Free Republic

DETROIT (Reuters) - The past year was sobering for investors who poured money into Tesla Inc and rival electric vehicle startups that hoped to emulate Tesla CEO Elon Musk's success. As interest rates rose and financial markets gyrated, shares in many EV startups deflated. Rivian Automotive Inc, which had a higher market value than Ford Motor Co shortly after it went public in 2021, lost more than 70% of its value over the past year. Other EV startups fared worse. Electric van maker Arrival warned it could run out of cash in less than a year. Lucid Group Inc, backed...

Recently-appointed White House clean energy czar John Podesta has hired several officials who have advocated in favor of far-left energy and climate policies to join his team. Podesta, who founded the progressive Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), has hired Kristina Costa, Alison Cassady and Joshua Peck to serve in the White House Office of Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation. The three officials have previously worked in private and public sector roles pushing climate policies and have past ties to Podesta. Podesta, who founded the progressive Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), has hired...

I think that the old Communist East Germany should have been bought by the Disney Corporation, and kept going permanently, exactly as it was, as a tourist attraction. Schoolchildren from all over the Western world could have spent a few days there to find out what a dogma-driven society was really like. Tourists could have paid for package tours, escaping at the end of each gruelling day to special cordoned-off Western-style hotels. They could have realized, in time, what was happening here in supposedly Conservative Britain, where, as a new report has revealed this week, huge amounts of money and...

BOSTON (AP) — The Boston City Council voted Wednesday to form a task force to study how it can provide reparations for and other forms of atonement to Black Bostonians for the city’s role in slavery and its legacy of inequality. The unanimous vote means Boston now joins a conversation about reparations that is happening across the country from Providence, Rhode Island to California. Boston will be closely watched given its troubled racial history, including its role in supporting and financing slavery even after Massachusetts abolished the practice in 1780. Supporters of reparations cited its history of segregated housing as...

HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, announced Wednesday it will no longer finance new oil and gas fields as part of its updated climate strategy. Climate campaigners welcomed the moved saying HSBC provided a new baseline for other major banks but urged the bank to go further. The bank said it would still provide financing to existing fossil fuel projects “in line with current and future declining global oil and gas demand.” It would also continue to provide finance and advisory services to energy sector clients but will assess the companies’ plans to transition to clean energy. “It sets a new minimum...

A Minnesota science teacher in the Saint Paul Public Schools district lambasted cell biology lessons, particularly on mitochondrion, for containing "capitalist" propaganda, Fox News Digital found. Mandi Jung, a teacher at Highland Park Middle School, said, "Lately, there's been a lot of conversation about teachers indoctrinating students to their beliefs. And I always find this funny because our children are seeped in capitalist indoctrination from like the second they're born, basically." Jung proceeded to provide the "perfect example" of how "capitalist indoctrination" is expressed in her seventh grade science classes. "Seventh grade science… [is] the year that you learn that...

PHOENIX (AP) — Mecca Patterson-Guridy wants to learn, but for some subjects, she isn’t always comfortable asking her teachers. So she has been turning to TikTok. Online, the 17-year-old high school junior in Philadelphia has found videos on social media platforms about protests over police shootings, civic engagement and Black and Latino history in the U.S. The accounts she checks regularly feature segments including “Fast Black History” and “Black Girl Magic Minute.” The videos, Mecca said, address “things that get overlooked in the classroom.” Scrutiny from conservatives around teaching about race, gender and sexuality has made many teachers reluctant to...

C40 is a network of mayors of nearly 100 world-leading cities collaborating to deliver the World Economic Forum (WEF) plan to confront the grossly exaggerated climate crisis. Their social engineering plan is an authoritative “vision of climate action that is rooted in equity because we know that climate, social and economic justice can only be achieved together.” Equity and economic justice are Marxism, aka communism or the collective. You can go to this map to find the cities worldwide that are C40 cities. ARUP published a report outlining some of the transformative changes needed across the economy to reduce consumption-based...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Passage of a bill protecting federal recognition of same-sex marriages that has the support of both LGBT advocates and religious groups, has been delayed in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill was initially expected to be debated and passed by the full House on Tuesday. It is now expected to be attached to an unrelated defense bill that is still under discussion by House and Senate negotiators.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The federal government has illegally broken a promise to pay off the debts of a group of Black farmers, according to a class-action lawsuit. The group hopes to put pressure on officials to keep their word and to restore funding that was dropped after a group of white farmers filed legal challenges arguing their exclusion was a violation of their constitutional rights. The lawsuit filed in October remains active even as the U.S. Department of Agriculture moves forward with another effort to help farmers in financial distress in addition to paying farmers who the agency...

