Irresponsible Trump, responsible China: that is the message the BBC’s climate editor seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the President had repealed Barack Obama’s “endangerment finding” and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is otherwise committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. But is there any truth in that? The endangerment finding was a piece of legalese issued in a 2009 ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It stated that six greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide,...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called on world leaders attending the Munich Security Conference in Germany to think about a future without President Donald Trump. Newsom's comments on climate policy reflected the larger theme of his message for Europe. "I hope if there is nothing else I communicate today: Donald Trump is temporary. He'll be gone in three years," Newsom said. He added, "It's important for folks to understand the temporary nature of this current administration in relationship to the issue of climate change and climate policy." He slammed the Trump administration's rollback of the 2009 "endangerment finding" and accused the...

President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Thursday announced the repeal of a 2009 policy allowing the federal government to regulate the emissions of fossil fuels by declaring them dangerous to public health. Trump called the repeal “the single largest deregulatory action in American history” and said it would “save American consumers trillions of dollars.” “We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers,” Trump said in the White House Roosevelt Room. “Effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding...

Townhall reported: Elites Did Their Part to Fight Global Warming by Flying Dozens of Private Jets to the Super Bowl The Democrats keep telling us we have to address climate change immediately, or half the country will end up underwater. Bernie Sanders, who supports the Green New Deal and calls climate change an “existential threat” to humanity, spent more than half a million dollars on private jets during his “Fight Oligarchy” tour. Yesterday, following the Super Bowl in San Francisco, hundreds of private jets were seen leaving the area. We’re willing to be that 90 percent or more of them...

Here at Manhattan Contrarian, we get results. After my last three posts harshly critiquing the Federal Judicial Center’s newly revised Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, and particularly its chapter on Climate Science, suddenly on Friday the Center’s Director sent a letter stating that the Center has now “omitted” that chapter! Well OK, I was not the only one objecting. On January 29, a coalition of state Attorneys General from red states, led by the AG of West Virginia (JB McCuskey), had sent a letter to Judge Robin Rosenberg, the Director of the Center, asking for immediate withdrawal of the offending...

My last two posts have been about the new Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, just out (December 31) from the Federal Justice Center. The Chair of that Center is U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. The latest version of the Manual is the Fourth Edition. The prior version in 2011 was the Third Edition; and there were also two prior Editions from 2000 and 1994. In those previous two posts, I principally criticized a newly-added chapter in the Fourth Edition titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science.” Today, I want to take a look at another chapter titled “How Science Works.”...

Bernie Sanders has made a name for himself as Congress' resident cranky commie. He likes to pretend he's a man of the people and champion of the working class, but the reality is he owns three houses and likes capitalism when he's selling his latest book. He's also a raging hypocrite who lectures us about the dangers of climate change and the "oligarchy" while he jets around the country on a private aircraft. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who crisscrossed the country last year on a Fighting Oligarchy tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., spent over $550,000 in 2025 on private...

A bill advancing through the Massachusetts Senate would make reducing how much people drive an explicit goal of state transportation policy. It is called the Freedom to Move Act. The bill, SB 2246, does not impose mileage caps on individual drivers. There is no odometer check, no per-driver limit, and no new fines or taxes written into the legislation. Instead it directs the state to set targets for reducing total vehicle miles traveled statewide — targets that would be incorporated into transportation planning, infrastructure investment, and long-term emissions policy. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts,...

California drivers and Republican legislators are furious over a Democrat-led proposal that could see motorists taxed for each mile they drive. With the state staring down a budget deficit in the billions and more Californians switching to electric vehicles, Democratic lawmakers are searching for new ways to shore up declining gas tax revenue. Californians pay the second-highest gas price in the nation behind only Hawaii. In January, the average price was $4.23 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. On Thursday, state legislators advanced Democrat Lori Wilson’s bill, AB 1421, which would direct the California Transportation Commission and the...

As most know by now, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” global warming propaganda film turned 20 a few days ago. It won a couple of Oscars in 2007, one for best documentary. The latter should be returned. The movie was filled with errors. Exalting the celluloid screed with an Academy Award for best documentary is the equivalent of handing the Nobel Peace Prize to a terrorist, an incompetent, a fraud, an unaccomplished charlatan, and, yes, Gore himself, because it was far more a faux-umentary than an honest account of the facts. In the same year that Gore was given his...