Free Republic

Oops.Brought to you by the same kind of people who regulate free markets to the point where you can get detained for selling light bulbs heat balls, comes the cry for a “free market solution” on carbon emissions. These people wouldn’t know a free market if it was the only bridge across a swamp full of crocodiles. Is that a stable path; a simple choice; a tested way through the quicksand?  No No! There’s a log (it looks like a log)… “it’s natural”. (It’s two hundred million years of natural selection.) Playing with fake markets is begging to be bitten,...

We hear a lot about “vested interests” in America these days. Here in California – it is the cry of Global Warming alarmists who are opposed to proposition 23 that is to be voted on in the November election. Prop 23 will suspend a “Global Warming solutions” act that will push up energy prices and drive even more jobs out of the state during one the biggest recessions in living memory. Understandably there is a lot of opposition to the Global Warming Act and Prop 23 is proving surprisingly popular in a state that practically invented the Green movement. Two...

Los Angeles - A new LAUSD school dedicated to environmental studies is set to open in Los Angeles on Monday, despite concerns about environmental safety. The Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences is a state of the art school that took five years and 75 million dollars to make. The elementary school was named in honor of biologist Rachel Carson and former vice president turned environmentalist Al Gore, but public health advocates say Carson-Gore is an environmental mistake. Jane Williams, California Communities Against Toxics (CCAT): "This school site is horribly contaminated ... there is an operating oil well on one side...

Sestak screws up. OK, that's one of those phrases that you could copy to a clipboard from which to paste into a story for convenience sake but yesterday Pennsylvania's 7th District Congressman and Democrat nominee for U.S senate has admitted to doing so, which makes it a bit more newsworthy than normal. Joe Sestak has announced that he erred in seeking to send $350,000 in taxpayer money to the Thomas Paine Foundation, which is an organization owned by Drew Devitt aimed at promoting the cause of atheism, to design a new kind of windmill which would be built by New...

The commission appointed by President Obama to investigate the Gulf oil spill (the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling) does not include a single member with specialized knowledge of petroleum engineering. This is akin to performing a heart transplant with a surgical team that has never set foot in an operating room. Of the seven members appointed to the commission, not one is a petroleum engineer, and all have long-standing ties to the environmental movement. This is certainly the case with Frances Beinecke, Donald Boesch, Terry Garcia, and Frances Ulmer, all of whom have...

AS well-intentioned gestures go, Earth Hour is hard to beat. At 8.30pm on Saturday, March 27, nearly a billion people in more than 120 countries demonstrated their desire to do something about global warming by switching off their lights for an hour. Earth Hour is surely one of the most successful publicity stunts to be dreamed up. First organised in Sydney in 2007 by the local chapter of the WWF, its popularity and the level of participation that generates has exploded in recent years, to the point that there is barely a corner of the earth that the campaign hasn't...

Daily baths and showers polluting the environment Showers and baths are polluting water supplies partly due to growth in shampoos, gels and skin products, new research claims. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent Published: 11:15PM GMT 24 Mar 2010 Researchers have detected substances in water supplies that have come from prescription drugs and toiletries. In the past environmental concerns have focused on sewage as a source chemical pollution as it is thought antibiotics and the active ingredients of pills are flushed down the lavatory. But now the new research by the US Environment Protection Agency suggests that waste from showers and...

WASHINGTON — All Republicans except one are boycotting the start of committee debate on a bill to curb greenhouse gases in a protest that the bill's economic costs have not been fully examined. Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio attended the session to explain the GOP's argument for staying away. He said the tactic "is not a ruse" to block the bill, but concern that is widespread impact on the country has not been made clear. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the panel's chairman, argued the EPA already has provided "a full blown economic analysis" and that Majority Leader Harry...

The environmental movement, bent on regulating America under its green thumb, has such a vast array of lobbying groups, proposed measures, and specialized terminology, that it is difficult for busy Americans who are wary of this movement to stay current with the debate.   To the rescue comes Steve Milloy’s Green Hell. At 294 pages, it is not encyclopedic, but just the right length to bring readers up to date on the methodologies, motives, and fallacies of this movement, and how to combat it. Green Guilt The core environmental “danger” greens currently discuss is global warming, allegedly caused by man-made carbon...

