Free Republic

This past week, the Senate passed the Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” which includes $368 billion for green energy spending targeted to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2030, a move that will almost certainly increase inflation. In a repeat of the renewable energy project failures that the Obama administration financed with federal grants and tax breaks, the Biden administration is betting more potentially inflationary deficit spending against the odds that renewable energy will be profitable this time. Ironically, on September 4, 2009, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the one who announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) had...

In anticipation of California losing 10% of its water supply by 2040, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state water officials unveiled a multi-pronged plan Thursday to adapt to hotter conditions and bolster the Golden State’s water supply in the coming years. The 16-page plan outlines goals to target the state’s water supply by developing additional space to capture and store water, diversifying the state’s water portfolio through desalination and reducing water demand. The plan also underlines the importance of accelerating the modernization of California’s water system to replenish the water California will lose due to hotter and drier seasons. Speaking from...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A flagship Democratic economic bill perched on the edge of House passage Friday, placing President Joe Biden on the brink of a back-from-the-dead triumph on goals for the climate, health care and taxes that could energize his party ahead of November’s elections. Democrats were poised to muscle the measure through the narrowly divided House Friday over solid Republican opposition. They employed similar party unity and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote Sunday to power the measure through the 50-50 Senate. The package is but a shadow of Biden’s initial vision and was produced only after a year...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Friday on a $430 billion bill to fight climate change and lower prescription drug prices, in what Democrats view as a major political win for President Joe Biden ahead of November's midterm elections. The bill has been more than 18 months in the making. It represents a final version of Biden's original sweeping Build Back Better plan, which had to be whittled down in the face of opposition from Republicans and key legislators from his own party. Democrats, who have been weighed down for months by inflation and Biden's anemic...

If insanity involves an inability or unwillingness to accept and deal with ineluctable realities, then every last Democrat in the United States Senate, all fifty of them, is insane and has no business being anywhere near the levers of power. This was made clear yet again on Sunday, when the entire bloc of those who think of themselves as our intellectual and moral superiors voted against recognizing a fact that has been obvious since the dawn of recorded time. Every last Democrat voted against an amendment to the infamously misnamed Inflation Reduction Act — which will do absolutely nothing to...

Democrats inched ahead of Republicans on FiveThirtyEight’s generic congressional ballot average on August 10 — less than four months from the midterm election night. FiveThirtyEight updated their generic congressional ballot average on Wednesday to show Democrats have a slight advantage over Republicans. The average showed generic Democrats with an average of 44.2 percent and generic Republicans with an average of 44 percent. The average from FiveThirtyEight looks at polls from Morning Consult, Rasmussen Reports, Ipsos, Data for Progress, and YouGov.

So, what did everyone pay at their last fill-up?

California Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a new water strategy on Thursday that plans for a future with 10% less water and shifts the emphasis from conservation to capturing more water that otherwise flows out to sea. The state has budgeted more than $8 billion in the past three years to modernize water infrastructure that Newsom said would generate enough water for 8.4 million households in a state of 40 million people. His plan calls for creating storage for 4 million acre-feet of water and recycling or reusing 800,000 acre-feet per year by 2030 in addition to more stormwater capture and...

Gasoline and oil prices should bounce back through the end of the year as the market still needs to balance rising demand and tight supplies, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.. Brent oil futures could go as high as $130 per barrel, with retail gasoline prices in the US surging back to about $5 per gallon, said Damien Courvalin, Goldman’s head of energy research in a Bloomberg Television interview. These are the levels “at which we need to see sustained prices to eventually solve the market deficit,” Courvalin said. Read more: Oil consumption to accelerate as gas crisis spurs switch,...

Guayule is an evergreen shrub that originated in the arid zone from the southwestern part of the USA to northern Mexico and therefore can be grown in environments totally different from those suited for para rubber trees (the current primary source of natural rubber (*1)). Also, the rubber constituent contained therein is very similar to that of para rubber trees. Given these factors, guayule is expected to become a new source of natural rubber. *1Hevea brasiliensis, Euphorbiaceae; evergreen tree originated in Brazil. Latex extracted from the tree contains natural rubber.

