Free Republic

A huge portion of a glacier in the Swiss Alps has broken off from the mountainside, sending rock, mud and ice crashing onto the village of Blatten. Authorities have been warning of a potential collapse of the Birch glacier for weeks now as cracks appeared in the ice. Earlier this month, villagers and livestock were evacuated from Blatten, which sits in the valley below the glacier and is home to around 300 people. Webcam and drone images from 28 May show enormous plumes of dust billowing into the Alpine valley as the glacier collapsed, with a huge wave of mud...

An energy watchdog group wants to know whether eight of President Joe Biden’s far-left executive orders related to energy were signed by autopen.Power the Future argues that Biden never mentioned the orders publicly, which raises the corollary question of whether the mentally addled president even knew about them, and whether his radical underlings wrote and signed them.The questions are important because of the autopen scandal that surfaced in March. It raised the question of whether autopenned orders — including presidential pardons — are valid.Power The Future’s also invites a look at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that Biden didn’t know...

In a rare moment of honesty from the left, retiring Democrat Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is sounding the alarm — not about Republicans, but about the crumbling state of his own party. During a CNN interview on Sunday, Bennet torched the Democratic brand, admitting what millions of Americans already know: today’s Democratic Party is out of touch, unpopular, and fundamentally failing. . . . Bennet, who is positioning himself for a gubernatorial run in Colorado in 2026, didn’t hold back. He expressed “fury” at his party’s inability to defeat Trump, even after years of media smears, endless investigations, and...

Three activists banned from campus for three years A professor was among several climate protesters who during commencement defaced the statue of Andrew Dickson White, one of Cornell University’s founders, as a message to stop the school’s “fossil fuel complicity.” Early Saturday morning, the group Cornell on Fire, a “coalition of Cornellians and community members calling for a just and comprehensive university-wide response to the climate emergency,” put a blindfold over White’s face along with a poster protesting Cornell’s association with the fossil fuel industry, The Cornell Daily Sun reports. According to a press release from the group, Scientist Rebellion...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was fuming Thursday as Congress passed a repeal of California’s electric vehicle (EV) mandate, which relied on a special waiver from the outgoing Biden administration in December. “Make America Smoggy Again,” he announced, sarcastically. The Senate voted 51-44 to repeal the waiver, after a bipartisan majority in the House had done the same, as Breitbart News reported earlier this month. The repeal relies on the Congressional Review Act, a Bill Clinton-era law that allows Congress to repeal regulations that are not presented to it for timely approval. Newsom says the waiver is exempt from review....

…However, no president has pushed fossil fuels more aggressively or at greater cost than President Trump. He has imposed an energy policy that denies the addiction’s real costs, ranging from lung cancers to deadly weather disasters. All the while, America’s future — in fact, the world’s — depends on replacing “all of the above” with the “best of the above.” Many of the best options are market-ready today, and much less expensive than fossil fuels, especially when we compare their real costs and benefits to those of oil, natural gas and coal. America’s most secure and prosperous future will be...

“It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it’s still pretty bad,” New York Republican Andrew Garbarino said of the climate law’s gutting.House Republicans who spent months defending renewable energy tax credits expressed disdain for a proposal that would all but eradicate such incentives in the GOP-led megabill.But that small subset of Republicans say they are running short on time and options in the lower chamber. The House Ways and Means Committee is poised to advance a measure that phases out or eliminates billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act renewable energy and other tax...

When a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dr John Clauser, labels the claims about greenhouse gases warming the Earth as “pseudoscience” and describes them as “a dangerous corruption of science,” I urge you to take notice. He further stated that “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation,” and remarked that climate science has “metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”Similarly, Professor Harold (Hal) Lewis, a distinguished physicist, called such claims “the biggest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” he had encountered in his lifetime. Another German physicist expressed outrage upon discovering that much of what the IPCC and the media presented...

Space junk in Earth's orbit may increase because of the effects of the same heat-trapping gases that are polluting the air and warming the planet, according to a recent study. What's happening? A team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers determined that, with Earth's warming, space debris could accumulate enough to reduce the low Earth orbit area available for satellites by between a third and 82% by the year 2100, as the Associated Press detailed. The reason for this, per the study published in Nature Sustainability in March, is that climatic changes high above ground could reduce the effectiveness...

Comedian says it would benefit auto enthusiasts, while environmentalists say it would increase air pollutionShould old cars get a break from California’s smog check laws? Former Tonight Show host and avid car collector Jay Leno thinks so. He’s thrown his support behind a bill in the state legislature that would exempt vehicles 35 years or older from the state’s requirement to pass a smog check test that most other California vehicles face every two years. “I know there’s nothing more annoying than Hollywood people involved in politics,” Leno said at a rally at the state Capitol last month. “But this...