The report alleges that Toyota exploits guest workers, mostly shipped in from China and Vietnam. According to the NLC, these workers are “stripped of their passports and often forced to work — including at subcontract plants supplying Toyota — 16 hours a day, seven days a week, while being paid less than half the legal minimum wage.” Workers are forced to live in company dormitories and deported for complaining about poor treatment, the report finds.

In Oregon, one in four people can’t find full-time jobs Here’s the thing that worries unemployed Woodstock resident George Snipes: What if things are worse, much worse, than we are being told? They are, says Andrew Sum, an economist who heads the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Sum has analyzed employment data for all 50 states, and he says that those charts provide statistical verification of what Snipes feels in his gut: Oregon’s 12.2 percent official unemployment rate is something of a red herring and far from a true indicator of the social hardship taking...

Below Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck explains the Apollo Alliance on his July 28 show. Beck mentions the Obama administration’s “stimulus” blueprint, “The New Apollo Program: Clean Energy, Good Jobs,” which you can read here.

To meet ambitious renewable energy goals, city must find a way to pay for them. Austin's electric utility could soon reverse a long-standing practice of selling wind, solar and other renewable energy only to customers who choose to buy it, four Austin City Council members and a mayoral aide said this week.

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days. So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place. So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing...

Forget sticks, and stick with carrots instead. So says Brent Schulkin, founder of a fledgling movement of activist consumers employing a kind of reverse boycott that he calls a Carrotmob. The concept is simple: instead of steering clear of environmentally backward stores, why not reward businesses with mass purchases if they promise to use some of the money to get greener? "Traditional activism revolves around conflict," says Schulkin, 28, a San Francisco–based activist turned entrepreneur. "Boycotting, protesting, lawsuits — it's about going into attack mode," says the former Googler and onetime game developer. "What's unique about a Carrotmob is that...

The state energy commission denies it wants to ban any kind of television sets. They claim that they just want to limit the market only to those models that provide better energy efficiency in order to save costs and cut down on emissions. The Orange County Register notes that the annual savings in energy costs between comparable plasma and LCD models amounts to a grand total of $30 per year.

The Environment: Wednesday's airwaves, print media, cable news shows and Webosphere will be filled with nonsense about the scourge of capitalism, corporations and humanity. All of it will ignore the real truth. Buried beneath all the badgering and fear-mongering about lavish Western lifestyles is a reality that the stuck-on-green left won't talk about and the average American isn't aware of: The world, especially in developed nations, is a cleaner — and greener — place than it was when the environmental movement began. Every year Steven Hayward, a scholar at the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, compiles his...

Oscar-nominated actor compares those who do not accept human-induced global warming with Holocaust deniers Actor Pete Postlethwaite yesterday denounced climate change deniers as a "negative force" with their "heads in the sand". Ahead of Sunday's premiere of The Age of Stupid, an environmental doomsday docudrama, he compared those who do not accept that human-induced global warming is occurring with Holocaust deniers, and said the evidence for global change is now beyond doubt. "The naysayers are a negative force," said Postlethwaite, whose new film, The Age of Stupid, premieres on Sunday. "Because that can be really bad for people who are...

In some places you don't mess with gun rights. In Portland, you don't mess with bikes. So it was no surprise Friday when Portland's avid cycling community erupted after four Oregon legislators proposed a $54 fee for registering adult bikes every two years. BikePortland, a local cycling blog, was besieged with complaints. The "intention is exactly to discourage and kill cycling," one blogger fumed. Another fretted about the hefty tab for his garage full of bikes. Rep. Wayne Krieger, R-Gold Beach, one of the chief sponsors of House Bill 3008, conceded the legislation probably won't pass, particularly with "everybody struggling"...

In one of the first internal struggles of the incoming Obama administration, environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are trying to shift the priorities of the economic stimulus plan that will be introduced in Congress next month away from allocating tens of billions of dollars to highways, bridges and other traditional infrastructure spending to more projects that create "green-collar" jobs. The debate has centered on two competing principles in the evolving plan: the desire to spend money on what President-elect Barack Obama calls "shovel-ready projects," such as highway and bridge construction, vs. spending on more environmentally conscious projects, such as grids for...