A powerful Dutch banking executive signaled support for personal carbon wallets that would give citizens — and perhaps even a government regulator — the ability to track carbon emissions on a micro scale. Is this an early look at what the U.S. has in store if it doesn’t stop woke environmental, social and governance policies?

PARIS (Reuters) - The head of the European Space Agency (ESA) has warned economic damage from heatwaves and drought could dwarf Europe's energy crisis as he called for urgent action to tackle climate change. Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters successive heatwaves along with wildfires, shrinking rivers and rising land temperatures as measured from space left no doubt about the toll on agriculture and other industries from climate change. "Today, we are very concerned about the energy crisis, and rightly so. But this crisis is very small compared to the impact of climate change, which is of a much bigger...

Mark the date in your memory; August 8, 2022. It will be recorded in history as the "Shattering of American Democracy." Although nowhere near the bestial, violent actions of the Nazi brownshirts against helpless German Jews during the two days known as Kristallnacht in 1939, there is a similarity in the message - one of the end of the rule of democratic values and civil rights. (Kristallnacht, however was the German Nazis' opening salvo of fascism, the beginning of the extermination of Jews and democracy, on November 9, 1938.) Yesterday was a sad day for all of patriotic Americans, as...

Science has retracted a 2014 study on coral reefs in Fiji co-authored by Danielle Dixson of the University of Delaware, Lewes. PETE OXFORD A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,”...

One of the many initiatives in the Chinese Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 was a repudiation of the past. The "Destroy the Four Olds and Cultivate the Four News" campaign aimed at destroying old ideas, culture, habits, and customs that had survived the Communist takeover of the country 17 years earlier and replacing them with "new" doctrines more in line with Chairman Mao.[1] The extremely bloody (more than a million victims) Cultural Revolution itself was less a grassroots effort by an underclass than it was a plot to consolidate power from above. Mao was to remain in charge, but...

"When a world famous physicist rushed to post groundbreaking pictures from the new James Webb Space Telescope of a distant planet, the first ever taken of it, people sat up and took notice. And by default anything such a person said is given great deference. You don’t expect someone like that to post something you later discover was a joke all along. But his approximately 92000 followers on Twitter learned that is exactly what it was. In this case it wasn’t really harmful as after an hour of teasing them all about Spanish charcuterie not existing anywhere but Earth, and...

Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are known as the moderates of the Senate Democratic Caucus. There are problems with that designation, of course, such as the fact that Manchin's and Sinema's lifetime ACU ratings are 27% and 15%, respectively - not exactly the definition of "moderation." But the universe of Democratic Party officeholders has moved so far left that they now officially regard Josef Stalin as "squishy," so the definition of "moderate" has had to be softened a bit as well, in recent years. Since the Democrats usurped complete control of both the national executive and legislative branches in 2020,...

Three people were killed by a lightning strike on Thursday just across the street from the White House and Reuters used the sad occasion to hype... climate change. I kid you not as their own headline on Friday reveals: "Washington DC lightning strike that killed three offers climate warning."Reuter's reporter Gloria Dickie then goes into the details of how this tragedy is indicative of climate change starting with the very first sentence of her story:

In a recent House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg proclaimed “the more pain we are all experiencing from the high price of gas, ​the more benefit there is for those who can access electric vehicles.” That evoked a response from Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez. “So you’re saying the more pain we have, the more benefit we’re going to get?” the Florida Rep. wondered. “Of course — no,” said Buttigieg with a laugh. “I think that’s what I heard you say,” countered Gimenez, who later tweeted “the more pain Americans felt, the better for electric vehicles. It’s...

Former President Trump laid into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday after Senate Democrats passed their long-awaited health care, tax and climate package. “Mitch McConnell got played like a fiddle with the vote today by the Senate Democrats,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “First he gave them the fake Infrastructure Bill, then Guns, never used the Debt Ceiling for negotiating purposes (gave it away for NOTHING!), and now this,” Trump said. “Mitch doesn’t have a clue – he is sooo bad for the Republican Party!”