Free Republic

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is promising, if elected president, to pull the United States out of the nonbinding climate change accord that nearly 200 countries agreed to earlier this month. Cruz, a GOP presidential candidate, on Tuesday told reporters in Tennessee that the agreement is part of an extreme focus on climate by President Obama. "Barack Obama seems to think the SUV parked in your driveway is a bigger threat to national security than radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. That's just nutty," he said, according to The Washington Post. "These are ideologues, they don't focus on the...

Floridians for Solar Choice, an ad hoc group seeking a carve-out for the already heavily subsidized solar industry in Florida, appears to be running out of sunshine (it wouldn't do to say gas here) in its constitutional amendment petition drive. The group has gathered 271,000 certified signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2016 state ballot that would oblige the state to promote solar power over other forms of electrical power generation and would allow citizens to generate solar power through a solar power company. This generation and sales would not be regulated in any way by the...

"..........Anti-trade groups on the political right use similar methods. The easiest target for these groups has been apprehension among conservative voters over the intentions of President Obama,focusing on things like immigration and gun control. Conservative protectionists adopted the term "Obamatrade" to refer--interchangeably,in order to profit from confusion--to the TPP,trade promotion authority,and even the WTO. During the debate earlier this year over trade promotion authority,a number of politicians fell for the simplistic but inaccurate argument that TPA would enable Obama to secretly liberalize America's immigration laws.The most recent right-wing,anti-trade boogieman is the idea that the TPP will enable Obama to implement...

At least 24 activists who advocate for climate change have been placed under house arrest ahead of the highly anticipated United Nations talks in Paris. France used emergency laws that were implemented after the Paris shootings to arrest the green campaigners, the French government confirmed on Saturday. Earlier, the Guardian had reported the news, noting that the warrants delivered to the activists cited state of emergency laws that were imposed after 130 people were killed in terrorist attacks earlier this month....... ......It's not that the French government thinks green campaigners are tantamount to terrorists, but rather that their actions could...

Lawmakers in Lansing are working on legislation that would bring major changes to Michigan’s energy laws. Since energy policy is a hard-to-understand topic, it does not receive much public scrutiny. By its very nature, it involves a mind-numbing array of technical terms, acronyms and insider elitist jargon that average people find both boring and confusing. This in turn gives policy insiders and advocates more of an incentive than usual to disseminate misinformation. At the beginning of the year, there was an attempt to eliminate the competition — such as it is — that Consumers Energy and Detroit Edison face in...

98 cents, right by the check out lanes

President Obama hiked to Exit Glacier in Alaska last week, with photographers in tow, to send the world a message: The glacier is melting.Obama blames it on the increasing use of fossil fuels such as coal,oil and natural gas,which he wants to restrict not only in the United States but worldwide. The photo op was designed to build support for an international climate agreement he’s pushing hard to sell, so far with little success......Exit Glacier has been shrinking for 200 years—since 1815—long before widespread industrialization and automobiles. As the president ended his trip,he sounded the alarm again: “This state’s climate...

As Florida enviros push for their solar amendment, solar’s undesirability goes unmentioned.The important thing to know about solar and wind power, and other so-called “renewable” sources of energy, is that they aren’t necessary. Au the contraire, their dominance of the energy mix would be a disaster for the republic. Solar and wind create trifling amounts of power at a multiple of the cost of power made available by fossil fuels.Increased reliance on pricy power from wind and solar would drive up the overall cost of energy, which in turn would drive up the cost of everything. EVERYTHING! Not just individual...

Market research surveys commissioned by one of the nation’s largest environmentalist groups advises activists to “talk about yourselves as conservationists — not environmentalists,” “do not make global warming/climate change the primary rationale for conservation,” “do not use the threat of ‘sprawl’ unless with core supporters,” and “do not focus on ‘green’ jobs as a primary rationale for conservation.” These quotes are found in a pair of documents, one from 2004 and one from 2013, that expose what might be called the environmental movement’s political messaging intended for public consumption. The documents are based on research commissioned by The Nature Conservancy,...

An Inspector General of the Department of Energy report that picked over the bones of the Solyndra green energy fiasco placed most of the blame on Solyndra executives for losing more than $500 million in taxpayer money. But a close reading shows DOE made plenty of mistakes as well. The report authored by DOE Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman came just short of calling Solyndra’s highest officials liars, saying their actions during the loan process were “at best, reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department.” While the 13-page report...

