Free Republic

Germany's environment minister has added his voice to green activists and others who have sought to link Hurricane Katrina with global warming. "The increasing frequency of these natural events can only be explained through global warming which is caused by people," Juergen Trittin told the ZDF television network. Trittin, a member of the Green Party in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's ruling coalition, was also quoted by the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper as criticizing the Bush administration for doing little to fight climate change. Germany is a strong supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that came into force last February. The pact...

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is blaming Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, along with President Bush, for causing Hurricane Katrina. "As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2," Kennedy blogged Tuesday on HuffingtonPost.com. The influential Democrat's enviro-conspiracy theory had the sinister Gov. Barbour engineering Bush's energy policy on behalf of "the president’s major donors from the fossil fuel industry." Kennedy charges that in March 2001, the former Republican National Committee chairman issued "an urgent memo to...