Oil refinery Valero has opted to close its operations in California due to excessive regulations on energy. Located in the small city of Benicia, the town is expected to lose 400 jobs, which the mayor is calling the exit “a major hit on the city.” Everyone in California is feeling the impact of Newsom’s war on fossil fuels. Valero said its decision ” follows years of regulatory pressure, significant fines for air quality violations, and a recent lawsuit settlement related to environmental concerns.” “California has been pursuing policies to move away from fossil fuels for really for the past 20...

Every failing city in America follows the old Detroit playbook. The only thing better than learning from your own mistakes is learning from someone else’s. Unfortunately, today’s urban leaders haven’t been paying attention. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, New York, and other cities could have avoided their current dire conditions if only they had heeded the lessons of Detroit. In 1950 the Motor City was home to nearly two million people and built half the cars in the world. Today two-thirds of those people are gone and its auto industry is a shell of its former self. After decades...

Scientists have uncovered a bizarre new bacterium that behaves like a living wire, opening the door to pollution-fighting tech and next-gen bioelectronics. A newly discovered species of bacteria that conducts electricity like a living wire is shaking up the scientific world. Named Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis, the organism was found in Oregon’s Yaquina Bay mudflats and described in a study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. With unique structural and metabolic traits, this microbe may one day be used to clean up pollution or inspire the next generation of bioelectronics. A Bridge Between Species with Electrifying Genetics Researchers from Oregon State...

Our southernmost continent is, we’ve been told, the suffocating canary in the global coal mine. The more ice loss in Antarctica, the greater trouble we’re in. So what do we make of a study which found that between 2021 and 2023, there was a record-breaking increase in the Antarctic Ice Sheet? We mark it down as another in a long line of misses from the global warming zealots. “Notably, four major glaciers in the Wilkes Land–Queen Mary Land region of East Antarctica reversed their previous pattern of accelerated mass loss from 2011 to 2020 and instead showed significant mass gain...

Eighteen states sued the Trump administration Monday over its halting of permits for wind-energy projects, arguing that its actions posed an existential threat to the burgeoning industry.“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” said Attorney General Letitia James of New York, which is one of the plaintiffs. She said the halt threatened “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments” and was “delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet.”The halt on federal permits for wind energy was first laid out...

Scientists at the cutting edge of ecological research, Dr. Hanson among them, argue that the century-old American practice of suppressing wildfires has been nothing less than a calamity. They are calling for a new approach that basically involves letting backcountry fires burn across millions of acres. In principle, the federal government accepted a version of this argument years ago, but in practice, fires are still routinely stamped out across much of the country. To the biologists, that has imperiled the plants and animals — hundreds of them, it turns out — that prefer to live in recently burned forests. “From...

“Rims” – the slangster term for wheels that are disproportionately large for the vehicle – are arguably one of the worst styling and functional affectations of the past 20 years. They add weight and increase rolling resistance, which reduces fuel economy. This goes for hybrids, too – i.e., vehicles specifically designed to deliver the highest-possible gas mileage. Yet even the Prius (reviewed here) that is marketed as being the apotheosis of fuel-efficiency, at least putatively – is much less fuel-efficient than it is capable of being, due to its “rims.” Specifically, it is 5 MPG less efficient when it rides...

In a nutshell * Rice malt could help the brewing industry adapt to climate change, yielding twice as much extract per hectare as barley while requiring 50-67% less land * While rice malt costs 20% more to produce than barley malt, it offers significant advantages for gluten-free brewing and can reduce costs when used as an adjunct * As climate change threatens barley production, rice provides a more resilient alternative that’s already grown abundantly in warmer regions worldwide ****************************************************************** FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Beer prices might soon rise as climate change threatens barley crops, but an unexpected savior is emerging from...

A sixth-century "mini" ice age may have been "the straw that broke the camel's back" that led to the final disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, a new study claims...By studying rocks carried by icebergs from Greenland all the way to Iceland's west coast, a team of researchers has uncovered what they believe is more evidence for the severity of this mini ice age. Their findings, published April 8 in the journal Geology, point to the prolonged cooling being a key factor in the eventual decline of the Western Roman Empire — although not all historians agree...Economic crisis, government corruption,...

More than 3,500 staffers are preparing to leave the Energy Department in coming days, gutting offices tasked with doling out billions of dollars... Roughly 77 percent of workers at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, or OCED, took an offer to leave voluntarily... deeper cuts are likely on the horizon as DOE complies with the administration's push to shrink the federal footprint... OCED, for example, was allocated more than $25 billion under those laws, including for hydrogen hubs, carbon capture and battery projects.