Free Republic

Desperate to stay relevant, climate activists now claim they can trace individual heat waves to specific oil companies—just as Washington steps away from their agenda. In the wake of a federal government no longer serving as its obedient lapdog, the desperate lengths to which the climate cult goes to maintain its standing are increasingly imaginative. Case in point: CNN recently reported that “for the first time, scientists have quantified the causal links between worsening heat waves and global warming pollution from individual fossil fuel and cement companies, pushing the boundaries of extreme weather event research in multiple surprising ways.” In...

Here in the U.S., ever since the push to “de-carbonize” the energy system to “save the planet” from global warming got going in a big way 20 or so years ago, there has always been a critical mass of skeptics strongly pushing back. I count myself among them. Another prominent example is the CO2 Coalition, an organization of about 200 scientists and intellectuals who dissent from the climate orthodoxy. Large portions of our Republican Party — recently approaching near unanimity — have also joined the dissent from climate orthodoxy. But over in Europe, the same has not been true at...

When did the Wall Street Journal give up on making coherent arguments? It certainly seems to be the case with a recent WSJ article entitled, “The U.S. Is Forfeiting the Clean-Energy Race to China”. The premise of the article, as you might have guessed, is that the U.S. will lose out to China if it does not match China’s level of subsidization of clean energy. No where in the article did the authors ask, “Is it a race worth winning?” I contend that it isn’t. The authors start out by asserting that, “The rapid pace of EV adoption in China...

The first eight months of the second Trump administration have seen a sea change in energy policy. Previously, under Biden, the federal government had undertaken a blowout of hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and incentives for so-called “renewable” energy sources, while simultaneously implementing dozens of regulations and restrictions to suppress the production and use of fossil fuels. President Trump has now reversed all of that. However, please take note of an important distinction: although Trump and Congress have zeroed out nearly all subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar generation and for grid-scale batteries, they have not...

I saw this a couple of days ago, and it was so intriguing, I had to hang on to it, figuring there would be a time it would come in handy.Little did I know our president would go into the United Nations General Assembly today with a flamethrower and give me the perfect opportunity to illustrate one of the scorched remnants of European superiority he left smoking on the expensive carpet in that room.When the man told them that their countries were going to fail.IF YOU DON'T GET AWAY FROM THE GREEN ENERGY SCAM, YOUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO FAILIF...

Yesterday, along with two excellent colleagues, I submitted a Comment to EPA on the subject of the proposed and pending repeal of the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009. The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the absurd regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to find that the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes a “danger” to human health and welfare as it accumulates in the atmosphere from the current level of about 0.04%, to perhaps 0.05% or maybe even (the horror!) 0.06% by some time later this century. The EF is then the basis for all the subsequent regulatory initiatives...

Turns out, as much money as those Biden bozos blew through, prepaying for electric buses up front that were never and will never now be delivered?EPA head Lee Zeldin says the Biden administraiton sent $160 million dollars to a Canadian electric vehicles company.... which then pocketed the money, didn’t send the school buses promised and then declared bankruptcy!“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric… pic.twitter.com/hANBqhFPfm— Mike Netter (@nettermike) August 16, 2025...“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric vehicle bus manufacturer. The Biden administration sent all of the money — They gave all the money...

The US power grid is under significant stress due to rapidly increasing electricity demand from AI data centers and electric vehicles, coupled with the retirement of traditional power plants.The grid faces mounting vulnerabilities from extreme weather events, cybersecurity threats, and physical sabotage, while policy gridlock and infrastructure delays hinder necessary upgrades.Despite challenges, the situation presents investment opportunities in grid modernization, diversified generation, and solutions for energy storage and load management.America’s power grid is straining under the weight of a fast-changing energy landscape. Beyond the usual summer hum of air conditioners, power demand is surging from electric vehicle chargers and sprawling...

As I have written many times, with New York’s fantasy “net zero” energy plans, it is not a question of whether they will fail, but only when and how. The Democrats, who dominate state politics, and their environmentalist allies, are firmly committed to the impossible. Thus, they are caught in a trap of their own making, and from which there is no good escape. The fact that they are caught in this trap is obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skills, but almost all of our politicians and environmentalists lack those. However, a small handful of them are starting to...

It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040. Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources...

