Free Republic

Absent heroic efforts, the world has locked in dangerous climate change. That’s according to a much-anticipated report released on Monday in South Korea by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored collection of the world’s top scientists. That stark, blunt assessment comes after years of deliberation at the request of the world’s most vulnerable nations to assemble pathways that could limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C, now believed to be the upper limit that would preserve the stability of the world’s interconnected ecological and societal systems. Some key conclusions: The world has already warmed by...

Mona Lee Brock went into the office early that morning, as she always did, when she received a panicked phone call. The telephones in the crisis center were lighting up all over the place, as was common. This particular call was from a farmer’s wife. A day prior, the farmer had spoken to Brock and agreed not to hurt himself, but now his wife couldn’t find him. And she was afraid. Brock asked where the farmer kept his .410 shotgun. It was the height of the ’80s farm crisis, one of the greatest economic turmoils since the Great Depression. Drought...

In its calm and measured way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just delivered a blistering assessment of the environmental value of corn-based ethanol. The CBO had been charged by Congress to calculate just what the public is getting for its investment in ethanol production: specifically, the $0.45/gallon tax credit that gasoline blenders get for mixing ethanol into the fuel supply. In 2009, 10.8 billion gallons of corn ethanol got used in such a manner, costing the federal Treasury $5.16 billion in reduced tax revenue. What did we get for that fat wad of cash, in environmental terms? The question is...

It was the summer of 1972 and John Kerry's group, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was in the midst of an anti-war march through the streets of downtown Gainesville. ... I was disgusted to see that they were not only carrying the American flag upside down, they were carrying the flag of the communist Viet Cong as well. ...The freedom to protest is an important one. ...However, we did not go into harm's way to allow our fellow citizens to help our enemy. ...Now, we have some new Hollywood military experts. The latest is comedian Bill Maher, who made...