RENO, Nev. (AP) — A tiny Nevada toad at the center of a legal battle over a geothermal power project has officially been declared an endangered species after U.S. wildlife officials temporarily listed it on a rarely-used emergency basis last spring. “This ruling makes final the listing of the Dixie Valley toad,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a formal rule published Friday in the Federal Register. Environmentalists who first petitioned for the listing in 2017 filed a lawsuit in January to block construction of the geothermal power plant on the edge of the wetlands where the toad...

Link only per posting rules. https://news.yahoo.com/biden-moves-bar-mining-waste-003933134.html

A controversial new proposal to ban diesel-powered trucks in California has sparked a divisive debate among the trucking industry, the state and environmentalists. The California Air Resources Board has laid out an ambitious plan to eventually force all diesel truck fleets off the road, with varying timelines. This includes mandating that all new trucks operating around busy railways and ports be zero-emission vehicles by 2024; phasing out all diesel trucks from those areas by 2035; and eventually taking every diesel truck and bus fleet off California roads by 2045, where feasible. The proposed Advance Clean Fleets regulation first targets the...

White supremacist banners were recently displayed on a pedestrian walkway in Walnut Creek, disturbing local residents and city officials. The banners reportedly displayed slogans such as "It's OK to be pro-white" and "White Lives Matter," NBC Bay Area reported. "White Lives Matter" as a slogan was first circulated by neo-Nazi groups in a backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It was like a gut punch to turn a corner and see that," resident Maya Borgueta told NBC. Walnut Creek is home to some of the Bay Area's active white nationalist hate groups....

Most people's view of politics is shaped by the stifling limits of the two-party system. Politics is seen as something politicians do, which has little to do with "us." The two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, appear, to quote Frederick Engels, as "two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends--and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it." It should be no surprise, then, that...

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Obama Foundation program that has trained hundreds of young leaders across Africa, the Asia-Pacific and Europe is being expanded to include the United States. In remarks prepared for delivery on Thursday at the forum, Obama cites “consistently high interest” in the foundation’s programs as a reason for the expansion. “The creativity, determination and passion of these leaders are already making an impact — in lives saved, environments restored, children educated,” he says. “They’re creating new models for clean energy generation and poverty alleviation. It’s remarkable and inspiring — and a little humbling, since I sure wasn’t...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The Democratic Party’s most prominent figures warned that abortion, Social Security and democracy itself are at risk as they labored to overcome fierce political headwinds — and an ill-timed misstep from President Joe Biden — over the final weekend of the 2022 midterm elections. “Sulking and moping is not an option,” former President Barack Obama told several hundred voters on a blustery day in Pittsburgh. “On Tuesday, let’s make sure our country doesn’t get set back 50 years,” Obama said. “The only way to save democracy is if we, together, fight for it.” Obama acknowledged that voters...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Mississippi announced Friday that it has designated a federal attorney to focus on environmental justice and public health. U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Rob Coleman will serve as the office’s environmental justice coordinator. Joyner said the move is part of a “new initiative to address environmental justice and public health concerns in the Northern District of Mississippi.” “Strong and fair enforcement of environmental and public health laws protects our precious natural resources and ensures a healthy environment for everyone to live, learn, play,...

The success or failure of the U.N.’s flagship climate conference is likely to depend on getting wealthy countries to deliver on reparations — a highly divisive and emotive issue that is seen as a fundamental question of climate justice. It comes amid growing calls for rich countries to compensate climate-vulnerable nations as it becomes harder for many people to live safely on a warming planet. Reparations, sometimes referred to as “loss and damage” payments, are likely to dominate proceedings at COP27, with diplomats from more than 130 countries expected to push for the creation of a dedicated loss and damage...

The rate of California businesses leaving the state more than doubled in 2021, leading a new analysis to posit that the state may be “risking its economic future.” There were 153 companies that relocated headquarters in 2021, more than double the 75 that left in 2020 and more than triple the 46 that exited in 2018, according to a recent report from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The conservative think tank said economics was the primary cause of relocation, citing other states’ lower regulation, lower taxes, and lower cost of living. Eleven Fortune 1000 companies were among those that...