When my friend Rebecca in Highland Park, NJ, opened her PSE&G gas and electric bill last month, she almost fell out of her seat: It had tripled. It’s now costing her more than $1,000 a month to keep her modest home running. “It’s been creeping up for months, in spite of the fact that nothing about our house has changed,” she told me. “In years past, it was averaging about $300 a month.” “I don’t know how we’re expected to absorb these new bills,” she posted on Facebook. Her neighbor Felix Urman wondered the same as he ticked off his...

Forced electric load reduction and possible rolling blackouts in Maryland. Electric system in crisis. Got Coal?

Energy poverty is quite literally destroying culture in Great Britain, and it's a fate that all societies pursuing a Net Zero agenda face. Among the reasons why this is so is that wind power blows. iv-gpt-300x250_4" class="gpt-ad ad-90 text-center"> Climate madness on stage:A Handel opera canceled because its single wind turbine generated no power in still weatherPrior to cancellation? SIX blackouts through performance, each causing a 15-min restart delayAnd back-up generators couldn't copeOh, bright green future… pic.twitter.com/nIxTNTO6hj— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) July 4, 2025Perhaps, given that this concert was to feature Handel's music, the Opera House should have chosen to be...

The invaluable Mike Rowe pointed me to this article yesterday. Well, not me, exactly. Mike doesn't know me from Adam, but he shared it online with 7 million other people, and I count myself among them. It's a piece in The New York Times--for him, it was the international version with a different headline--that argues that several decisions by various international courts amount to outlawing the extraction and use of fossil fuels. It's hard to argue with their conclusion because I am not an international lawyer, but let's assume that the claim is true, as it appears to be on...

How quickly things change. It was barely more than a year ago that climate activists and federal bureaucrats thought they had maneuvered the internal combustion engine (ICE) automobile to the brink of extinction. ICE vehicles had become like dinosaurs, inferior to their new competitors the EVs, and therefore headed for the scrap heap of history. Customers were flocking to the trendy new EVs, which were seeing rapidly rising sales. And the all-powerful federal bureaucracy was going to give the final push to put ICE vehicles out of their misery. On June 7, 2024 President Biden’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration...

The climate alarmists regularly seize on weather events they believe will help them exploit their narrative. Naturally, they ignore contradictory information. So we see it as our duty to fill in the gaps from time to time. Following are a few examples that show why the global warming story is less scientific theory than conjecture in the service of a political agenda. - Let’s begin in the West Arctic, where the Northwest Passage is experiencing its third-highest level of sea ice extent in the last two decades. In 2009, Al Gore said, with his usual galling listen-to-me certainty, the Arctic...

How quickly things change. It was only two years ago, in 2023, that I was writing posts compiling long lists of quotes from climate activists warning that all assets used for production of coal, oil and gas were about to become obsolete and “stranded.” After all, wind and solar were (supposedly) cheaper and cleaner for generating electricity, which could then power anything and everything. Therefore anyone stupid enough to make further investments in producing fossil fuels would lose everything. Here is one such post from June 2023, and another from February 2023. If you look today, you can still find...

2024, prices jumped 800% at PJM Interconnection, a “traffic controller” part of the grid that provides service in 13 states as well as D.C. .. PJM operates the largest power grid in the U.S., with around 67 million customers—that’s more than 20% of the American population. ... amid a dwindling supply and an increase in demand, “Prices for power plants landed at $269.92 per megawatt-day, compared to $28.92 per megawatt-day” in 2023. ... prices are set to spike again, and the projection for this year is around 20%. If you live in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey,...

The Biden administration's annual "Resource Adequacy Report" mentioned climate change 17 times. The Trump administration's report doesn't mention it at all. Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the latest report confirms the U.S. electricity grid is on an "unstable and dangerous path." The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released its annual “Resource Adequacy Report,” earlier this month, and it warns that blackouts are coming if the country carries out the Biden-era plan to retire fossil fuel power plants. That is not sitting well with climate activists. The report's executive summary opens with a declaration that the U.S. possesses “abundant energy sources...

A group of German industrial labor representatives has broken ranks. In an open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, they fiercely criticize Berlin’s climate policy. Will their defiance ignite a firestorm -- or vanish in the memory hole crafted by media gatekeepers? I must admit: after years of bitter disappointment in the fight for rational energy discourse, I view initiatives like this with cautious pessimism. In Germany, climate policy has become the domain of a paternalistic triad -- politics, media, and public compliance. The first casualty? Open debate. The air is thick with passive-aggressive apocalypse. Criticizing the Green Deal is a...