Free Republic

BEIJING — The Obama administration's push to help clean up China is emerging as a bright spot in a relationship rife with economic and strategic tensions. The failure of the world's two largest economies to agree on tough carbon emissions limits four years ago doomed substantial progress on climate change and left each side blaming the other. Since the Copenhagen talks, however, the U.S. and China have ramped up their environmental cooperation as repeated outbreaks of thick, acrid smog have virtually shut down major Chinese cities and cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year. “For a period...

Flanked by a cadre of local political leaders, Mayor Chuck Reed of San Jose used a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a solar power company last week to talk up the promise of the green economy. Mr. Reed called the opening of the new headquarters of SolFocus, which produces large, free-standing solar panels, an “enormously important” development for the city’s economy. “Clean technology is the next wave of innovation that Silicon Valley needs to capture,” the mayor said, noting that the San Jose City Council had committed to increasing the number of “green jobs” in the city to 25,000 by 2022. San...

‘Imagine if every child in the country channelled their Pester Power in service of the Glorious Green Future.’ So says James Russell in his recent book How to Turn Your Parents Green. And he’s far from alone in his musings. npower, a large British electriciy supplier, have also been evisaging a world in which kids, renamed Climate Cops, are instructed to ferret out ‘climate crimes’ in their homes, schools and cities and report them to the authorities, that is, in Russell’s words, to ‘nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking [their] world’, fining ‘transgressors’ for...

Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie blasted Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean on Friday for suggesting that President Bush may have been warned in advance about the 9/11 attacks. "It's breathtaking that someone running for president in either party would float the notion that the president of the United States would have had prior information and knowledge of what was to come on Sept. 11 and did not act on it," the top Republican told radio host Laura Ingraham. "It is astounding to me," Gillespie added. "It's unbelievable, the kind of things that Howard Dean is willing to say." During...