You may have a "green" car, but it could be causing black rain in China from the graphite mined and used in its lithium ion battery. Two academics at Toronto's York University, Carla Lipsig-Mumme and Caleb Goods, applaud many of the new advances in green technology in recent years, but at the same time warn that those very technologies may come with a host of environmental issues. The pair issue a caution about “superindustrialization” in which the answer to climate change is a matter of “technological adjustment.” In an article recently published in The Conversation and picked up by the...

A Cambridge professor has claimed that three scientists investigating climate change in the Arctic may have been assassinated. Professor Peter Wadhams insists Seymour Laxon, Katharine Giles and Tim Boyd could have been murdered by someone possibly working for the oil industry or within government forces. The trio had been studying the polar ice caps - with a focus on sea ice - when they died within a few months of each other in 2013. Professor Laxon, 49, a director of the Centre for Polar Observation at University College London, was at a New Year's Eve party in Essex when he...

Tesla Motors has earned more than $295 million in green subsidy emission credits during the past three years for a battery-swapping technology customers weren’t getting, a Watchdog investigation reveals. In fact, the electric car company, owned in part by billionaire Elon Musk, may have earned credits up to nearly half a billion dollars in value from the 11 states that use the Zero Emission Vehicle barter as part of a green auto industry mandate. California created the program and leads the pack, doling out $173 million in credits to the Silicon Valley-based Tesla. Tesla claimed the credits between 2012 and...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker joined the crowded field of Republican contenders vying for the White House in 2016 on Monday, and immediately stands out for having one of the poorest records on environmental and climate issues, according to green groups and political experts. Since taking office in 2010, Walker has dismantled several longstanding policies protecting wetlands and waterways, fast-tracked mining projects, fought climate action, slashed funding for dozens of state scientists and environmental education positions, and impeded development of wind energy in Wisconsin. "He's one of the worst," said Heather Taylor-Miesle, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Action Fund,...

We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence, researchers have declared. Researchers say a new study shows 'without any significant doubt' that we are entering the sixth great mass extinction on earth. The study says that the window for conserving threatened species is rapidly closing. The study shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,' said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who led the research.The new study, published in the journal Science Advances,...

When Wisconsin’s new state treasurer Matt Adamczyk took office in January, his first act was to order a highly symbolic change in stationery. Adamczyk, a Republican and one of three members of the board that oversees a small public lands agency, “felt passionately” that Tia Nelson, the agency’s executive secretary, should be struck from the letterhead. As soon became clear, his principal objection to Nelson, daughter of former Wisconsin governor and environmentalist-hero Gaylord Nelson, was that in 2007–08 she had co-chaired a state task force on climate change at the then-governor’s request. Adamczyk insisted that climate change is not germane...

If a website from a progressive group is to be believed, state workers in Wisconsin cannot even say the words "climate change." So the scottaway.com website, developed by an operation called Forecast the Facts, allows readers to click a red button on the screen and get alternative words to use, like "weather roulette" and "extended Popsicle season." One tongue-in-cheek offering: "In the U.S., FREE OUTDOOR HEATING is predicted to cause more heat waves, flooding, wildfires, sea level rise and drought." Forecast the Facts, a project of the progressive Citizen Engagement Laboratory, says it developed the website in response to government...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Conservationists are drawing a line in the scrubland, vowing to fight any attempt by the state to expand logging and cattle grazing throughout Florida's 171 state parks. Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Jon Steverson, appointed in December by Gov. Rick Scott, set off a furor last month when he suggested in a series of newspaper guest columns that Florida expand grazing and timber harvesting in its state parks as a way to offset the cost of running them. In the columns, which ran in newspapers throughout Florida, Steverson said state parks hosted more than 27...

It’s no surprise that we lead the world in incarcerations when you see that the whole process has been monetized and profitable. States of Incarceration: The Global Context http://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/ Here Are All Of The Nations That Incarcerate More Of Their Population Than The U.S. Yeah, we’re actually number one and that’s not a good thing. No country incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the United States. At 716 per 100,000 people in 2013, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies, the U.S. tops every other nation in the world. Among OECD countries, the competition isn’t even close...

In 1848, the discovery of gold in California lead to one of the most dramatic population shifts in US history. People hoping to strike it rich migrated from all over the country, South America, and even as far as China. The non-native American population of California went from under 1,000 to over 100,000 in a little over one year. Today, there is another gold rush taking place in Washington D.C. as political entrepreneurs seek to strike it rich by mining the climate change mother lode. According to the 2013 Federal Climate Change Expenditures Report to Congress, the Federal Government is...